Monthly Archives: May 2015

The Joy of Coding (Ep. 16): Wacky Morning DJ

I’m on vacation this week, but the show must go on! So I pre-recorded a shorter episode of The Joy of Coding last Friday.

In this episode1, I focused on a tool I wrote that I alluded to in the last episode, which is a soundboard to use during Joy of Coding episodes.

I demo the tool, and then I explain how it works. After I finished the episode, I pushed to repository to GitHub, and you can check that out right here.

So I’ll see you next week with a full length episode! Take care!


  1. Which, several times, I mistakenly refer to as the 15th episode, and not the 16th. Whoops. 

Things I’ve Learned This Week (May 18 – May 22, 2015)

You might have noticed that I had no “Things I’ve Learned This Week” post last week. Sorry about that – by the end of the week, I looked at my Evernote of “lessons from the week”, and it was empty. I’m certain I’d learned stuff, but I just failed to write it down. So I guess the lesson I learned last week was, always write down what you learn.

How to make your mozilla-central Mercurial clone work faster

I like Mercurial. I also like Git, but recently, I’ve gotten pretty used to Mercurial.

One complaint I hear over and over (and I’m guilty of it myself sometimes), is that “Mercurial is slow”. I’ve even experienced that slowness during some of my Joy of Coding episodes.

This past week, I was helping my awesome new intern get set up to tear into some e10s bugs, and at some point we went through this document to get her .hgrc all set up.

This document did not exist when I first started working with Mercurial – back then, I was using mq or sometimes pbranch, and grumbling about how I missed Git.

But there is some gold in this document.

gps has been doing some killer work documenting best practices with Mercurial, and this document is one of the results of his labour.

The part that’s really made the difference for me is the hgwatchman bit.

watchman is a tool that some folks at Facebook wrote to monitor changes in a folder. hgwatchman is an extension for Mercurial that takes advantage of watchman for a repository, smartly precomputing a bunch of stuff when the folder changes so that when you fire a command, like

hg status

It takes a fraction of the time it’d take without hgwatchman. A fraction.

Here’s how I set hgwatchman up on my MacBook (though you should probably go by the Mercurial for Mozillians doc as the official reference):

  1. Install watchman with brew:
    brew install watchman
  2. Clone the hgwatchman extension to some folder that you can easily remember and build it:
    hg clone https://bitbucket.org/facebook/hgwatchman
    cd hgwatchman
    make local
  3. Add the following lines to my user .hgrc:
    [extensions]
    hgwatchman = cloned-in-dir/hgwatchman/hgwatchman
  4. Make sure the extension is properly installed by running:
    hg help extensions
  5. hgwatchman should be listed under “enabled extensions”. If it didn’t work, keep in mind that you want to target the hgwatchman directory
  6. And then in my mozilla-central .hg/.hgrc:
    [watchman]
    mode = on
  7. Boom, you’re done!

Congratulations, hg should feel snappier now!

Next step is to try out this chg thingthough I’m having some issues still.

The Joy of Coding (Ep. 15): OS X Printing Returns

In Episode 15, we kept working on the same bug as the last two episodes – proxying the printing dialog on OS X to the parent process from the content process. At the end of Episode 14, we’d finished the serialization bits, and put in the infrastructure for deserialization. In this episode, we did the rest of the deserialization work.

And then we attempted to print a test page. And it worked!

We did it!

Then, we cleaned up the patches and posted them up for review. I had a lot of questions about my Objective-C++ stuff, specifically with regards to memory management (it seems as if some things in Objective-C++ are memory managed, and it’s not immediately obvious what that applies to). So I’ve requested review, and I hope to hear back from someone more experienced soon!

I also plugged a new show that’s starting up! If you’re a designer, and want to see how a designer at Mozilla does their work, you’ll love The Design Hour, by Ricardo Vazquez. His design chops are formidable, and he shows you exactly how he operates. It’s great!

Finally, I failed to mention that I’m on holiday next week, so I can’t stream live. I have, however, pre-recorded a shorter Episode 16, which should air at the right time slot next week. The show must go on!

Episode Agenda

References

Bug 1091112 – Print dialog doesn’t get focus automatically, if e10s is enabled – Notes

Lost in Data!

Keeping Firefox zippy involves running performance tests on each push to make sure we’re not making Firefox slower.

How does that even work? This used to be a mystery. NO LONGER. jmaher lets you peek behind the curtain here in the first episode of Lost in Data!

The Joy of Coding (Ep. 14): More OS X Printing

In this episode, I kept working on the same bug as last week – proxying the print dialog from the content process on OS X. We actually finished the serialization bit, and started doing deserialization!

Hopefully, next episode we can polish off the deserialization and we’l be done. Fingers crossed!

Note that this episode was about 2 hours and 10 minutes, but the standard-definition recording up on Air Mozilla only plays for about 13 minutes and 5 seconds. Not too sure what’s going on there – we’ve filed a bug with the people who’ve encoded it. Hopefully, we’ll have the full episode up for standard-definition soon.

In the meantime, if you’d like to watch the whole episode, you can go to the Air Mozilla page and watch it in HD, or you can go to the YouTube mirror.

Episode Agenda

References

Bug 1091112 – Print dialog doesn’t get focus automatically, if e10s is enabled – Notes