Input: 2015q4 quarter in review

Published: Monday January 4, 2016, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)

Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

Things to know:

Input is Mozilla's product feedback site.
Fjord is the code that runs Input.
We maintain project details and plans at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Input.
I am Will Kahn-Greene and I was the tech lead, architect, QA and primary developer on Input.

This is the quarter in review for Mozilla Input!

Bugzilla and git stats

Quarter 2015q4 (2015-10-01 -> 2016-01-01)
=========================================


Bugzilla
========

Bugs created: 46
Creators: 6

         Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] : 38
     Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] [ : 3
     Michael Kelly [:mkelly,:Osmose : 2
                  Artem Polivanchuk : 1
                                Jen : 1
           Francesco Lodolo [:flod] : 1

Bugs resolved: 55

                            WONTFIX : 23
                              FIXED : 29
                          DUPLICATE : 3

                         Tracebacks : 2
                           Research : 6
                            Tracker : 3

Research bugs: 6

    1179534: [research] geo for heartbeat
    1213373: [research] better way to collapse whitespace in Jinja2
        trans blocks
    1222442: [research] way to distinguish feedback from Fennec
        about:feedback and Input generic form

Tracker bugs: 3

    1146686: [tracker] upgrade to django 1.8
    1198758: [tracker] trigger suggester project

Resolvers: 4

         Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] : 53
                              jorge : 1
                      L. Guruprasad : 1

Commenters: 25

                             willkg : 342
                            mgrimes : 14
                         ankititsme : 9
                              zfang : 5
                       jennifer72tx : 4
                       mr.reception : 4
                            neminaa : 4
                              hello : 4
                         deshrajdry : 3
                              glind : 3
                          standard8 : 2
                     bansalutkarsh3 : 2
                          lgp171188 : 2
                           rrosario : 2
                             gioyik : 2
                        aaronkalair : 1
                          reachtotj : 1
                      a.polivanchuk : 1
                            madhava : 1
                                cww : 1
                              mhoye : 1
                           rajat503 : 1
                          aman_alam : 1
                              jorge : 1
                             mkelly : 1

git
===

Total commits: 96

      Will Kahn-Greene :    92  (+3214, -2880, files 266)
         L. Guruprasad :     4  (+17, -12, files 5)

Total lines added: 3231
Total lines deleted: 2892
Total files changed: 271

Everyone
========

    aaronkalair
    aman_alam
    ankititsme
    Artem Polivanchuk
    bansalutkarsh3
    cww
    deshrajdry
    Francesco Lodolo [:flod]
    gioyik
    glind
    hello
    Jen
    jennifer72tx
    jorge
    Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] [:jcrawford]
    L Guruprasad
    madhava
    Matt Grimes
    mhoye
    Michael Kelly [:mkelly,:Osmose]
    mr.reception
    neminaa
    rajat503
    reachtotj
    rrosario
    standard8
    Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg]
    zfang

Code line counts:

2014q1: April 1st, 2014:        15195 total  6953 Python
2014q2: July 1st, 2014:         20456 total  9247 Python
2014q3: October 7th. 2014:      23466 total  11614 Python
2014q4: December 31st, 2014:    30158 total  13615 Python

2015q1: April 1st, 2015:        28977 total  12623 Python
2015q2: July 13th, 2015:        29549 total  13572 Python
2015q3: September 30th, 2015:   30571 total  15119 Python
2015q4: December 30th, 2015:    31116 total  15364 Python

We removed a lot of code this quarter and did a fair amount of code cleanup. It was a good quarter for improving the quality of the code without improving the quantity of the code.

Contributor stats

There wasn't a lot of non-me activity this quarter. Generally 4th quarter tends to be slower all around.

Accomplishments

Switched to Puente: We ditched a lot of code in Fjord for l10n support and switched to use Puente. In the process of doing that, we improved Puente by a lot, solved a bunch of mysteries and generally have a much better l10n situation than we did previously.

Emoji: I spent a lot of time tracking down problems with Input falling over when emoji was in the feedback. The problem is that we're using MySQL with utf8 and MySQL's utf8 is 3-byte. In order to store emoji, we need to be using 4-byte utf8mb4. Switching to that is a bit of a trick and I hit a lot of problems. I'm not sure when we'll get this fixed, but at least we understand the issues involved now.

Heartbeat Health Check: We added a healthcheck system for Heartbeat to prevent future data problems. This system is pretty flexible, so we can easily expand it with additional checks in the future.

Updates, bug fixes, etc: We had the regular amount of library updates, minor bug fixes and other improvements. We added a lot of tests and removed a lot of half-done or dead code. Generally, the quality of the project is higher, though as with most things, there are always things to improve.

Summary

It was a decent quarter. Nothing special, but nothing worrying either.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.