Mozilla (old posts, page 5)

Standup report: End of days

, | Tweet this

What is Standup?

Standup is a system for capturing standup-style posts from individuals making it easier to see what's going on for teams and projects. It has an associated IRC bot standups for posting messages from IRC.

Short version

Standups project is done and we're going to decommission all the parts in the next couple of months.

Long version: End of days

Paul and I run Standups and have for a couple of years now. We do the vast bulk of work on it covering code changes, feature implementing, bug fixing, site administration and user support. Neither of us use it.

There are occasional contributions from other people, but not enough to keep the site going without us.

Standups has a lot of issues and a crappy UI/UX. Standups continues to accrue technical debt.

The activity seems to be dwindling over time. Groups are going elsewhere.

In June, I wrote Standup report: June 8th, 2018 in which I talked about us switching to swag-driven development as a way to boost our energy level in the project, pull in contributors, etc. We added a link to the site. It was a sort of last-ditch attempt to get the project going again.

Nothing happened. I heard absolutely nothing from anyone in any medium about the post or any of the thoughts therein.

Sometimes, it's hard to know when a project is dead. You sometimes have metrics that could mean something about the health of a project, but it's hard to know for sure. Sometimes it's hard to understand why you're sitting in a room all by yourself. Will something happen? Will someone show up? What if we just wait 15 minutes more?

I don't want to wait anymore. The project is dead. If it's not actually really totally dead, it's such a fantastic fascimile of dead that I can't tell the difference. There's no point in me waiting anymore; nothing's going to change and no one is going to show up.

Sure, maybe I could wait another 15 minutes--what's the harm since it's so easy to just sit and wait? The harm is that I've got so many things on my plate that are more important and have more value than this project. Also, I don't really like working on this project. All I've experienced in the last year was the pointy tips of bug reports most of them related to authentication. The only time anyone appreciates me spending my very very precious little free time on Standups is when I solicit it.

Also, I don't even know if it's "Standups" with an "s" or "Standup" without the "s". It might be both. I'm tired of looking it up to avoid embarrassment.

Timeline for shutdown

Shutting down projects like Standups is tricky and takes time and energy. I think tentatively, it'll be something like this:

  • August 29th -- Announce end of Standups. Add site message (assuming site comes back up). Adjust irc bot reply message.
  • October 1st -- Shut down IRC bots.
  • October 15th -- Decommission infrastructure: websites, DNS records, Heroku infra; archive github repositories, etc.

I make no promises on that timeline. Maybe things will happen faster or slower depending on circumstances.

What we're not going to do

There are a few things we're definitely not going to do when decommissioning:

First, we will not be giving the data to anyone. No db dumps, no db access, nothing. If you want the data, you can slurp it down via the existing APIs on your own. [1]

Second, we're not going to keep the site going in read-only mode. No read-only mode or anything like that unless someone gives us a really really compelling reason to do that and has a last name that rhymes with Honnen. If you want to keep a historical mirror of the site, you can do that on your own.

Third, we're not going to point www.standu.ps or standu.ps at another project. Pretty sure the plan will be to have those names point to nothing or something like that. IT probably has a process for that.

[1] Turns out when we did the rewrite in 2016, we didn't reimplement the GET API. Issue 478 covers creating a temporary new one. If you want it, please help them out.

Alternatives for people using it

If you're looking for alternatives or want to discuss alternatives with other people, check out issue 476.

But what if you want to save it!

Maybe you want to save it and you've been waiting all this time for just the right moment? If you want to save it, check out issue 477.

Many thanks!

Thank you to all the people who worked on Standups in the early days! I liked those days--they were fun.

Thank you to everyone who used Standups over the years. I hope it helped more than it hindered.

Update August 30, 2018: Added note about GET API not existing.

Standup report: June 8th, 2018

, | Tweet this

What is Standup?

Standup is a system for capturing standup-style posts from individuals making it easier to see what's going on for teams and projects. It has an associated IRC bot standups for posting messages from IRC.

