sumo - Coffee on the Keyboard

Acronyms you should know: MTTD and MTTR

If you’re a SUMO contributor, there are two acronyms you will start to hear more often from us developers: MTTD and MTTR. They mean “mean time to detect” and “mean time to resolve,” respectively, and they refer to how long it takes to detect an issue in production, and

continuous deployment

A brief SumoDev update

A little while ago, I said that I thought we got a B in Q1, but we could move up to an A with a little more work. (This is my favorite grading system: everyone starts at 0 and works up.) Well, we landed two things: Initial JavaScript tests. (And

mozilla

Weekly Update for 11/3/11

Been a busy week! Helped run down an issue with our ads on Reddit. Updated django-multidb-router. - Learned a little about ContextDecorator and how to do that in Python 2.6. Shipped SUMO 2.6.1. Wrapped up SUMO 2.6.2, ready to go this weekend. Rolling through activity

kitsune

SUMO in Q2

At the end of 2010, I issued a challenge to my team: deploy support.mozilla.com continuously by the end of 2011. So, as we move into the last part of Q1, how are we doing, and what’s next? So Far This quarter we’ve managed to completely break

kitsune

The future of SUMO development

Just this month, the SUMO development team completed our transition to our new platform, Kitsune. This small release represented the culmination of nearly a year of great work, and I couldn’t be prouder of the team. At first, as the end of the tunnel approached, and we weren’t

kitsune

An End and a Beginning

2010 is coming to a close, and, with it, the end of our year-long project to create a new platform for support.mozilla.com (SUMO) is in sight. For the past year, developing the new platform has been our focus and has effected our roadmap. When 2011 starts, we’ll

Back-end

Developing at Scale: Database Replication

When a website is small—like this one, for example—usually the entire thing, from the web server to the database, can live on a single server. Even a single virtual server. One of the first things that happens when a web site gets bigger is this is no longer

mozilla

Weekly Update for 06/14/2010

Last week could have gone better. We tried to push SUMO 2.1 twice only to realize we had some issues with respect to replication that need to get ironed out. We think we have a fix for these issues and are rounding out the tests for that fix, but

mozilla

Weekly Update for 07/06/2010

I missed last week. I blame the holiday on Monday. Also Erik started, which is very exciting! Tomorrow afternoon is our planned push for SUMO 2.1, which is our new discussion forum component, and migrating the old data into that component. This is huge, since it’s the first

Database

Surviving Pac Man

On Friday, Google showed off a fun new doodle in honor of the 30th anniversary of Pac Man: a Pac Man clone, complete with sounds. Unfortunately, in the initial release, those sounds started playing automatically—an oversight or an homage to <bgsound>, I guess. Even if Google was

mozilla

Weekly Update for 17/05/2010

Enjoyed the long weekend in New York, which was my big goal for this week. I was out Friday and Monday—which also happened to be the first day for Ricky, a new Mozillian, and Josh, an intern. Being in New York with my family was wonderful, and more than

mozilla

Weekly Update for 10/05/2010

Last week Filed lots of 2.1 bugs. Meet with IT and QA in preparation of 2.0 push. (It didn’t go well, but not for lack of planning.) Engineering plan is roughly complete through the end of the quarter. Came up with a plan for an intern project.

mozilla

Weekly Update for 12/04/2010

Last week: Finished bugs 556810 (string extraction) and 554740 (Sphinx tests) and landed both. Finished up work on bug 550515 (concat and minify CSS/JS) and pulled jingo-minify out of Zamboni. Got Hudson up and running! Wrote lots of documentation. Need to ask people if it’s enough. Updated all

black triangle

SUMO's Black Triangle

A “black triangle” is an accomplishment or milestone that doesn’t look like much—it may be literally a black triangle on a screen—but is the result of a lot of preliminary or foundational work. A black triangle often means that the pace of work is about to increase

mozilla

Weekly Update for 3/15/2010

I’m going to try to do weekly updates of what I’ve been working on, what I want to get accomplished, and what kind of progress I made since the last update. I don’t know if I’ll stick with Mondays, but it seems like a reasonable starting

amo

Code-sharing Update

When we decided to move SUMO to a new platform, one of the reasons we chose Django was code sharing and reuse—specifically that SUMO and AMO would be able to share code, meaning both teams would save time and see benefits. So how is that going? Were we right

django

The Evolution of SUMO

When I joined the SUMO team six months ago, the team was just starting a discussion of “where do we go from here?” SUMO was built on a CMS called TikiWiki, and had diverged pretty significantly in two years. (David Tenser wrote a more detailed history if you’re interested.

amo

So You Wanna Help Mozilla?

A common theme we heard in responses to our web developer survey was: “I wish I could help Mozilla, but I’m just a web developer.” Well, fellow web ninjas, you can put your skills to work with Mozilla and help make the web a better place. Our web projects