Mozilla: 1 year review

Monday December 31, 2013, 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 It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with.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.

This was my first full year at Mozilla and it was intense. I essentially worked on four projects: SUMO, Input, ElasticUtils and Gaia. This blog post talks about the first two which are worked on by the James' Rifles SUMINPUT Megalosaur team.

We accomplished a lot on SUMO this year. I spent a couple of hours last week throwing together a rough "year in review" script that looked at Bugzilla and git and crunched some numbers:

Twas the year: 2012
===================


Bugzilla
========

Bugs created: 938

              rrosario : 201
               a.topal : 188
                willkg : 108
           scoobidiver : 51
               igarcia : 41
                mverdi : 36
      swarnavasengupta : 30
                 james : 29
                  bram : 19
            tobbi.bugs : 17

Bugs resolved: 1025

              rrosario : 335
                       : WORKSFORME 18
                       :    INVALID 16
                       :  DUPLICATE 23
                       :    WONTFIX 7
                       :      FIXED 263
                       : INCOMPLETE 8
               a.topal : 182
                       : WORKSFORME 36
                       :    INVALID 41
                       :  DUPLICATE 11
                       :    WONTFIX 70
                       :      FIXED 21
                       : INCOMPLETE 3
                willkg : 131
                       :  DUPLICATE 6
                       :      FIXED 110
                       : WORKSFORME 2
                       :    WONTFIX 11
                       :    INVALID 2
                rdalal : 84
                       :      FIXED 84
                 james : 51
                       : WORKSFORME 6
                       :    INVALID 5
                       :  DUPLICATE 3
                       :    WONTFIX 15
                       :      FIXED 14
                       : INCOMPLETE 8
               mcooper : 37
                       :      FIXED 36
                       :    INVALID 1
            tobbi.bugs : 29
                       :      FIXED 29
             tgavankar : 28
                       :    WONTFIX 1
                       : WORKSFORME 1
                       :      FIXED 26
           scoobidiver : 28
                       :      FIXED 4
                       :  DUPLICATE 4
                       : WORKSFORME 11
                       :    WONTFIX 3
                       :    INVALID 6
               bmo2010 : 13
                       :      FIXED 1
                       :  DUPLICATE 3
                       : WORKSFORME 3
                       :    INVALID 6

            INCOMPLETE : 21
             DUPLICATE : 61
            WORKSFORME : 82
               INVALID : 91
               WONTFIX : 117
                 FIXED : 653

git
===

Total commits: 916

         Ricky Rosario : 430
      Will Kahn-Greene : 192
           Rehan Dalal : 98
           Mike Cooper : 44
             Erik Rose : 34
                 Tobbi : 29
        Tanay Gavankar : 23
           Kadir Topal : 11
             Tim Watts : 10
         Berker Peksag : 9
           James Socol : 7
            Victor Neo : 6
      Cesar Carruitero : 5
           David Lilly : 4
                  Ibai : 3
        Isac Lagerblad : 2
                 icaaq : 1
           TylerDowner : 1
              browning : 1
         ricky rosario : 1
    Anatoli Papirovski : 1
     Clauber Stipkovic : 1
          Jason Thomas : 1
                atopal : 1
      Florin Strugariu : 1

There are some interesting bits in there:

Ricky does a lot of work! Holy cow!
There were 23 people who contributed code to Kitsune (the SUMO codebase) this year. Of those, about half are volunteer contributors.

Compare with 2011, we had 19 people who contributed to the code base and less than half were volunteer contributors.
We resolved more bugs than we created in 2012. We did that in 2011 as well, so that's two years in a row. I've never seen that happen before on a project I work on.

The codebase is pretty different now than it was at the beginning of the year. I helped with the following semi-massive overhauls:

The push for more metrics and dashboards to view the numbers.
The switch from Sphinx to ElasticSearch.
The new Information Architecture which affected browsing and searching across the site.
The site redesign which covered both the desktop and mobile versions of the site.
The upgrade to Django 1.4.
The switch from arecibo to sentry.
The push to switch from fixtures to model makers for all our tests.
The switch from weekly deployments on Tuesdays to deploying whenever we want. Continuous deployment is fantastic.
Started switching the whole site from Webtrends to Google Analytics. I saw Ricky write up a bunch of bugs to finish up that work, so I'll say it's in progress.
During the redesign, Rehan redid all the CSS and switched us to use LESS.
I spun off some code I wrote for richard, then ported to Fjord, then improved into a project called django-eadred. That makes it a lot easier to generate sample data for a variety of purposes like new contributors, bootstrapping, and large random data sets.

On top of that, we did a lot of work on the documentation and making it easier to get to a working Kitsune development environment. We switched to a sprint-based work flow using Scrumbugz. We also nixed our daily checkin conference call for an IRC-based checkin system that we wrote called Standup.

It's been a big year.

For Input, it was a bigger year. We decided to abandon the old Input codebase (omfg yay) in favor of rewriting it from the ground up. The rewrite took a couple of months and then has sort of been sitting around waiting for a security review. In the meantime, we (actually, Mike did) fixed a bunch of issues with the old site code because that's what's currently in production.

Rewriting Input wouldn't have taken so long except that we did a lot of work fixing bugs in external libraries and updating Playdoh. That work definitely cut into our schedule, but it benefitted a bunch of other groups/people/sites, so that's good.

That's the gist of the year: it was a lot of work, but we accomplished a ton.

w00t for 2012!

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