Controlled Flight Into Terrain

Everything was going just fine until we ran into the real world

Latest posts

Waking up again

Nine and a half years at PagerDuty, and a few months recovering from burnout, later…

Nov 21, 2024 · irving

Telemetry Results for Add-on Compatibility Check

Earlier this year (in Firefox 32), we landed a fix for bug 760356, to reduce how often we delay starting up the browser in order to check whether all your add-ons are compatible. We landed the related bug 1010449 in Firefox 31 to gather telemetry about the compatibility check, so that we could to before/after analysis.

Aug 8, 2014 · irving

How many Firefox extensions do people use?

I found myself wondering what a “normal” number of XPI extensions is, and since I was working on some other analysis runs on the Mozilla Telemetry database, I took the time to run a count across one day’s data (May 29 2014). Without much further ado, here’s the median and higher percentiles of the number of active add-ons for Firefox and Fennec (Firefox for Android):

Jun 3, 2014 · irving

A Mixed Bag of Telemetry

There were a few open questions, and follow ups on previous work, that I wanted to look at in Mozilla’s Telemetry database (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telemetry, though that page is out of date).

Mar 20, 2014 · irving

Add-on compatibility checks and new Firefox versions

I’ve been working on Bug 772484 – “extension check dialog is annoying and can effectively hang the Firefox process”, and Vladan suggested I post an outline of the issues and proposed changes.

Jan 7, 2014 · irving

Add-on Manager JSON databases landed!

Felipe landed the Addon Repository (Bug 853389) changes on Aug 1, so they rode the uplift train and are currently in Firefox Aurora (25). My changes for the XPI Provider (Bug 853388), aside from the Telemetry measurements, landed on Sunday (Aug 11) and are in the latest nightly (Firefox 26). I still need to make some changes to the Telemetry patch and get that through reviews, but the core of the…

Aug 12, 2013 · irving

Add-on Manager progress: Almost done!

Felipe has a full suite of r+ for his work on AddonRepository.jsm in Bug 853389, and I’m in the middle of handling review comments for the XPI Database changes in Bug 853388. I need to update based on the review comments, implement asynchronous loading of the JSON database, and add some telemetry so we can track performance and correctness of the new version. Once that is done, we’ll be ready to…

Jun 17, 2013 · irving

Saving browser state asynchronously

As part of switching the Firefox extensions databases from sqlite to a flat file containing JSON, we want to build a module that flushes the in-memory state of the data out to disk after it changes, in a way that doesn’t hang the main thread waiting for the I/O to complete. Felipe did an initial implementation for bug 853389 based on the DeferredTask module, and I’ve been working on sorting out…

May 31, 2013 · irving

Add-On Manager Progress

It’s been a month since Felipe and I started coding on the add-on manager conversion, and we’ve made quite a bit of progress. The core code for both modules has been converted to load and save in JSON format; we’re now cleaning up corner cases like upgrading from previous database formats.

May 3, 2013 · irving

Speeding up the Add-On Manager

One of the focuses of the performance team this year is to improve start-up time for the browser. We’ve identified that the Add-on Manager has several issues that can delay start up, and can also cause brief user interface hangs (“jank”) during normal operation. This Bugzilla search shows what we’re tracking right now.

Apr 1, 2013 · irving

Waking Up

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here. In the mean time I’ve moved jobs to Mozilla, originally working on the Thunderbird email client and more recently on the Firefox performance team, known as “Snappy”. I’ll be trying out using this space to kick around ideas related to the specific portions of Firefox I’m trying to improve.

Feb 4, 2013 · irving

Computational Legal Studies

The Freedom to Tinker blog (a good read in its own right) points to a fascinating new blog where two University of Michigan grad students are applying computational information analysis and complex systems thinking to issues of law and government; this visualization of US Code Title 11 (the law governing bankruptcy) is just one nifty example.

Apr 3, 2009 · irving

Excellent article on the agile Product Owner role

Thanks to Adam for twittering a link to:

Feb 17, 2009 · irving

Twitter twitter tweet tweet?

Anyone still listening, and using twitter? I realize it’s very 2008, but since when did I arrive for something early?

Feb 13, 2009 · irving

Hey! Anybody want a job?

I just managed to get a couple of positions posted for entry-level Java programmers. If you’re interested in working in health care, hop on over and apply:

Jan 26, 2009 · irving

How can we tell when we’re done?

One of the key guidelines for an agile development team is that everyone agrees on what it means to say a particular task (typically a user story implementation) is “done”. I really like the definition given in InfoQ: Version Control for Multiple Agile Teams (via Jurgen Appelo)

May 27, 2008 · irving