Project report

Over the last six months, we've done:

  • monthly library updates
  • revamped static assets management infrastructure
  • service maintenance
  • fixed the textarea to be resizeable (Thanks, Arai!)

The monthly library updates have helped with reducing technical debt. That takes a few hours each month to work through.

Paul redid how Standup does static assets. We no longer use django-pipeline, but instead use gulp. It works muuuuuuch better and makes it possible to upgrade to Djagno 2.0 soon. That was a ton of work over the course of a few days for both of us.

We've been keeping the Standup service running. That includes stage and production websites as well as stage and production IRC bots. That also includes helping users who are stuck--usually with accounts management. That's been a handful of hours.

Arai fixed the textareas so they're resizeable. That helps a ton! I'd love to get more help with UI/UX fixing.

Some GitHub stats:

GitHub
======

  mozilla/standup: 15 prs

    Committers:
             pyup-bot :     6  (  +588,   -541,   20 files)
               willkg :     5  (  +383,   -169,   27 files)
                 pmac :     2  ( +4179,   -223,   58 files)
               arai-a :     1  (    +2,     -1,    1 files)
                  g-k :     1  (    +3,     -3,    1 files)

                Total :        ( +5155,   -937,   89 files)

    Most changed files:
      requirements.txt (11)
      requirements-dev.txt (7)
      standup/settings.py (5)
      docker-compose.yml (4)
      standup/status/jinja2/base.html (3)
      standup/status/models.py (3)
      standup/status/tests/test_views.py (3)
      standup/status/urls.py (3)
      standup/status/views.py (3)
      standup/urls.py (3)

    Age stats:
          Youngest PR : 0.0d: 466: Add site-wide messaging
       Average PR age : 2.3d
        Median PR age : 0.0d
            Oldest PR : 10.0d: 459: Scheduled monthly dependency update for May


  All repositories:

    Total merged PRs: 15


Contributors
============

  arai-a
  g-k
  pmac
  pyup-bot
  willkg

That's it for the last six months!

Switching to swag-driven development

Do you use Standup?

Did you use Standup, but the glacial pace of fixing issues was too much so you switched to something else?

Do you want to use Standup?

We think there's still some value in having Standup around and there are still people using it. There's still some technical debt to fix that makes working on it harder than it should be. We've been working through that glacially.

As a project, we have the following problems:

  1. The bulk of the work is being done by Paul and Will.
  2. We don't have time to work on Standup.
  3. There isn't anyone else contributing.

Why aren't users contributing? Probably a lot of reasons. Maybe everyone has their own reason! Have I spent a lot of time to look into this? No, because I don't have a lot of time to work on Standup.

Instead, we're just going to make some changes and see whether that helps. So we're doing the following:

  1. Will promises to send out Standup project reports every 6 months before the All Hands and in doing this raise some awareness of what's going on and thank people who contributed.
  2. We're fixing the Standup site to be clearer on who's doing work and how things get fixed so it's more likely your ideas come to fruition rather than get stale.
  3. We're switching Standup to swag-driven development!

What's that you say? What's swag-driven development?

I mulled over the idea in my post on swag-driven development.

It's a couple of things, but mainly an explicit statement that people work on Standup in our spare time at the cost of not spending that time on other things. While we don't feel entitled to feeling appreciated, it would be nice to feel appreciated sometimes. Not feeling appreciated makes me wonder whether I should spend the time elsewhere. (And maybe that's the case--I have no idea.) Maybe other people would be more interested in spending their spare time on Standup if they knew there were swag incentives?

So what does this mean?

It means that we're encouraging swag donations!

  • If your team has stickers at the All Hands and you use Standup, find Paul and Will and other Standup contributors and give them one!
  • If there are features/bugs you want fixed and they've been sitting in the queue forever, maybe bribing is an option.

For the next quarter

Paul and I were going to try to get together at the All Hands and discuss what's next.

We don't really have an agenda. I know I look at the issue tracker and go, "ugh" and that's about where my energy level is these days.

