In response to my post earlier this week on Tinderbox’s end-of-life, reader Carsten Mattner asked: Reading [your post], I couldn’t figure out what replaced Tinderbox for the Mozilla builds. What feeds tbpl? Does Mozilla not use Tinderbox to build continuously? When I left Mozilla in 2007, there was a Release Engineering project in progress to Read More
About a month ago, I noticed a tweet from Coop: Pouring out a little liquor for tinderbox today. Drinking the rest, because, you know, tinderbox. It linked to a mozilla.dev.planning post describing the plan to end-of-life Tinderbox1. As one of a handful of people who was required in an employment-capacity to support Tinderbox in production2,3, Read More
Longtime readers of The Sober Build Engineer may find today’s XKCD amusing1. I get asked a lot of times why this blog tends to rely heavily on footnotes; it turns out it’s mostly a historical footnote2. The original incarnation of this blog started back when I was one of Mozilla Corporation’s two3 full-time release engineers. Read More
J. Paul Reed
Seth Thomas
Seth Thomas
In case you missed it, Mozilla’s own Brandon Burton (aka @solarce) joined the panel for the most recent episode of The Ship Show1, to talk about his research into and experiences with building and rolling out an internal platform-as-a-service (PaaS). He had a lot of interesting stories and data about introducing PaaS infrastructure at Mozilla Read More
There’s been a lot of activity in the Mozilla community over the past 36 hours regarding community standards, free speech issues, and LGBTQ issues. It’s great to see these conversations happening; I believe this is precisely what should happen in a community when disagreement arises. One aspect continues to confuse me1: many of those discussing Read More
This is NOT the Planet’s module owner and peers’ official position on today’s events; I worked very hard with my esteemed colleagues to write that post. And I’m proud of our words. Below are some additional thoughts, which are entirely my own. If it wasn’t for me, planet.mozilla.org might not be an official Mozilla project Read More
I wasn’t going to even bother saying anything, but raccettura’s post goaded me into it. Let’s put this in some perspective:Apple—user experience and design queen Apple—is to the rightof Mozilla’s position on this issue! Allow me to succinctly cut through all the cacophony on this: version numbers matter1. They’ve always mattered. And they will continue Read More
I just released a new build/release harness1 I’ve been working on for about a year now called QuickRelease. How does this relate to the Mozilla community, you might ask? Some bootstraps are clearly more…ornate & complex than others… Well, some of the core ideas behind QuickRelease actually come from an automation project Rob Helmer and Read More
I recently had to re-download Firefox1. I’m not exactly sure what new features Firefox 5 sports, but based on the landing page, it must have something to do with Harry Potter: Now I’m a little slow. Mozilla is “reinventing itself.” Got it. But can someone help me understand what a half-page about the new Harry Read More
Last Friday was my last day at Songbird1. The San Francisco OFFSHORE FIVE Departure,a common departure for birds flyin’ south… I meant to get this written earlier, but the last few weeks have been insanely busy, trying to get all the loose ends tied up to make sure things keep humming along. It is not Read More