Recent content on mr mr cote
I think I found my new favourite thing about Claude Code: using it to upgrade Hugo. Switching to a static blog generator was supposed to make things easier, but given how infrequently I actually write anything here, every time I sat down I’d fight with the latest version of Hugo for a while and sometimes just give up. (Of course I probably didn’t really need to upgrade Hugo, especially…
I acquired a copy of Learn to Program with Minecraft from No Starch Press a while ago but only recently decided to crack it open. Multiple versions of Minecraft, Spigot, and Python have been release since, but the provided zip file on the publisher’s website hasn’t been kept up to date. I took some time to figure out how to replicate the setup and figured I’d write it down for…
Last year I wrote a post for the Shopify engineering blog on the subject of Modelling Developer Infrastructure Teams . I figured I should link to it here as well. I’ve had several industry peers reach out to me to exchange notes on building dev-infra teams, so it seems the topic resonated with some people!
The last Raspberry Pi that I bought (the one that powers my ledweb setup) came with a remote control intended for media servers, one of the official OSMC remotes . I thought it would be fun to use it to do something involving my LED panel, like switching between different modes or something. I couldn’t find any information on using this remote outside of OSMC, however. I’ve never done…
Something I regularly tell my daughter, who can tend towards perfectionism, is that we all fail. Over the last few years, I’ve seen more and more talks and articles about embracing failure. The key is, of course, to learn from the failure. I’ve written a bit before about what I learned from leading the MozReview project, Mozilla’s experiment with a new approach to code review…
I’ve discussed and linked to articles about the advantages of splitting patches into small pieces to the point that I don’t feel the need to reiterate it here. This is a common approach at Mozilla, especially (but not just) in Firefox engineering, something the Engineering Workflow group is always keeping in mind when planning changes and improvements to tools and processes. Many…
This is the last post in a three-part series on A Vision for Engineering Workflow at Mozilla. The first post in this series provided some background, while the second introduced the first four points of our nine-point vision. The Engineering Workflow Vision (continued) 5. Reviews are straightforward and streamlined The Engineering Workflow team has spent a lot of time over the last few years on…
In my last post I touched on the history and mission of the Engineering Workflow team, and I went into some of the challenges the team faces, which informed the creation of the team’s vision. In this post I’ll go into the vision itself. First, a bit of a preamble to set context and expectations. About the Vision Members of the Engineering Workflow team have had many conversations with…
The OED’s second definition of “vision” is “the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom.” Thus I felt more than a little trepidation when I was tasked with creating a vision for my team. What should this look like? How do I scope it? What should it cover? The Internet was of surprisingly little help; it seems that either no one thinks…
Having taken advantage of a Black Friday sale at BuyaPi.ca and picked up a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B , I then needed something to do with it. I’m not sure how it popped into my head, but at some point I realized my bar absolutely needed a Times Square zipper -type LED display. I mean, it seems so obvious in retrospect. At first I thought about making one but then I thought “hahah yeah…
As the manager responsible for driving the decision and process behind the move to Phabricator at Mozilla, I’ve been asked to write about my recent experiences, including how this decision was implemented, what worked well, and what I might have done differently. I also have a few thoughts about decision making both generally and at Mozilla specifically. Please note that these thoughts…
Stuff that landed in 2016 Here’s a sampling of improvements to BMO that were launched in 2016. Improvements to bug-modal We’ve continued to refine the modal bug view , aka the “experimental UI”. The BMO team fixed 39 bugs relating to the new interface in 2016. We’ve got a couple more blockers before we make the modal view the default , which should happen in the…
For historical reasons (or “hysterical raisins” as gps says) that elude me, the BMO database has been in (ughhh) Pacific Time since it was first created. This caused some weirdness on every daylight savings time switch (particularly in the fall when 2:00-3:00 am technically occurs twice), but not enough to justify the work in fixing it (it’s been this way for close to two…
It’s been a whole year since my last BMO update , partly because I’ve been busy with MozReview (and blogging a lot about it ), and partly because the BMO team got distracted from our goals by a few sudden priority changes, which I’ll get to later in this post. Plans from 2014 Even with some large interruptions, we fully achieved three of our five goals for the year and made good…
The other day I read about another new Mozilla project that decided to go with GitHub issues instead of our Bugzilla installation (BMO). The author’s arguments make a lot of sense: GitHub issues are much simpler and faster, and if you keep your code in GitHub, you get tighter integration. The author notes that a downside is the inability to file security or confidential bugs, for which…
After languishing for a few years, Pulse got a burst of interest and development in 2014. Since I first heard of it, I’ve found the idea of a central message bus for the goings-on in Mozilla’s various systems rather intruiging, and I’m excited to have been able to grow it over the last year. Pulse falls into that class of problem that is a result of, to borrow from a past Mozilla…
