The Joy of Coding

Reminder - no plan survives breakfast.

Episode guide

• Feel free to send pull requests to the repo!
• Here’s a contributing guide!
• Here’s the guide for creating pull requests that smurfd used and recommends!

Today

• Exploring about:unloads
  • aboutUnloads.js 
  • aboutUnloads.html
  • Part of Firefox :: Tabbed Browser in Bugzilla
  • Maybe fact: URLs is a subset of URIs
    • URI: "about:home", "about:about", "viewsource:https://google.ca", "https://mikeconley.ca"
      • about:unloads
    • URLs: "https://mikeconley.ca", "https://example.com", "http://badssl.com"
      • chrome://version
• OpenSearch:
  • https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/OpenSearch
• Bug 1674827 - Re-enable startup_about_home_paint_cached Talos test
  • https://mikeconley.ca/blog/2020/07/13/improving-firefox-startup-time-with-the-abouthome-startup-cache/
• Feedback:
  • People are digging the questions. Going to keep doing that. Thanks for the feedback!

• Questions:

  • As a normal user: What other products of Mozilla (e.g. Pocket, Mozilla VPN, Firefox Relay, Thunderbird) do you use on a daily basis? What are the features of Firefox you can't live without (e.g. Containers, Picture-in-Picture etc.)?

    • Firefox
      • Picture-in-Picture
      • uBlock Origin
      • AwesomeBar
      • Tabs!
      • Password generation
      • Knowing that it's got my interests at heart
    • Mozilla VPN
    • Pocket
    • Thunderbird on one of my desktop machines
    • Fenix
    • Have used Relay in the past, but don't often create aliases
    • Lockwise

  • Can you describe your day of work? (eg. do you have special time to read emails, bugzilla, catch up with slack/matrix, etc.) - what changes when you work on a bigger project vs during a normal day?

    • Every day is different, because (at least at this point in my career), I get roped into lots of different meetings.
    • Try to have concentrated blocks of working time
    • The first thing I do in the morning, is go through what happened since the last time I was around.
    • Look at my calendar for the day, look at my task list, and then try to plan a route

  • Can you walk us through your previous jobs? (some general things, interesting stories etc.) - how do they differ from your current job?

    • Dishwasher
    • Music store clerk, guitar lesson teacher
    • Quality assurance clerk at a salvage firm
    • Greenhouse, lifting, moving, planting, watering, pruning, etc.
    • Gardener
    • Web application developer for a school board
    • TA
    • Mozilla (contractor)
    • Mozilla (full time)

  • Have you ever made / co-developed add-ons, or is it not your cup of tea?

    • MyQOnly
    • Balcony

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Chat

• Join us in the Livehacking room on Mozilla’s Matrix instance! Here’s documentation on how to join. I’m only sorta monitoring the Twitch chat. A bot will try to bridge Matrix and Twitch (joc-bridgebot).

Links

• Alessandro Castellani has been streaming himself livehacking on Thunderbird
• emilio hacks on Firefox!
• Compiler Compiler - watch a Mozilla engineer hack on the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine!
• How mconley uses Mercurial
• Fission - what is it, and how does it work?
• Andreas Kling hacks on a custom browser engine for a hand-rolled OS called SerenityOS
• The Joy of Coding: Community-Run Episode guide
  • Feel free to send pull requests to the repo!
  • Here’s the guide for creating pull requests that smurfd used and recommends!
• Check out Josh Marinacci hacking on Firefox Reality, our nascent VR browser!
• I've been mirroring the episodes to YouTube
• Code Therapy with Danny O’Brien
• Watch a developer put together a Windows game from scratch (no third-part engines) - really great explanations: https://handmadehero.org/
• /r/WatchPeopleCode for more livehacking!

Glossary

• BHR - “Background Hang Reporter”, a thing that records information about when Firefox performs poorly and sends it over Telemetry
• e10s ("ee ten ESS") - short for Electrolysis, which is the multi-process Firefox project
• CPOW ("ka-POW" or sometimes "SEE-pow") = Cross-Process Object Wrapper. See this blog post.
• Deserialize - "turn a serialized object back into the complex object”
• Serialize - "turn a complex object into something that can be represented as primitives, like strings, integers, etc
• Regression - something that made behaviour worse rather than better. Regress means to “go backward”, more or less.
• l10n - localization
• a11y - accessibility
• i18n - internationalization
• k8s - kubernetes

Feedback

• @mconley@mastodon.social on Mastodon
• @mike_conley on Twitter
• mconley in IRC on irc.mozilla.org
• mikeconley.ca/blog
• mconley at mozilla dot com