Possible things to tackle in the next 6 months off the top of my head:

If you're interested in meeting up with us, toss me an email at willkg at mozilla dot com.

AWS Lambda dev with Python

, | Tweet this

A story of a pigeon

I work on Socorro which is the crash ingestion pipeline for Mozilla's products.

The pipeline starts at the collector which handles incoming HTTP POST requests, pulls out the payload, futzes with it a little, and then saves it to AWS S3. Socorro then processes some of those crashes in the processor. The part that connects the two is called Pigeon. It was intended as a short-term solution to bridge the collector and the processor, but it's still around a year later and the green grass grows all around all around and the green grass grows all around.

Pigeon is an AWS Lambda function that triggers on S3 ObjectCreated:Put events, looks at the filename, and then adds things to the processing queue depending on the filename structure. We called it Pigeon for various hilarious reasons that are too mundane to go into in this blog post.

It's pretty basic. It doesn't do much. It was a short term solution we thought we'd throw away pretty quickly. I wrote some unit tests for the individual parts of it and a "client" that invoked the function in a faux AWS Lambda like way. That was good enough.

But then some problems

Pigeon was written with Python 2 because at the time AWS Lambda didn't have a Python 3 runtime. That changed--now there's one with Python 3.6.

In January, I decided to update Pigeon to work with Python 3.6. I tweaked the code, tweaked the unit tests, and voila--it was done! Then we deployed it to our -stage environment where it failed epically in technicolor glory (but no sound!) and we had to back it out and return to the Python 2 version.

What happened? I'll tell you what happened--we had a shit testing environment. Sure, we had tests, but they lacked several things:

  1. At no point do we test against the build artifact for Pigeon. The build artifact for AWS Lambda jobs in Python is a .zip file that includes the code and all the libraries that it uses.
  2. The tests "invoke" Pigeon with a "client", but it was pretty unlike the AWS Lambda Python 3.6 runtime.
  3. Turns out I had completely misunderstood how I should be doing exception handling in AWS Lambda.

So our tests tested some things, but missed some important things and a big bug didn't get caught before going to -stage.

It sucked. I felt chagrinned. I like to think I have a tolerance for failure since I do it a lot, but this felt particularly faily and some basic safeguards would have prevented it from happening.

Fleshing out AWS Lambda in Python project

We were thinking of converting another part of the Socorro pipeline to AWS Lambda, but I put that on hold until I had wrapped my head around how to build a development environment that included scaffolding for testing AWS Lambda functions in a real runtime.

Miles or Brian mentioned aws-sam-local. I looked into that. It's written in Go, they suggest installing it with npm, it does a bunch of things, and it has some event generation code. But for the things I needed, it seemed like it would just be a convenience cli for docker-lambda.

I had been aware of docker-lambda for a while, but hadn't looked at the project recently. They added support for passing events via stdin. Their docs have examples of invoking Lambda functions. That seemed like what I needed.

I took that and built the developer environment scaffolding that we've got in Pigeon now. Further, I decided to use this same model for future AWS Lambda function development.

How does it work?

Pigeon is a Python project, so it uses Python libraries. I maintain those requirements in a requirements.txt file.

I install the requirements into a ./build directory:

$ pip install --ignore-installed --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt -t build/

I copy the Pigeon source into that directory, too:

$ cp pigeon.py build/

That's all I need for the runtime to use.

The tests are in the tests/ directory. I'm using pytest and in the conftest.py file have this at the top:

import os
import sys

# Insert build/ directory in sys.path so we can import pigeon
sys.path.insert(
    0,
    os.path.join(
        os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(__file__)),
        'build'
    )
)

I'm using Docker and docker-compose to aid development. I use a test container which is a python:3.6 image with the test requirements installed in it.

In this way, tests run against the ./build directory.

Now I want to be able to invoke Pigeon in an AWS Lambda runtime so I can debug issues and also write an integration test.

