‘Web Development’ Archives
Today! Mozilla Webdev “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on Reddit!
As promised, today, a bunch of Mozilla Webdevs are on reddit to answer your questions! For more information, check out the announcement. Click here to get to the Mozilla Webdev "Ask Me Anything" on Reddit. We will be there from 10am Central European Time to the evening, Pacific time, so in total about 18 hours. We hope this way people in most time zones will get the chance to get their questions answered. Come by and ask us all you never dared to ask but always wanted to know! Read More »
Timing AMO user experience
There are lots of ways to measure the performance of a site. On addons.mozilla.org we measure a few of them: how long it takes to render pages, the cache performance and responsiveness for content delivery networks globally. But with the advent of the navigation timing API in Firefox 7 we've been able to add the most important measurement of all - the actual performance in the browser. Along with a few other Mozilla sites, we've been using pystatsd and Graphite for a while. This produces useful graphs of the site health and performance. For example, this graph ... Read More »
Coming up: Webdev “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on reddit
Update, Jan 20: The Reddit AMA is going on today! Click here to join us and ask questions! As web developers at Mozilla, we take pride in making web applications that are used by millions of people every day. We work hard to promote the Open Web, both by showing off what the latest in web technology can do and by actively developing our projects in the open: as open-source projects on github. Whenever we go to meetups, conferences, or chat with community members, people ask all sorts of questions, like: How do you make sure your ... Read More »
Bringing Firefox Alive with Popcorn.js
For most people who work with computers for a living, holidays are a time for family… and providing endless tech support. As I was huddled over a half working computer, someone asked what an add-on was. I spend most of my time working with and on add-ons — so the concept seems obvious to me. As I found out this past Christmas, it's not to everyone. My otherwise-fairly-computer-literate family had a hard time understanding where the browser ended and websites such as Facebook or Google started — so explaining the concept of add-ons was not nearly as easy as I ... Read More »
An optimization story with Django – one thousand times faster!
I've been working on a Django project that is going to be squeezed in as an external application under Pootle which is our tech of choice for the Mozilla Verbatim site which is where all awesome translations happen for Mozilla web projects. (translations for Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. is done by another project which I'll blog about more in the next couple of weeks). In Pootle, there are "Profiles" and that's where the name and quick stats on contributions is stored. However, what I needed to do was to actually go through every "Suggestion", "Submission" and "Review" and figure ... Read More »
Guest Post: “I want to contribute, how do I start?”
Preface This is guest post from one of webdev's awesomesauce community contributors: Nigel Babu. nigelb contributes to a bunch of Mozilla's web apps including Firefox Input and Socorro. He writes about Mozilla and open source on his blog and hangs out on #webdev on IRC -- where we often talk about motorcycles. At Mozcamp Asia, Tim Watts and I talked about contributing to Mozilla Webdev. When I met Tim, he asked me how I got started and what were some of the challenges I faced. This blog post is a summary of those challenges and a few solutions to help ... Read More »
Git: Using topic branches and interactive rebasing effectively
When I first joined the webdev group at Mozilla I was a Mercurial refugee who had never used git or github. I was always daunted by git and suddenly I had to learn it really fast! Fast forward to today and I can't imagine working on a highly collaborative project without git or github. Here is the workflow we use for the addons.mozilla.org project. I highly recommend it and I'll summarize exactly why at the end. It's pretty similar to how I've heard a lot of teams work but has some subtle differences. Using topic branches The first ... Read More »
Scrubbing your Django database
This is the second in a series of posts, focusing on issues around open sourcing your Django site and data privacy in Django. You'll end up with production data in your Django database and that will likely contain different kinds of data such as: configuration data, required basic data (categories for example), collected data and personal user data. There's a couple of reasons for taking that production data and copying it off your production servers: for developers and contributors you want a sample copy of the app with some key data in. for testing or staging servers, you might want to copy ... Read More »
Using localtunnel to do web development on actual mobile devices
Surely you're convinced too now that developing for the mobile web is important. It certainly is for us here at Mozilla. Mobile web development isn't just about making a ultra-slim stripped down version with no images or Javascript widgets. It's also about taking regular full powered web applications and making stepwise adjustments to make sure they work responsively on all mobile devices which means everything from tablets to regular cell phones over 3G. There are numerous good guides such as this for Designing for Mobile Devices and there are great add-ons for Firefox such as the User ... Read More »
From 80 Seconds to 6: Optimizing Our Asset Compression
Before pushing our CSS and JavaScript assets to our CDN, we run them through jingo-minify to concat and minify the files, as well as cache bust them and any resources (such as images) contained inside them. Turns out, this was by far the slowest part of our push process — it took between 80 and 160 seconds for addons.mozilla.org (AMO) assets. It wasn't a huge priority, since most of the time this happens in the background and nobody really notices. However, I wanted to see how fast I could get it. Read More »
