I'll be speaking at CPOSC this October in Harrisburg, PA.  I will being giving a talk about Mozdev's architecture and history; about how it has grown over time from an all-volunteer effort to my current employment with Mozdev and where Mozdev is going.  I plan to go over some of the architectural changes that have come about through its lifetime and how we've tackled certain challenges.

Registration at CPOSC is limited to 100 people and seats are going quickly.  The conference is being held Sunday, October 19th in Harrisburg, PA; if you're interested in coming I'd recommend signing up soon!

Some more photos (end of OSCON, trip on the way through Vancouver to Whistler for moz08).

• Last day of OSCON
• Pre-moz08 stop in Seattle on the way to Vancouver
• Pre-moz08 trip to Vancouver; border crossing
• Pre-moz08 first night in Vancouver
• Pre-moz08 day in Vancouver
• Moz08 trip to Whistler from Vancouver

Thanks for having us at the Mozilla Summit (called moz08)!

Here's some pics of us here:

Jay saying thanks in MozCafe

Me saying thanks for the people manning the registration area and swag

More pictures from Moz08

My second day at OSCON was also terrific. I continued to meet new people and got to spend more time talking with others. There were two sessions that I wanted to see, and they were:

• Integration Testing PHP Applications - this was a little more overview that I had hoped, but it did go over Selenium and when it's best to use that vs. your own HTML parser (which should hopefully be in PHPUnit 3.3).
• Top 10 Scalability Mistakes - After some of the "overview"-like talks I had been to, I was pleased to see this one get into a good bit of detail that allows you to plan for specific situations better by giving you some context. I recommend checking out the slides.

I spent most of the afternoon helping out at the Mozilla booth and helping break down the booth when the expo was over. In the evening there was the SourceForge Community Choice Awards at the Jupiter hotel and an after-party called BeerForge at the Bossanova. The Bossanova was a really nice venue (whereas the DJ wasn't amazing) and getting to hang out and talk to various people was great.

I looked through Stephen Lau's photos and selfishly picked out the ones that had myself in it (if only to prove that I'm here):

• Rob and Jay talking to people at the Mozilla booth
• Me talking w/ Max (from Bugzilla)
• Eric and Brian at the Mozdev BoF
• David at the Mozdev BoF

My own photos from the past couple days are uploading; hopefully I can update the post soon w/ the pictures.

Update 2008-07-26 00:15
Photos of my first three days at OSCON are up:
http://www.silfreed.net/gallery/v/events/OSCON+2008/

Big day at OSCON today. I got into town at 01:00 this morning and taking the cab to the hotel wasn't as bad as I thought it would be (but more expensive than I had planned).

I was able to get a hold of and meet Brian King and David Boswell later in the morning (at normal waking hours) and we met up with Eric Jung as well.

The day was a blur of meeting tons of people; some for the first time, some putting faces to names (or IRC nicks); I attended a number of sessions, also got hang out with a lot of great people from all walks of the Mozilla community.

The sessions I ended up going to were:

• The Internet is an Ogre: Finding Art in the Software Architecture - this one was pretty good overview of how the Internet is a hard thing to develop for but how a proper architecture can make your life easier
• PHP Taint Tool: It Ain't a Parser - I was interested in learning about the work done in static analysis for PHP, but it ended up being too technical for me and I tuned a lot out
• White beautiful code (in PHP) - I really enjoyed Laura's talk and her insights on what can be done to make your code, well, beautiful. I'm hoping to be able to discuss more with her next week at the Summit about some code-structure problems Mozdev has (such as how to architect a good test suite) as well as how Mozdev could integrate with AMO (and thanks for the encouragement on my blog last week!)
• Firefox Delivered: OSS Infrastructure for the Masses - Justin's talk on Mozilla's infrastructure was great and went over the steps Mozilla has taken to be able to scale to its needs. This was a nice overview of the problems Mozdev might face in the future as it continues to grow.
• Give Your Site a Boost with memcached - Ben Ramsey's talk on memcached was very helpful for me to solidify questions I had about how memcached can be best integrated into an application without writing a ton of code to handle the interactions between your db layer and caching layer; it was a big help to see some of that in practice

I also participated in the Mozdev-led BoF on Tools and Other Resources for Mozilla Extension Development. This turned out to be a great discussion on what tools are available for extension developers and what we can possibly do to improve things (such as better chrome debuggers, implementing dependency resolution in the update process, and having support for multiple update repositories).

The day ended at the Montage with MoCo and a couple other members of the community. A big thanks to MoCo for allowing us to tag along; it was great to be a part everything that's going on!

We're happy to announce the availability of Mercurial for hosting project sources at Mozdev.
Documentation can be found here:
http://www.mozdev.org/drupal/wiki/MozdevMercurial

The biggest caveats:

• CVS is still necessary for maintaining the website and downloads (fixing this is on our roadmap)
• Projects' source information page needs updated by the PO to include information on Mercurial
• We weren't planning on removing the old sources from CVS and we don't have a mechanism for locking CVS, so it might slightly confusing to new users or contributors as to where to get the canonical source for a project if they switch to from CVS to Mercurial

If you're interested in having Mercurial setup for your project, head over to the documentation page and click the link to request a new Mercurial repository.