I set up a lambda-run container that uses the lambci/lambda:python3.6 image. I mount ./build as /var/task since that's where the AWS Lambda runtime expects things to be.

I created a shell script for invoking Pigeon:

#!/bin/bash

docker-compose run \
    --rm \
    -v "$PWD/build":/var/task \
    --service-ports \
    -e DOCKER_LAMBDA_USE_STDIN=1 \
    lambda-run pigeon.handler $@

That's based on the docker-lambda invoke examples.

Let's walk through that:

  1. It runs the lambda-run container with the services it depends on as defined in my docker-compose.yml file.
  2. It mounts the ./build directory as /var/task because that's where the runtime expectes the code it's running to be.
  3. The DOCKER_LAMBDA_USE_STDIN=1 environment variable causes it to look at stdin for the event. That's pretty convenient.
  4. It runs invokes pigeon.handler which is the handler function in the pigeon Python module.

I have another script that generates fake AWS S3 ObjectCreated:Put events. I cat the result of that into the invoke shell script. That runs everything nicely:

$ ./bin/generate_event.py --key v2/raw_crash/000/20180313/00007bd0-2d1c-4865-af09-80bc00180313 > event.json
$ cat event.json | ./bin/run_invoke.sh
Starting socorropigeon_rabbitmq_1 ... done
START RequestId: 921b4ecf-6e3f-4bc1-adf6-7d58e4d41f47 Version: $LATEST
{"Timestamp": 1523588759480920064, "Type": "pigeon", "Logger": "antenna", "Hostname": "300fca32d996", "EnvVersion": "2.0", "Severity": 4, "Pid": 1, "Fields": {"msg": "Please set PIGEON_AWS_REGION. Returning original unencrypted data."}}
{"Timestamp": 1523588759481024512, "Type": "pigeon", "Logger": "antenna", "Hostname": "300fca32d996", "EnvVersion": "2.0", "Severity": 4, "Pid": 1, "Fields": {"msg": "Please set PIGEON_AWS_REGION. Returning original unencrypted data."}}
{"Timestamp": 1523588759481599232, "Type": "pigeon", "Logger": "antenna", "Hostname": "300fca32d996", "EnvVersion": "2.0", "Severity": 6, "Pid": 1, "Fields": {"msg": "number of records: 1"}}
{"Timestamp": 1523588759481796864, "Type": "pigeon", "Logger": "antenna", "Hostname": "300fca32d996", "EnvVersion": "2.0", "Severity": 6, "Pid": 1, "Fields": {"msg": "looking at key: v2/raw_crash/000/20180313/00007bd0-2d1c-4865-af09-80bc00180313"}}
{"Timestamp": 1523588759481933056, "Type": "pigeon", "Logger": "antenna", "Hostname": "300fca32d996", "EnvVersion": "2.0", "Severity": 6, "Pid": 1, "Fields": {"msg": "crash id: 00007bd0-2d1c-4865-af09-80bc00180313 in dev_bucket"}}
MONITORING|1523588759|1|count|socorro.pigeon.accept|#env:test
{"Timestamp": 1523588759497482240, "Type": "pigeon", "Logger": "antenna", "Hostname": "300fca32d996", "EnvVersion": "2.0", "Severity": 6, "Pid": 1, "Fields": {"msg": "00007bd0-2d1c-4865-af09-80bc00180313: publishing to socorrodev.normal"}}
END RequestId: 921b4ecf-6e3f-4bc1-adf6-7d58e4d41f47
REPORT RequestId: 921b4ecf-6e3f-4bc1-adf6-7d58e4d41f47 Duration: 101 ms Billed Duration: 200 ms Memory Size: 1536 MB Max Memory Used: 28 MB

null

Then I wrote an integration test that cleared RabbitMQ queue, ran the invoke script with a bunch of different keys, and then checked what was in the processor queue.

Now I've got:

  • tests that test the individual bits of Pigeon
  • a way to run Pigeon in the same environment as -stage and -prod
  • an integration test that runs the whole setup

A thing I hadn't mentioned was that Pigeon's documentation is entirely in the README. The docs cover setup and development well enough that I can hand this off to normal people and future me. I like simple docs. Building scaffolding such that docs are simple makes me happy.

