Wow! I’ve been a way from this blog for too long. I also haven’t posted any new episodes for The Joy of Coding. I also haven’t been keeping up with my Things I’ve Learned posts.
Time to get back in the saddle. First thing’s first, here are 6 episodes of The Joy of Coding that have aired. Unfortunately, I haven’t put together summaries for any of them, but I’ve put their agendas near the videos so that might give some clues.
Here we go!
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!
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!
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. ↩
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!
Bug 1096550 – Dragging tab from one window to another on different displays zooms in – Notes
Bug 863514 – Electrolysis: Make gesture support work – Notes
In this episode, I debuted The Joy of Coding’s new theme song, lovingly crafted by my good friend Barn Costello!1
Then I dove into fixing a new bug that allows e10s to continue running if the user is in safe mode. After that, we dove into an investigation on why click-to-play wasn’t working for a particular site.
Shameless plug – Barn and I are in a band together. Here are some of our music videos. ↩
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!
Bug 1091112 – Print dialog doesn’t get focus automatically, if e10s is enabled – Notes