Sometimes, you see a random photo whose composition and perspective all just click… and all you can think to yourself is “Yeah… that’s my life right now… that’s me.”1
It’s one of life’s better [surprise] pleasures.
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1 Photo courtesy of my friend Mid,2 who invited me to go plane watching today, but I declined. Maybe that was a bad call.
2 The official photographer on all my flights…
Dear Hawthorne Automated Flight Service Station:
I’m sorry.
No, seriously, I really do apologize.
Last week, the Firefox trunk build needed to be clobbered due to a checkin that broke depend builds.
dbaron emailed us, requesting the clobber, but then he must’ve remembered me mentioning adding CLOBBER file support to the Tinderbox client.
The idea was that developers shouldn’t have to find someone in #build to clobber builds for them; as long as the person requesting the clobber and reason can be tracked, developers should be able to clobber their own builds.
Implementation of the idea original stalled, though, because CLOBBER file support relies on a) all the configs being public and 2) all the Tinderboxen paying attention to those public configs. That’s been done for awhile now (thanks again Coop), but we never had a chance to finish testing the clobber file support, so I had never announced it.
Well, dbaron tried it out and—much to my surprise—it actually worked!
I also tested on the 1.8 branch later that day and it worked there, too.
So, if you need to clobber a build for a checkin, here’s how you do it:
a clobber build, and thus will take longer to complete.Obviously, clobber builds take longer than depend builds, so please only use this functionality only when necessary (there's a code change that requires it; nightlies are broken for some obvious reason). I'm pretty confident that we all know valid reasons for requesting clobbers. And please coordinate clobbering on IRC, if you can.
While it took us awhile to get here, this is the type of functionality I was talking about working more on this year to give developers the tools they need to be more productive/"agile," but in a framework that tracks the information we need to track.
I'm hoping this is just the beginning.
Yesterday, I talked a bit about my 2007 thus far.
Schrep and I were discussing New Years Resolutions yesterday, and he said he didn’t believe in New Years resolutions: “It’s never too early or too late to make a change in your life.”
I’d never thought about resolutions that way, but that’s a really good point.
As I mentioned, I’m more a fan of birthday resolutions; birthdays are like our own personal New Years and I tend to be more introspective about my life around my birthday anyway. New Years is mostly arbitrary timing in relation to our individual lives, so it’s never really done it for me.
I guess the New Years resolution thing is helpful because it throws the possibilities of change to make our lives better right in our faces. New Year does provide a bit of synchronicity since many are simultaneously thinking about changes in their past tense and what the future tense could, and should be.
Whatever you think of resolutions, I spent some time thinking about what mine might be:
Mozilla-related goals
Personal goals
In general, I think my resolutions boil down to having—not trying, but having—a better year than the last three8; I’m going to be my-favorite-number years old this year, so I think that means this year is basically required to not-suck.
Despite the first few days thus far of 2007, I have this weird feeling that it’s looking quite possible.
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1 At least, from a build engineers’ perspective
2 This is, admittedly, a pretty fluffy goal; I’m not quite sure how this one will turn out.
3 Would this require SPEWING BS IN CAPS?
4 Which at first glance, might seem easy, but if we’re refactoring Tinderbox client code…
5 And I mean this year, not mumble-mumble years, like my private took.
6 Imagine that!
7 P.S. Flickrsphere!!!
8 Combined, if possible!
mrz caught me in the hallway today to let me know about a late Christmas present for those doing checkouts on the other side of the globe: cvs-mirror.nl.mozilla.com!
This CVS mirror is not in production yet, but he told me about it so that he could get some help testing the mirror integrity/process.
So, if you’ve got a few extra seconds, you can help by doing a checkout of either a) your favorite tag or b) a specific date spec (-D) from cvs.m.o (or cvs-mirror.m.o) in one directory, and then pointing your CVSROOT at cvs-mirror.nl.mozilla.com, and performing the same checkout into a different directory, and then diff -ring the contents. The process for logging into the mirror should be identical to the current process. (If it is, that’s a bug).
You should only see differences in the CVS/Root files.
You can even go hogwild and check out different branches and make sure they’re correct!
If you’re on this side of the planet, and feel like helping out, you can perform the same test using cvs-mirror.sj.mozilla.com, which will someday grow up to become cvs-mirror.mozilla.org.
I want to stress that neither of these mirrors are in production yet, but you can help make sure they’re production ready by helping mrz and I out.
