Category Archives: Teaching Open Source

Thought experiment: letting git normalize whitespace

I’m working across a lot of different repos these days, and while fixing a whitespace issue in one of my patches, I wondered if it would be possible to eliminate this altogether. Working with git, we already have a version of what I want in terms of core.autocrlf.  You wrote this patch on Windows, I’m on [...]
Also posted in CDOT, MoFoDev, Mozilla, Mozilla Education, Seneca | 9 Comments

HTML5 time and data elements in Firefox

HTML5 includes some great additions for authors wanting to work with microformats and microdata in markup.  Last week I finished implementing the new <time> and <data> elements in Firefox (see bugs 629801 and 839371).  You can already use them in Nightly, and they should ship as part of Firefox 22.  I wanted to say something [...]
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Webmaker – Sequencing Web Media

One of the most requested new features we get for Mozilla Webmaker is web media sequencing.  Users want to be able to use multiple video or audio clips in a single experience.  This past week Scott and Kate, with help from Matt and Chris, have been building and testing a solution in Popcorn Maker. The idea [...]
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On Code Review

One of the discussions happening right now in the Mozilla Foundation software team is whether mandatory code reviews are a good thing.  I’ve had versions of this conversation a number of times in the past few months, and today I’m going to write my thoughts down so I can point at them when it comes [...]
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A prayer for Aaron

Today, and as I write this, friends and family of Aaron Swartz are gathering to pay their last respects to a son, friend, and colleague.  Our Mozilla Foundation software team call, which normally happens at this time, was rescheduled in order to allow a number of the engineers to attend the service in [...]
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Visual Studio considered Harmful

I was reading scrollback on irc this morning, where a number of my students were discussing the unit tests for the webvtt project we’re doing this term.  The main issue was that Visual Studio didn’t seem to provide the equivalent of our autotools build system’s `make check‘, that is, it can’t run all our tests [...]
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WEBVTT Update, Google Test, debugging unit tests

With the majority of the webvtt parser now written (untested, unrevewied, but written), we’ve turned our attention back to testing.  Previously the class wrote 300+ validation tests.  These were simple VTT files that allowed us to check that a parser (or validator) correctly passed or failed a particlar VTT file, each one designed to exercise [...]
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Web App JavaScript Crash Reporting

We just launched Popcorn Maker 1.0 this weekend at Mozilla Festival 2012, and while the focus of the app is obviously web video remixing, one of our favourite features as a dev team was the JavaScript Crash Reporter.  Bobby and I wrote a little bit about it in our Mozilla Hacks post, but I wanted [...]
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Popcorn Maker 1.0 Beta – TED Launch

We’re about 3 weeks away from the Popcorn Maker 1.0 launch at this year’s Mozilla Festival in London.  Just to raise my blood pressure a bit, we’ve shipped a beta today.  It coincides with the release of an amazing TED talk by Mozilla’s Ryan Merkley about Popcorn.js and Popcorn Maker.  “It would be cool if [...]
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Implementing WebVTT in Firefox at Seneca

Fall Teaching It’s the start of a new semester, and once again I’m teaching the Open Source and Mozilla Development course at Seneca’s Centre for Development of Open Technology.  I love teaching this course for many reasons: it’s different every time I do it and never boring; the students and I get to work on real [...]
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