Summary

You can see the project at https://github.com/mozilla-services/socorro-pigeon.

Socorro Smooth Mega-Migration 2018

, | Tweet this

Summary

Socorro is the crash ingestion pipeline for Mozilla's products like Firefox. When Firefox crashes, the Breakpad crash reporter asks the user if the user would like to send a crash report. If the user answers "yes!", then the Breakpad crash reporter collects data related to the crash, generates a crash report, and submits that crash report as an HTTP POST to Socorro. Socorro collects and saves the crash report, processes it, and provides an interface for aggregating, searching, and looking at crash reports.

Over the last year and a half, we've been working on a new infrastructure for Socorro and migrating the project to it. It was a massive undertaking and involved changing a lot of code and some architecture and then redoing all the infrastructure scripts and deploy pipelines.

On Thursday, March 28th, we pushed the button and switched to the new infrastructure. The transition was super smooth. Now we're on new infra!

This blog post talks a little about the old and new infrastructures and the work we did to migrate.

Read more…

Side projects and swag-driven development

, | Tweet this

Summary

I work at Mozilla. I work on a lot of stuff:

  • a main project I do a ton of work on and maintain: Socorro
  • a bunch of projects related to that project which I work on and maintain: Antenna, Everett, Markus
  • some projects that I work on occasionally but don't maintain: mozilla-django-oidc
  • one project that many Mozilla sites use that somehow I ended up with but has no relation to my main project: Bleach
  • some projects I'm probably forgetting about
  • a side-project that isn't related to anything else I do that I "maintain": Standups

For most of those projects, they're either part of my main job or I like working on them or I get some recognition for owning them. Whatever the reason, I don't work on them because I feel bad. Then there's Standups which I work on solely because I feel bad.

This blog post talks about me and Standups, pontificates about some options I've talked with others about, and then lays out the concept of swag-driven development.

Read more…

Socorro in 2017

, | Tweet this

Summary

Socorro is the crash ingestion pipeline for Mozilla's products like Firefox. When Firefox crashes, the Breakpad crash reporter asks the user if the user would like to send a crash report. If the user answers "yes!", then the Breakpad crash reporter collects data related to the crash, generates a crash report, and submits that crash report as an HTTP POST to Socorro. Socorro saves the crash report, processes it, and provides an interface for aggregating, searching, and looking at crash reports.

2017 was a big year for Socorro. In this blog post, I opine about our accomplishments.

Read more…

rob-bugson 1.0: or how I wrote a webextension

, | Tweet this

I work on Socorro and other projects which use GitHub for version control and code review and use Mozilla's Bugzilla for bug tracking.

After creating a pull request in GitHub, I attach it to the related Bugzilla bug which is a contra-dance of clicking and copy-and-paste. Github tweaks for Bugzilla simplified that by adding a link to the GitHub pull request page that I could click on, edit, and then submit the resulting form. However, that's a legacy addon and I use Firefox Nightly and it doesn't look like anyone wrote a webextension version of it, so I was out-of-luck.

Today, I had to bring in my car for service and was sitting around at the dealership for a few hours. I figured instead of working on Socorro things, I'd take a break and implement an attach-pr-to-bug webextension.

I've never written a webextension before. I had written a couple of addons years ago using the SDK and then Jetpack (or something like that). My JavaScript is a bit rusty, especially ES6 stuff. I figured this would be a good way to learn about webextensions.

It took me about 4 hours of puzzling through docs, writing code, and debugging and then I had something that worked. Along the way, I discovered exciting things like:

  • host permissions let you run content scripts in web pages
  • content scripts can't access browser.tabs--you need a background script for that
  • you can pass messages from content scripts to background scripts
  • seems like everything returns a promise, but async/await make that a lot easier to work with
  • the attachment page on Bugzilla isn't like the create-bug page and ignores querystring params

The MDN docs for writing webextensions and the APIs involved are fantastic. The webextension samples are also great--I started with them when I was getting my bearings.

