Monthly Archives: July 2015

The Joy of Coding (Ep. 20): Reviewin’ and Mystery Solvin’

After a two week hiatus, we’re back with Episode 20!

In this episode, I start off by demonstrating my new green screen1, and then dive right into reviewing some code to make the Lightweight Theme web installer work with e10s.

After that, I start investigating a mystery that my intern ran into a few days back, where for some reason, preloaded about:newtab pages were behaving really strangely when they were loaded in the content process. Strangely, as in, the pages wouldn’t do simple things, like reload when the user pressed the Reload button.

Something strange was afoot.

Do we solve the mystery? Do we figure out what’s going on? Do we find a solution? Tune in and find out!

Episode agenda.

References

Bug 653065 – Make the lightweight theme web installer ready for e10s
Bug 1181601 – Unable to receive messages from preloaded, remote newtab page – Notes
@mrrrgn hacks together a WebSocket server implementation in Go. To techno!

  1. Although throughout the video, the lag between the audio and the video gets worse and worse – sorry about that. I’ll see what I can do to fix that for next time. ↩

The Joy of Coding (Ep. 19): Cleaning up a patch

In this episode, I picked up a patch that another developer had been working on to try to drive it over the line. This was an interesting exercise in trying to take ownership and responsibility of something rather complex, in order to close a bug.

I also do some merging and conflict resolution with Mercurial in this episode.

Something else really cool happens during the latter half of this episode – I ask the audience for advice on how to clean up some state-machine transition logic in some code I was looking at. I was humming and hawing about different approaches, and put the question out to the folks watching: What would you do? And I got responses! 

More than one person contacted me either in IRC or over email and gave me suggestions on how to clean things up. I thought this was awesome, and I integrated a number of their solutions into the patch that I eventually put up for review.

Thanks so much to those folks for watching and contributing!

Episode agenda.

References

Bug 1096550 – Dragging tab from one window to another on different displays zooms in – Notes
Bug 863514 – Electrolysis: Make gesture support work – Notes