Everyone loves statistics! Right? Right? Hello? tap tap feedback screech Well anyway, here are some numbers from BMO in 2014: BMO Usage: 33 243 new users registered 45 628 users logged in 23 063 users performed an action 160 586 new bugs filed 138 127 bugs resolved 100 194 patches attached
The second half of 2014 was spent finishing up some performance work and shifting into usability improvements, which will continue into 2015. More performance! By the end of 2014, we’d managed to pick most of the low-to-medium-hanging fruit in the world of Bugzilla server-side performance. The result is approximately doubling the performance of authenticated bug views. Here are graphs from…
BMO currently supports five—count ’em, five—ways to search for bugs. Whenever you have five different ways to perform a similar function, you can be pretty sure the core problem is not well understood. Search has been rated, for good reason, one of the least compelling features of Bugzilla, so the BMO team want to dig in there and make some serious improvements. At our Portland get-together…
Here’s your mid-year report from the offices, basements, and caverns of BMO ! Performance This year we’re spending a lot of time on performance. As nearly everyone knows, Bugzilla’s an old Perl app from the early days of the Web, written way before all the technologies, processes, and standards of today were even dreamt of. Furthermore, Bugzilla (including BMO) has a very…
A large number of external applications have grown up around Bugzilla serving a variety of purposes. One thing many of these apps have in common is a need to get updates from Bugzilla. Unfortunately, the only way to get notifications of changes was, until recently, to poll Bugzilla. Everyone knows that polling is bad, particularly because it doesn’t scale well, but until recently there was…
Or, how to migrate to git using only three programming languages Another aspect of Bugzilla has been dragged, kicking & screaming, into the future! On March 11, 2014, the Bugzilla source moved to git.mozilla.org . We’re still mirroring to bzr.mozilla.org (more on that later), but the repository of record is now git, meaning it is the only place we accept new code. Getting over there was no…
This isn’t a traditional recipe or anything, just something I put together one day. When we visit Barbados, we usually find a place with a kitchen, for various reasons: I like cooking, eating out every night is expensive (particularly in Barbados) and, now that I have a child with an early bedtime, getting out is a little tricky. But since we only stay for a week or two, buying all the…
2013 was a pretty big year for BMO ! I covered a bit in my last post on BMO, but I want to sum up just some of the things that the team accomplished in 2013 as well as to give you a preview of a few things to come. We push updates to BMO generally on a weekly basis. The changelog for each push is posted to glob’s blog and linked to from Twitter ( @globau ) and from BMO’s discussion…
I went about the seemingly simple task of sharing a directory in OS X with an Ubuntu VMware box so that I could code in my main desktop and run under Linux. The simple sharing dialog is of course only the beginning of the work; after that, I needed to refresh VMware tools, since I had done several kernel upgrades. Well that turned into a few hours of flailing at a command line.
A lot of people probably don’t know that I manage the team behind BMO , that is, bugzilla.mozilla.org , Mozilla’s Bugzilla installation. Work on BMO is continuous and incremental, and even really useful features often take a while to percolate through the community, so I thought I’d try to draw attention to some recent improvements that should get you pumped to open a Bugzilla…
Autophone is an automated system that executes Python test scripts on real user hardware, that is, actual phones. It’s been an active project for about a year now, and we’ve learned a lot about the difficulties of performing automated performance measurements on hardware that was never intended for automation. I’m documenting this story for posterity, since it has been an…
If you’ve the means to buy an Oban 14 or a Macallan 18 whenever a decanter frees itself, you’ll probably want to saunter on past this post. However, if you like whisky but aren’t crazy about spending a good portion of your income on it, let me take a few minutes to tell you about some of my favourite everyday whiskies. I’m not going to include links because most distillers'…
I bet that the moment most people decide they actually do like git is when they start using ‘rebase’ regularly. I definitely do not completely understand the git model, but rebase shows that there is some seriously cool stuff going on. Anyway, I’ve come upon a rebasing dilemma. The reasons for not rebasing a public repo are clear, but pushing to a remote origin (e.g. github) is…
Keeping wiki pages up to date is a hard problem, but recently we found out that people were having trouble finding out what projects we were working on. Obviously we can’t help people with their problems if they can’t figure out what we do, so I spent some time today updating the A-Team’s Project Central . All the projects we are working on are there, along with owners’ IRC…
An amusingly frequent pattern: git clone https://github.com/mozilla/new-python-project # ... right, virtualenv mkdir src mv new-python-project src virtualenv new-python-project cd new-python-project mv ../src . . bin/activate # get to work I really ought to make a script to clone new Python projects…
Thanks to dkl, bmo now has an extension which shows a failure data for intermittent-orange bugs. You’ll have to enable the extension by going to the Preferences page and changing “When viewing a bug, show its corresponding Orange Factor page” to “On”. Then the next time you are viewing a bug about an intermittent orange, e.g. the current top orange, bug 789003 , at…