‘Web Development’ Archives
Open sourcing your Django site
This is the first in series of posts, focusing on issues around open sourcing your Django site and data privacy in Django. A lot of people focus on open sourcing their Django libraries, but at Mozilla we open source the entire site. Releasing your entire source code can lead to a few problems, firstly let's look at your Django settings file. Separating your settings All Django sites come with a settings.py file. This file contains some key settings that you should not be releasing to the general public, such as database configuration and the secret key. The simple way to do ... Read More »
What is Shipyard?
At our recent Mozilla All Hands, I shared some slides about Shipyard, a JavaScript MVC framework that is making it’s way into Add-on Builder. It’s not finished, but since I shared it there, it felt appropriate to share what there currently is here. Summary Shipyard is an application framework that covers all the common things any JavaScript application would need to deal with: interacting with a server, storing data, rendering said data in the browser, and responding to user actions. An application built on Shipyard should only have to write the parts to pull all those things together. If you’re application ... Read More »
Ada Lovelace Day: Sheila Howell
Happy Ada Lovelace Day! This day is celebrated by writing about a woman in technology who inspired you. For Ada Lovelace Day this year, I want to honor Sheila Howell, a computer science academic at my alma mater, RMIT University. I first met Sheila in the early 90s in CS280 - Software Engineering. In that course I learned how to design and estimate systems. She taught systems thinking, a skill I have used over and over again and use to this day. I remember an exercise where we had to interview "users" (academics with scripts) about the current ... Read More »
Developing with Vagrant, Puppet, and playdoh
Mozilla is a large, highly visible, open source organization, with loads of contributors who commit code to, document, and localize our products. A big part of our success is our community, and our web apps are a big part of our product base. Logistically, it's very easy to commit code to our web apps. Most of them are hosted on GitHub: all you need to do is fork our code, commit your changes, and send us a pull request. We can review your contributions, comment on your code, discuss the changes, and (hopefully) merge in your awesome new code. Most ... Read More »
PyLadies and DjangoCon 2011
One of the cool things about working at Mozilla is you get to help more than just yourself or your boss or your company… sometimes you get to help the community. PyLadies is a mentorship group with a focus on helping more women become active participants and leaders in the Python open-source community. Following the pattern of groups like Ubuntu Women and PHP Women, PyLadies aims to provide a friendly support network for women and a bridge to the larger Python world. Both men and women are encouraged to participate. PyLadies requested sponsorship to help ... Read More »
Mozilla Webdev At PyCodeConf
Next week, a number of Mozilla webdevs will be making a pilgrimage to PyCodeConf, put on by the nice people at github, in Miami. I'll be speaking on the topic of Processing Firefox Crash Reports with Python. Mozilla is also sponsoring the conference. I'm excited that we get to go, because the other talks look awesome. This brings me to the next point: If you like Python, and use github, you might fit in here. Interested? If you're coming to the conference, find a Mozilla person and come talk to us about a job. Read More »
Email Unsubscribe Links
Over the past few weeks, I’ve become a bit of an unsubscribe connoisseur. Niche, I know. Rather than merely archiving unwanted emails as I’m wont to do, I made it my mission to permanently reduce the clutter in my inbox. The problem is that users and website owners view the unsubscribe link differently. To the user, it’s a way to give their bloated inbox a much needed reprieve. The people sending the emails, however, tend to view it as a desperate last chance to retain the user. These two goals tend to clash. Unsubscribe Practices I Hate During my quest to vanquish unwanted ... Read More »
How Apache & Some Magic Helped Move Mozilla to .org
Over the past couple weeks my teammates at Mozilla have been blogging about our goal to merge our major websites, currently spread across several domains, into the one and only site mozilla.org. Their posts provide a lot of good history on this project: Moving Towards One Mozilla by John Slater Bringing Mozilla Product Sites Back Home to Mozilla.org by Chrissie Brodigan Creating regional hubs to support Mozilla’s local communities by David Boswell John, David, and Chrissie explain the project from the engagement & contributor perspective, but I’m here to explain some of the tech details behind the merge. As the ... Read More »
Knowing what you want can make a huge difference (…with pymongo)
So I've got a piece of MongoKit code that simply wraps a pymongo query and it looks like this times = defaultdict(list) for pq in (db.PlayedQuestion.collection .find({'play.$id': {'$in': play_ids}})): if ... Read More »
Mozilla interns: nothing but the best
Julie Deroche seems to do it year after year. I'm not sure what her secret is, but we get the most amazing interns in the world. Matt, Tanay and Adrian worked on important projects for Mozilla this summer and made a difference for millions of people. They were all exposed to healthy doses of Python, scalability, security and webdev best practices. I'm excited to see what they accomplish next with what they've learned. In fact, before they even finished their internships Matt and Tanay won ... Read More »