It’s not even the first week of 2007, and it’s already been a harrowing… journey:
On the upside, I took this opportunity to make my machine complete RAIDified, so crappy hard drives should no longer make me stabby-stabby, and I also used the opportunity to get all paranoid4 and encrypt my /home partition. I must admit, with the 2.6 kernel this was intriguingly easy to do on top of RAID. (Some people actually run encryption on top of LVM on top of RAID, but those layers are all in software, and… I just don’t know if I trust my read()s and write()s going through oh-so-many layers before hitting hard magnetic filings.)
I don’t really do New Years Resolutions5, but I’m throwing down the gauntlet now: 2007: Stop. Sucking. Now.6
I want this year to rock… and I actually think this one has quite the potential to do so.
More on that tomorrow, though.
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1 And, because “That’s how the terrorists would do it,” their luggage, too… which, since it’s not, ya know, organized in any particular way, means tearing the baggage compartment apart to find it.
2 This passenger freaking out caused about 20 people to miss their connection in SFO, including (I overhead) people going to Seattle, Honolulu, and Sydney. Man, I was pissed, but if I had been going any of those places, I would’ve lost it right there on the concourse in Denver.
3 And I had to have a non-Linux using friend reboot it; “Type Slash-eee-tee-see-slash-init… no, INIT… eye-enn-eye-tee… INIT… no, not slash, then a dot… dot-dee… slash…” But he was a good sport, and we got it rebooted.
4 Maybe I’ve just been watching a little too much Law and Order lately…
5 I much prefer Personal New Years, aka birthday resolutions…
6 “I don’t want any more BS during the year… from anyone… that includes me!
I’ve got a secret to confess: I’ve been working remotely from my childhood home in Colorado this week. I flew out last Sunday.
That whole plan turned out to be really fortuitous, considering this afternoon’s Doppler radar:
07:07 <@preed> KDEN 201441Z 35025G36KT 1/4SM R35L/1800V2000FT +SN BLSN FZFG VV002
07:07 <@preed> that's awesome.
07:07 <@preed> winds 25 gusting 36 knots, one quarter mile visibility, heavy snow, freezing fog, vertical visibility of 200 feet.
07:07 <robcee> I'll take your word for it. I haven't progressed to the ability to parse METAR data in my head
07:08 <robcee> ah, thank you for the translation
07:08 <robcee> man, that's nasty
07:08 <@preed> I'd have to look up what BLSN is
07:08 <robcee> blowing snow?
07:08 <@preed> probably "bitch, loser there's friggen SNOW OUTSIDE!"
07:08 <@preed> or that.
Anyway, the release is done, the holidays are near, and I’m totally excited about the prospects of a snowed-in white Christmas, which I haven’t experienced in at least five years and certainly don’t get to see in California.
So here’s wishing you a happy holiday season—whatever that may mean to you—from OMGSOMUCHSNOW Colorado:
I’d just like to state for the record that the 1.5.0.9/2.0.0.1 release was quite possibly the suckiest release I’ve ever worked on.
And if any of you remember the sleeping-in-the-office-for-a-week-1.5.0.2 release, that’s saying a lot.
It’s also saying a lot because the entire release went relatively smoothly1 until… well… today, when everything promptly started sucking. Hardcore.
Like most aviation accidents, it wasn’t a single thing that caused so much doom and strife. It wasn’t the air traffic controller who forgot to call out the traffic… or the maintenance guy who didn’t tighten all the bolts… or the pilot who got distracted looking at a faulty warning light.
It was all of those things, working in concert with each other.
Similarly, the list of what-the-hell-were-we-thinkings2,3 includes things that, on their own, wouldn’t have been a big deal at all. But compound them and you basically had fourteen hours straight of me banging my head against the wall and wanting to stab my face off.4
The sole thing that makes horrendous releases like today’s at least bearable is the community’s response and attitude when problems like this arise: the web team started working on the release in the morning, and remain responsive throughout the day; IT was around and helped debug deployment and database load and app cluster problems with us; the app team weren’t bothered a bit by being called in the middle of the night to look at weirdness; my build colleagues pitched in to help run some extra verification while I worked on deploying the contingency plan; and QA stayed until the bitter end (past midnight!) to make sure it all worked and to sign off on it all.
I don’t ever want to repeat a release day like this one.5
But—at the risk of sounding sappy—this pervasive and consistent attitude within the Mozilla project is what gives me the energy to face even the possibility of such beasts again.
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1 At least, no bumpier than any other Moz release I’ve ever worked.
