Posted 2 weeks, 4 days ago at 16:28. 0 comments
Joey is really gathering steam now. His recent blog post about threadsafe mkdir comes complete with the motivation behind making this change, some of the problems he encountered while trying to make this fix, and a whole bunch of code examples.
I botched the initial landing of his code, but all of the relevant bits are in the tree as of bug 746151. Replacing rampant unnecessary shell calls is something that can potentially get us some build speed-ups, especially on Windows where shell ops are particularly slow. I’m excited to see where Joey goes next with this.
Posted 3 weeks, 3 days ago at 10:12. 0 comments
Yesterday was Kim Moir’s first day with the Mozilla release engineering team. Honestly, we didn’t hire her just because of her blog title (which is awesome): RelEng of the Nerds.
Kim joins us from IBM where she was well-known for her release engineering work on the Eclipse project. She also has a history of fostering the open source development community around Eclipse, which is the kind of thing we’re always trying to encourage here.
Like me, she is based in Ottawa. It’s been a while since I’ve had a co-worker in the same city — sorry, Kev, Kemptville doesn’t count. How often do we grab lunch? — but plans for an official Mozilla Ottawa office are still MoOt at this point.
As I mentioned previously, if you’re a release engineer looking for work (bonus points if your name is Chris or happen to be based in Ottawa), we are still hiring.
Welcome, Kim!
Current Tunes: Jaytech Music Podcast 052 | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla
Posted 1 month, 2 weeks ago at 18:41. 3 comments
Pro-tip: if you ping me on IRC to ask me something and don’t ask your question as part of the ping, you have added an asynchronous cycle of indeterminate length to our interaction. Don’t do that.
Current Tunes: OceanLab vs. Passive Progressive - Sky Falls Away | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla, QA
Posted 2 months, 1 week ago at 10:55. 0 comments
Joey has another great blog post up about makefile landmines, how to avoid them, and some current examples of *ahem* where we’re not.
Joey is not specifically tasked with fixing these issues…yet. We’re making sure to get bugs on file for these issues so he can circle back once his current work is done and start fixing makefile patterns to help protect us from ourselves.
Current Tunes: Above & Beyond present OceanLab - Miracle [Michael Cassette Remix] | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla
Posted 2 months, 2 weeks ago at 23:22. 0 comments
The Mozilla release engineering team added some extra components to bugzilla today.
Here is the new list of bugzilla components for Release Engineering (under Product: mozilla.org), complete with descriptions, QA contacts, and templates for filing bugs:
Continue Reading…
Current Tunes: Above and Beyond - Trance Around The World 153 - 2007-02-27 | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 18:02. 0 comments
Sources, remixes, and recreations of one of my favorite songs ever:
Happy Friday!
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 18:58. 0 comments
Joey continues his series examining make-makefiles internals over at his blog.
He’s doing thankless work in documenting the existing build config system. Of course, it’s all building up to Joey’s work on container makefiles where he’s going to change it all. 
Current Tunes: Above and Beyond - Trance Around The World 412 - 2012-02-17 | Filed under Build/Release, Firefox, Mozilla
Posted 2 months, 4 weeks ago at 00:53. 3 comments
Yes, the Mozilla release engineering team recently had a work week in Honolulu.
You can scream “JUNKET” as much as you want, and I will gleefully ignore you. We (and by “we,” I mean Lukas – exceptional job, BTW) actually did the groundwork to make sure that this trip was cost-comparable or better to meeting in a city that had an established Mozilla office, e.g. Toronto or San Francisco. Keep that in mind next time you’re planning a work meeting, but do expect management to require you to show your work.
While in Honolulu, the release engineering team set up shop at a local co-working space, The Box Jelly. The staff there were very supportive and helpful during our stay. I can’t recommend them enough.
Despite the location, the work week was challenging for me for a number of reasons, so I was really glad to have the weekend free after the work week was done to explore Oahu before I had to fly home.
Continue Reading…
Posted 4 months ago at 20:09. 0 comments
In response to the dev-planning thread last week about potentially extending downtime windows, I’ve updated the release engineering documentation for downtimes to provide clear instructions to the person on buildduty about who to notify for a given downtime, while also providing more information to developers who may still be trying to get work done around the downtime.
Continue Reading…
Current Tunes: Above and Beyond - Trance Around The World 407 - 2012-01-13 | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla
Posted 5 months ago at 15:12. 0 comments
Joey has been tasked with streamlining some of the more arcane parts of the Mozilla build system. Since he’s spent a good deal of time trying to get acquainted with these systems in order to work with and change them, he’s started blogging about how some of it works.
His first post on make-makefile is up now, and there is more coming soon.