[repost from Mozdev blog last week]

In 8 days (next Tuesday) I'll be heading to Portland for OSCON 2008. Several days later I'll be heading up to Canada for the Firefox Summit.

This is simultaneously awesome and scary. Awesome parts:

• Meeting my colleagues and board members from Mozdev for the first time
• Being able to attend sessions and meet/brainstorm with so many people from the open source community, and more specifically, the Mozilla community

Some of the scary parts:

• I haven't flown in a long time. I have no idea what to expect from the experience, and have some gaps in some basic logistical processes (How do I get from the airport to the hotel? Taxi? How's do I get a taxi? What's the typical interaction between taxi driver and drivee (never taken a taxi, either))? What do I do for 7 hours in the air? Are my neighbors in coach going to call me a terrorist for playing with my laptop and GPS? Will I be able to use my GPS? Am I carrying too much/little gear/clothes/etc?).
• I'm an introvert, and thus don't really talk unless being spoken too; even then, if it's a topic I'm not familiar and/or interested in with I don't do a great job at "chit-chat"
• I don't have a very, um, "cultured palate". I plan on trying to broaden that a bit.
• I have no idea what I'm doing at either event - oh, in general I know I'm going to help grow the Mozdev/Mozilla community (they're very symbiotic) and learn what I can from the sessions being offered at both, but there's a lot of "unknowns" about what I should be doing.

So most of the "scary" parts are probably just personality quirks and I really think I'll be fine, even if I don't have all my minutiae in order. It'll definitely be an big experience for me.

I'm going to be doing my Mozdev status updates and sysadmin meeting minutes over on the Mozdev blog now (rss feed). Hopefully this will be picked up by PMO soon.

For awhile now I've noticed that things in my home dir aren't setup optimally for my work flow. I've been trying to run with SELinux enabled and I run into development problems when I try to run web applications out of my home directory. Various parts of my home directory are version controlled separately due to the software projects they're part of, but not as a whole.

What I'd like is to setup some other place for "projects" (Mozdev code and docs, other software projects, RPM building, etc) and then version control my home dir.

The problem is I'm not sure how much this helps me. Things like IM clients still are going to want to log things to ~/.somedir/log which is evil. SELinux contexts for files in /home/myprojects is still going to be wrong; I'm not going to be able to run webapps out of there, either. Moving my docs out of my home dir might be a pain due to xdg-user-dirs needing to be setup correctly to point at the document dir

I'd really love to have a lean, mean homedir that is version controlled that I can port around between boxes. Have people attempted this before? What about the above problems?

• Fixed bug with tools styling of Summer theme
• Setup FCKeditor with mediawiki plugin (bug#18975) - I was able to get the fckeditor plugin for Drupal modified to load the mediawiki plugin only for the wiki content type; the patch for the plugin still needs some work and the mediawiki plugin for fckeditor doesn't quite work properly; I'm hoping both are easily resolvable
• Started researching how to make the www and downloads folder modifiable from other tools using pam-mysql and libnss-mysql
• Putting together itinerary for OSCON and Firefox Summit
• Mercurial was setup in production and testing has begun
• Log analysis of Firefox 3's release on Mozdev

This week I'm going to be trying to get Mercurial released into full production (available for all projects) as well as iron out some annoying bugs that have been neglected recently w.r.t. the secure update.rdf generation. If all goes well I'll get back to the fckeditor plugin and get my patch working better to be imported upstream.

We've been working on getting Mercurial ready to use at Mozdev for awhile now; it turns out there's a lot to do to offer a new VCS for a hosting provider that's only offered CVS for 7 years:

• Write admin interfaces for selecting a project's repository and setting up new hg repositories
• Write a tool to log hg commits, make sure project activity is also based on these logs, and make sure places that reported CVS commits can also report hg commits (the source.html page on projects and the RSS feed).
• Setup the web interface and repositories and get new SSL certs to cover the domain
• Update documentation

We're almost ready to release this in production; we just have a final round of testing to go through. With that in mind, there's still some caveats to our Mercurial offering that might disappoint some people:

• CVS is still necessary for maintaining the website and downloads (fixing this is on our roadmap)
• Projects' source information page needs updated by the PO to include information on Mercurial
• We weren't planning on removing the old sources from CVS and we don't have a mechanism for locking CVS, so it might slightly confusing to new users or contributors as to where to get the canonical source for a project if they switch to from CVS to Mercurial

Even with these things in mind, we're still very excited to offer this to our projects like our Mozilla brethern. Hopefully in the near future this list will be much fuller.

Mozdev has long offered free source hosting, but along with that we offer a number of other features that are important to extension developers such as mirroring and distribution and secure installations and updates.

Mozdev has been working hard to try to prepare for the Firefox 3 release. We were able to keep our server up during the entire event and ended up being surprised by where the traffic was going.

