Some new Marketplace dashboards
Cross posting from a mailing list:
Small teams and the Marketplace workflow
Towards the end of last year my routine was to find a weeks worth of bugs for each Marketplace developer, assign what I thought they could do in a week, and then meet with the person individually to talk about them and make sure we both thought it was a reasonable amount and the priorities were right. This worked fine for smaller teams, however, it’s not unusual for us to close 70+ bugs a week these days and it simply used too much time. I’d often end up skipping the folks who were comfortable grabbing bugs on their own, which was fine, but it didn’t encourage discussion within the team of who was working on what and kind of pushed people into working in isolation.
The sunset of getpersonas.com
Over four years ago getpersonas.com was built as a gallery to hold Personas - easy to make and use themes for Firefox. A lot of programs were supporting skins at the time, but I don’t know of any which were so simple (literally, move your mouse over an image on a webpage and it’s applied). A community of artists formed and many designs emerged - some amazing and popular, some focused on specific things (hat tip to CollieSmile), many for sports, or brands, or just people who wanted pictures of their family in a spot they noticed all day long.
Inception: projects within projects
When we converted addons.mozilla.org from PHP to Python I mentioned how deceptively large (lines of code) the site had grown with so many views and features. We’ve since built marketplace.firefox.com on literally the same code base (a decision I hoped to blog about some day, alas) and the line count continues upwards. The MVC paradigm is one of the most common out there, easy to understand, and built in to our frameworks so it was naturally a good choice. However, as the site continues to expand we’ve had to review what the best architecture for the code would be and the main point that stands out is that our entire site and its services are a monolithic blob of code. Both sites, all of our APIs, all of the PayPal code, the administrative tools, the developer control panel, the reviewer queues, the list goes on - it’s all in one repository and changing one means potentially affecting all of them.
Mozilla t-shirt time capsule
I moved around a lot over the past year and ended up putting a bunch of old t-shirts into a trunk and forgetting about them. My one-o-clock-in-the-morning brain decided now was a good time to go through the trunk and get rid of all those old shirts I never wear. It turns out we Mozillians used to really like making t-shirts. Below is a pile of shirts I found from around 2005-2011 or so. How many can you identify?