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 no alternative. Thus I would like to introduce to the world Bugzfeed, a WebSocket app that allows you to subscribe to one or more bugs and get pushed notifications when they change. It’s rather a small app, based on Tornado, and has a very simple interface, so it should scale quite nicely. It relies on a few moving parts to work, but I’ll start with the basics and explain the whole system later. ...

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 small feat, so I want to record the adventure in the hopes that it can benefit someone else, and so I can look back some day and wonder why I put myself through these things. ...

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 spices I would normally use in tomato sauce is wasteful, and I never think to bring some with me. Hence one night my wife suggested using Bajan seasoning–a blend of shallots, garlic, hot peppers, and various herbs and spices. It’s a different taste, but quite delicious! ...

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 forum, mozilla.tools.bmo (available via mailing list, Google Group, and USENET). ...

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 tab. Suggested Reviewers A really exciting, and long-awaited, feature is suggested reviewers. Now when you flag a patch for review, you see a list of people who should make good candidates. And as of today, you can even see the number of reviews in each person’s queue! There is a lot more in this feature, with even more to come, so I’ll just run down a list: ...

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 interesting, if often frustrating, experience. If you want to follow along, the source is on github. ...

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' sites are obnoxious in one way or another, and I don’t have a favourite whisky-reviews site, but a quick search should point you in the right direction. ...

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 also a form of backup. My master branches are for collaboration, but my dev branches are essentially just to back up my home computer, and occasionally for feedback. I rebase dev branches regularly, to keep my commits together for eventual merging to master. I occasionally switch around or squash commits too, where it adds clarity to the history. So, somewhat shamefully, I find myself using ‘git push -f’ a lot on branches other than master. ...

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 nicks and links to project pages and/or docs. We also have links to our quarterly goals as well as to SmartSheet pages with details of our progress. ...