From previous Firefox 2.0.0.* updates we were used to getting swamped with update requests when lots of users restarted Firefox within a short period of time. We didn't expect that so many people would be looking to our Brazillian Firefox translation project for Firefox 3 news!

Comparing the previous Tuesday and Wednesday (6/10 & 6/11) to the Firefox 3 release (6/17 & 6/18) (like filgtar did), I'd like to take a look at hits, update requests, and downloads

Our hits for the previous Tuesday and Wednesday are pretty typical; ~5.3M/day. We saw a 66% increase in hits on release day and an 87% increase the next day.

Our updates requests (when Firefox checks for an update, not when it downloads a file) are also fairly steady; ~2.3M/day. We didn't see as nearly a big increase in update requests - a 4% increase on Tuesday and 19% increase on Wednesday. This is most likely due to most Firefox 3 installs being new installs and not updates from a beta.

Our downloads are typically fairly erratic, but just looking at these 4 days we have an average of of ~56k downloads/day the previous week and we see a 48% increase on release day, an a 99% increase on the day after!

While Mozdev may not be as active as AMO is, we do have a thriving community here and we're continuing to work on adding new features to help extension developers out.

I've been at Mozdev for a full year now. This was a big step for me personally as well as for Mozdev; there was lots of trepidation from both parties, for a number of reasons:

• I was Mozdev's first full-time employee (and without a formal office, all interviews were over the phone)
• This was my first time being a full-time contractor instead of salaried
• There were (and still are) lots of bugs; some old, some important, and they all needed reevaluated to better define their scope and meaning
• There was a large, pre-existing open-source community that I had no experience with. I didn't know how (or if) they would accept me or my work
• The features that were needed at Mozdev were rather large; mostly due to scaling them across many different projects

While the first few months were relatively scary for me while I learned the existing code base and environment (7 years of organic growth!), I was able to begin working on new features almost immediately. Most of what I worked on is on our roadmap, but I also spent a lot of time trying to setup new structures for maintaining code.

One of my biggest challenges this year wasn't developing features for Mozdev, though; it was integrating myself with the existing community. The community of developers and users at Mozdev is amazing and has an incredible breadth of knowledge and background, and I was an outsider coming in to change how they worked on their projects. I've tried hard to make sure changes and prototypes are announced ahead of time and get exposure as well as making myself available to Mozdev users who need support in order to help people get to know me a little better. Being on the front-line for support as well as new features is a new experience for me, and while it's had it's rough moments I think it helps people feel that we're listening to them and that we're here to help.

This past year I've mostly kept my head down trying to learn about the Mozdev community; this year I'd like to get my head up a little more and reach out to the larger Mozilla community so that we can all benefit. I'm sure the upcoming OSCON Conference and Firefox Summit will go a long way toward getting people together so we can brainstorm on how to improve Mozdev and make it a bigger participant in the Mozilla community.

It's been a great year, and I'm very glad that I took the chance on jumping into an environment I knew nothing about and that Mozdev chose to take a chance on me. I'm very thankful to be able to continue to help the Mozdev and Mozilla communities to grow and look forward to the next year and what it will bring.

Participants: davidwboswell, (David Boswell), gjm (Gerry Murphy), silfreed (Doug Warner)
Community participants: JesperHansen

Discussion was held publically in #mozdev

Discussed developer priorities

• working on WYSIWYG for Mozdev wiki
• planning on using mediawiki syntax with FCKeditor (noticed DevMo is switching to DekiWiki)
• at ccaygill's prompting (and patch) updated the local.conf documentation
• performed some log analysis of Firefox 3 release traffic
• discussed alternatives to awstats for performing custom stats analysis (no solution found)
• hg was just setup in production; needs tested and then we can open up to projectowners for testing
• once hg is in testing w/ POs I'll be back at working on the wiki and also with new file upload mechanisms

Discussed sysadmin priorities

• some security updates
• mailman upgraded to latest version
• hg setup in production; still needs SSL cert

Web stats/Top 50 page

• stats have caught up
• hits for 2008-06-(17-20) are impressive (FF3 release)

Staging server migration

• mozilla has recently been looking into racking a ton of Mac Minis and OSUOSL just received a shipment of hard drives
• david will ping mozilla again and gjm will get back to OSUOSL

Next meeting July 8th, 2008 @ 15:00 UTC in #mozdev

Semi-busy week with not much to show for it:

• Working on providing a GUI for Mozdev's wiki - For now I think I've settled on using MediaWiki syntax and using FCKeditor. The Drupal module for FCKeditor needs some improvements to support to load different toolbars for different content types (so we can use the mediawiki plugin for wiki pages and the regular toolbar for blogs and other pages). I've submitted a patch that seems to support this, but I'm still working on a way to only load the mediawiki fckeditor plugin only in the wiki profile.
• Documenting more local.conf options
• Performing some log analysis of last week's Firefox release traffic - also discussing alternatives to awstats for performing custom query generation (no solution found yet)

The big thing for this week will be trying to get FCKeditor working with the mediawiki syntax; Independence Day is this Friday for the USA so I'll be offline then.