A story of bug fixing | JAWS
I spent some time last night looking in to a bug in the Firefox preferences as part of the Outreachy internship I’m mentoring. This bug is about how the context menus in our preferences were …| JAWS
This week I’m taking over for Dolske as he takes a vacation to view the eclipse. This is issue #13 of the Photon Engineering Newsletter. This past week the Nightly team has had some fun with the Firefox icon. We’ve seen the following icons grace Nightly builds in the past week: The icon in the […]| JAWS
Since my last post on the eslint work that is happening in mozilla-central, we have increased coverage as well as enabling more rules. The publication of that post spawned a few conversations, among them Florian Quèze has added a bunch of new Mozilla-specific rules to our eslint configuration and evilpies has started looking at what […]| JAWS
In the past week there has been quite a lot of progress made on the eslint front. Last week I enabled the following rules for the default mozilla-central eslint configuration (/toolkit/.eslintrc.js): no-extra-label no-iterator no-regex-spaces no-self-assign no-unsafe-negation no-unused-labels object-shorthand brace-style no-multi-spaces no-debugger no-delete-var no-sparse-arrays no-unsafe-finally no-cond-assign no-extra-bind no-useless-call no-lone-blocks no-useless-return Mark Banner has con...| JAWS
First, let me say that the students working on this project have done a great job. Secondly, let me say that I’ve not done a great job blogging about their work. I will try to make up for it in this post. Since the previous post a lot has happened: we had our hack-weekend at […]| JAWS
Mike and I met with the “select dropdown” team today and discussed where they’re at and the work that they can focus on for the next week. We are discussing a possible “hack-weekend” October 1st and 2nd at Michigan State. Freddy got XCode up and running and can debug processes at the single-process/multi-process fork. Jared […]| JAWS
A couple of weeks ago Mike de Boer and I started work on a project to rethink themes in Firefox. At present day, Firefox offers two ways for users to theme their browser: XUL themes (also known as “complete themes”) and lightweight themes (also known as “themes”). We want to create something that gives more […]| JAWS
Last week marked the beginning of a new 12-week period of mentorship for myself. I’ll be working Mike Conley to share mentorship duties as we mentor a group of five Michigan State University students. The students are all seniors in the Computer Science program. The MSU Capstone is a program that pairs industry companies with […]| JAWS
Just a couple of weeks ago marked the end of my first Outreachy session. During the session I mentored Katie Broida as she worked on some pretty cool features for Firefox. I learned a lot during the session, and I think she did too. I learned how to advertise and recruit for job openings, gather […]| JAWS
I spent some time last night looking in to a bug in the Firefox preferences as part of the Outreachy internship I’m mentoring. This bug is about how the context menus in our preferences were …| JAWS
This past year has been a big and exciting one for Balrog. We made the transition to Docker, migrated to new infrastructure, participated in Google's Summer of Code for the first time, bootstrapped System Addon updates, and much, much more. In total, 129 tickets were closed, with a significant portion of those being done by volunteers. I'd like to highlight a few things in particular. Toolchain Improvements Early on in the year I spent a good deal of time modernizing Balrog's toolchain. I upg...| Ben Hearsum
I want to tell you about an important new Balrog feature that we're working on. But I also want to tell you about how we planned it, because I think that part is even more interesting that the project itself. The Project Balrog is Mozilla’s update server. It is responsible for deciding which updates to deliver for a given update request. Because updates deliver arbitrary code to users this means that a bad data in update server could result in orphaning users, or be used as an attack vector...| Ben Hearsum
The past month has seen some significant and exciting improvements to Balrog. We've had the usual flow of feature work, but also a lot of improvements to the infrastructure and Docker image structure. Let's have a look at all the great work that's been done! Core Features Most recently, two big changes have landed that allow us to use multifile updates for SystemAddons. This type of update configuration let us simplify configuration of Rules and Releases, which is one of the main design goals...| Ben Hearsum
The pace of Balrog development has been increasing since the beginning of 2016. We're now at a point where we push new code to production nearly every week, and I'd like to start highlighting all the great work that's being done. The past week was particularly busy, so let's get into it! The most exciting thing to me is Meet Mangukiya's work on adding support for substituting some runtime information when showing deprecation notices. This is Meet's first contribution to Balrog, and he's done ...| Ben Hearsum
Hello from Platform Engineering Ops! Once a month we highlight one of our projects to help the Mozilla community discover a useful tool or an interesting contribution opportunity. This month's project is Balrog! What is it? Balrog is the software that runs the server side component of the update system used by Firefox and other Mozilla products. It is the successor to AUS (Application Update Service), which did not scale to our current needs nor allow us to adapt to more recent business requi...| Ben Hearsum
Earlier this year I spent some time modernizing and improving Balrog's toolchain. One of my goals in doing so was to switch from Travis CI to Taskcluster both to give us more flexibility in our CI configuration, as well as help dogfood Taskcluster-Github. One of the most challenging aspects of this was how to build and push our Docker image, and I'm hoping this post will make it easier for other folks who want to do the same in the future. The Task Definition Let's start by breaking down Task...| Ben Hearsum
This past quarter I spent some time modernizing Balrog's toolchain to make it more approachable. We've switched from Vagrant to Docker, cleaned up setup.py, started using tox, and updated the sample data included in the repo. At the same time, I started identifying some good first bugs, and put together a proposal for a Summer of Code project. I feel very lucky that this work has paid off so quickly. There's been great interest in the Summer of Code project, and we've had 5 new volunteers sub...| Ben Hearsum
When we ship new versions of Firefox we do our best to avoid introducing new bugs or crashes, especially those that affect large numbers of users. One of the strategies we use to accomplish this is to ship new versions to a subset of people before shipping to everyone. We call this a "throttled rollout", and it's something we've been doing for many years. The tricky part of this is getting the new version to enough users to have a representative sample size without overshooting our target. Ou...| Ben Hearsum
Balrog is one of the more crucial systems that Release Engineering works on. Many of our automated builds send data to it and all Firefox installations in the wild regularly query it to look for updat| Ben Hearsum