I created a new GitHub repository. I threw the code into a pull request making it easier for someone else to review it. Mike Cooper kindly skimmed it and provided insightful comments. I fixed the issues he brought up.

TheOne helped me resurrect my AMO account which I created in 2012 back when Gaia apps were the thing.

I read through Publishing your webextension, generated a .zip, and submitted a new addon.

About 10 minutes later, the addon had been reviewed and approved.

Now it's a thing and you can install rob-bugson.

Socorro signature generation overhaul and command line interface

, | Tweet this

Summary

This quarter I worked on creating a command line interface for signature generation and in doing that extracted it from the processor into a standalone-ish module.

The end result of this work is that:

  1. anyone making changes to signature generation can can test the changes out on their local machine using a Socorro local development environment
  2. I can trivially test incoming signature generation changes--this both saves me time and gives me a much higher confidence of correctness without having to merge the code and test it in our -stage environment [1]
  3. we can research and experiment with changes to the signature generation algorithm and how that affects existing crash signatures
  4. it's a step closer to being usable by other groups

This blog post talks about that work briefly and then talks about some of the things I've been able to do with it.

[1] I can't overstate how awesome this is.

Read more…

Socorro local development environment

, | Tweet this

Summary

Socorro is the crash ingestion pipeline for Mozilla's products like Firefox. When Firefox crashes, the Breakpad crash reporter asks the user if the user would like to send a crash report. If the user answers "yes!", then the Breakpad crash reporter collects data related to the crash, generates a crash report, and submits that crash report as an HTTP POST to Socorro. Socorro saves the crash report, processes it, and provides an interface for aggregating, searching, and looking at crash reports.

This (long-ish) blog post talks about how when I started on Socorro, there wasn't really a local development environment and how I went on a magical journey through dark forests and craggy mountains to find one.

If you do anything with Socorro at Mozilla, you definitely want to at least read the "Tell me more about this local development environment" part.

Read more…

Socorro and Firefox 57

, | Tweet this

Summary

Socorro is the crash ingestion pipeline for Mozilla's products like Firefox. When Firefox crashes, the Breakpad crash reporter asks the user if the user would like to send a crash report. If the user answers "yes!", then the Breakpad crash reporter collects data related to the crash, generates a crash report, and submits that crash report as an HTTP POST to Socorro--specifically the Socorro collector.

Teams at Mozilla are feverishly working on Firefox 57. That's super important work and we're getting down to the wire. Socorro is a critical part of that development work as it collects incoming crashes, processes them, and has tools for analysis.

This blog post covers some of the things Socorro engineering has been doing to facilitate that work and what we're planning from now until Firefox 57 release.

This quarter

This quarter, we replaced Snappy with Tecken for more reliable symbol lookup in Visual Studio and other clients.

We built a Docker-based local dev environment for Socorro making it easier to run Socorro on your local machine configured like crash-stats.mozilla.com. It now takes five steps to getting Socorro running on your computer.

We also overhauled the signature generation system in Socorro and slapped on a command-line interface. Now you can test the effects of signature generation changes on specific crashes as well as groups of crashes on your local machine.

We've also been fixing stability issues and bugs and myriad other things.

Now until Firefox 57

Starting today and continuing until after Firefox 57 release, we are:

  1. prioritizing your signature generation changes, getting them landed, and pushing them to -prod
  2. triaging Socorro bugs into "need it right now" and "everything else" buckets
  3. deferring big changes to Socorro until after Firefox 57 including API endpoint deprecation, major UI changes to the crash-stats interface, and other things that would affect your workflow

We want to make sure crash analysis is working as best as it can so you can do the best you can so we can have a successful Firefox 57.

Please contact us if you need something!

We hang out on #breakpad on irc.mozilla.org. You can also write up bugs.

Hopefully this helps. If not, let us know!