2 Hindsight = 20/20, and all that…
3 My “WTF,” while I think defensible, is particularly… WTFular.
4 I must admit, Winnebago Man did help at about hour ten or so.
5 And I hope we’ll spend some time figuring looking at exactly what happened, so none of us have to.
The New York Times Sunday Magazine had an interesting article last week on some new research and a book about burnout. (For those into the Podcast-o-sphere, NPR covered this as well.)
It mostly focuses on data from Wall Street brokers, a cutthroat existence to be sure, but it also has interesting perspectives from social workers and teachers.
A few particularly thought provoking passages stood out to me:
If one of the surest recipes for burnout, as Michael Leiter has said, is the sensation of inefficiency—particularly if we’re still expending energy and seeing little in return—then there may be something about the modern office that conspires to burn us out. In 2005, a psychiatrist at King’s College London did a study in which one group was asked to take an IQ test while doing nothing, and a second group to take an IQ test while distracted by e-mails and ringing telephones. The uninterrupted group did better by an average of ten points, which wasn’t much of a surprise. What was a surprise is that the e-mailers also did worse, by an average of six points, than a group in a similar study that had been tested while stoned.
That’s right. Stoned. Those people were literally burned out, and they did better.
I’ve been trying to pay attention to this more recently, and I’ve noticed that if my day starts with a number of fires, I can easily lose the rest of the day to “pacing on my desktop,” that is switching between Thunderbird, IRC, Bugzilla, and AIM, all in a very tight poll()ing loop, just waiting for one of them to generate an interrupt.
If you get stuck into this mode, it’s easy to waste twenty or thirty minutes in a tight loop, just switching between windows. One recent afternoon, I got into almost this trancelike state, where I was just switching between those applications, so quickly that I wouldn’t have even picked up any state changes had they occured. Fortunately, I noticed it pretty quickly, but before I generally started paying attention to this tendency, it was easy to let this cycle pockmark my afternoon to the point where I didn’t have any significantly contiguous blocks of time to use to accomplish any notably involved (and by implication, forward-thinking) tasks.
“The worst case of Wall Street burnout I know is of this guy who wound up driving a cab,” Cass tells me.
A cab?
He shrugs. “There’s a control factor in driving a cab. You go from point A to point B. On Wall Street, you start your day with no idea how it’s going to end.”
My fantasized mode of transportation is different, but the sentiment is the same. Every time people have asked if I want to become a commercial pilot, my answer is the same: “No, that would just suck all the fun out of it.”
But I’ve found myself thinking about it on occasion… like… today for instance:
17:06 <marcia> next week on "As the Update Churns"
17:07 <marcia> preed annouces he is leaving the build team to become a Fighter Pilot
...
17:09 <preed> marcia: I actually thought about that last week
17:10 <preed> maybe not a fighter pilot, though
...
17:17 <Pike> preed: now that you're panic-proof, you want to become a commercial pilot? bah, we shouldn't train you that well
17:17 <preed> I'm trying to figure out which is more stressful
17:18 <preed>this, or flying a hundreds of irritable people around in a tin can.
17:18 <Pike> 300 passengers vs 30 million users
17:18 <Pike> luckily, the 30 million don't die if you [fargle] up
17:19 <preed> Pike: and to think I wanted to be an air traffic controller
One has to wonder whether the developments of a high-speed world haven’t made burnout worse. First, the obvious: With the advent of e-mail, cell phones, laptops, BlackBerrys (or “CrackBerrys”—the argot here seems extremely apt), and other bits of high-speed doodadry, it has become virtually impossible, in senses both literal and metaphorical, to unplug from our jobs. As Schaufeli, the Dutch researcher, notes, one of the strongest predictors of burnout isn’t just work overload but “work-home interference”—a sociologist’s way of saying we’re receiving phone calls from Tokyo during dinner and replying to clients on our BlackBerrys while making our children brush their teeth.
See also.
This type of “interference” seems to be one of the best kept secret neuroses of the project.
I noticed yesterday that it’s been one year this week since I started working at MoCo.
For some reason, it feels like I’ve been here longer. Much longer.
Maybe it’s partially due to the fact that joining MoCo was actually a return to the project for me. I interned on Netscape’s Build Team a few months after the lizard was freed, and did some Bugzilla work throughout college. An old friend I hadn’t talked to in awhile mused at the circular pattern of life: “when we were hanging out those first few years of college, you were keeping watchful eye over the Tinderboxen… and you now you are again.”
So it goes.
I spent some time thinking about what it’s been like to be here a year, and what I’ve learned. I came up with the following jumble…
