Monthly Archives: June 2011

Webdev Offsite & Open Source Bridge

Posted by on June 28, 2011 No comments

Mozilla WebDevBack when we released Firefox 4, I remember a fellow mozillian tweeted

The folks I work with are built out of brains, grit, guts and glory. Amazing. I am _so_ lucky.

Last week I verified the sentiment when I met a bunch of the folks I work with - many for the first time. Our WebDev offsite (photos) was great. We had a nice little Webdev unconference at the Urban Airship office on Monday, then we all attended, and a few of us spoke at, Open Source Bridge.

On Friday a bunch of us hacked on little projects and, as the conference wound down, we snuck into a room for a hack-n-tell. It showed me how much skill we have in webdev, and our evenings together showed me our group's passion. I'm humbled by both.

Web Standards in Visual Studio

Posted by on June 19, 2011 No comments

Visual Studio HTML5I just learned about Microsoft's Web Standards Update to Visual Studio, and I think it's a great step for Microsoft. When Microsoft showed Windows 8 apps written with HTML, CSS, and Javascript, a lot of Microsoft dev's - especially Silverlight dev's - whined expressed concern about being abandoned by Microsoft.

My area - Tulsa, OK - is dominated by enterprise/Microsoft developers. I have heard horror stories of websites built by enterprise/Microsoft developers who know very little outside of Visual Studio. We're working on opening the web developer atmosphere up with stuff like Tulsa Web Devs and Tulsa Hackathon, and we're trying not to scare away the couple of Microsoft dev's (like Chris and Chris) who have come.

Philosophically, and as a recent Eclipse-to-vim convert, I know how much difference good developer tools can make, and I know Visual Studio is way up there for many developers. This web standards update is great for Microsoft web developers. I hope the project gains momentum, and gets some more official Microsoft promotion - more than their equally good WebMatrix project. (Which I heard about just a few weeks ago, even though I'm a web developer in a Microsoft-heavy area?)

MDN & Kuma progress

Posted by on June 15, 2011 5 comments

Kuma will tear you up with fire attacksI haven't posted in a while for a couple good reasons - I've learned enough django to write more code than words now, and our new intern has taken over most of the project management work for MDN. So, I have time and ability to code and I'm using it! I should still post about *what* we're coding, so here we go.

We've done a lot since my first status post 4 months ago. We released Demo Studio, Learning, and Dev Derby from our "mdn" branch. I played some small parts in the Demo Studio work, and I implemented the Learning feature while I myself learned our jingo and tower libraries.

I did some important but less-visible work - I copied our mdn code from our old mdn repository into our new kuma repository. We maintain an mdn branch in kuma where we do main development to push to the live site. The master branch holds all of the kuma-only features. We frequently merge mdn into master to keep master current. I set up continuous integration projects for both kuma and mdn on the Mozilla jenkins server.

All along I've been fielding bugs on our old MindTouch/DekiWiki system and helped prepare our upgrade from MindTouch 9 to MindTouch 10, currently running on the MDN staging server.

Finally, just last week, I broke free from MDN features & infrastructure to work on the kuma wiki features. The kuma wiki is cloned from the kitsune wiki that powers SUMO. So, we're starting with a large solid wiki foundation already. On Thursday I started changing the kuma wiki templates to match our mdn templates. Along the way, I added ckeditor to the wiki app (just like our existing MindTouch), removed and/or hid many fields that SUMO requires that we will not, and restored and refactored over 80 wiki unit tests. (Which gave me a nice bump up the Leader board in our cigame.) Now I'm working on article viewing - our implementation is different since we store HTML content rather than wiki markup, so we need to change the way we bleach content - and I'll work on article previews next. All of this is continuously pushed to our kuma staging server. Very Soon™ we should be able to invite community testers to the staging server to start banging on kuma wiki and giving us feedback.

Outside of my Mozilla work, I gave a Web Application Security talk for Tulsa School of Dev 2011 along with other members of Tulsa Web Devs. I hacked the crap out of a WordPress site right after our other guys promoted WordPress as a great open-source CMS, which it really is; I feel bad to have hacked it in front of a bunch of Microsoft fanboi's, but oh well. Just please PLEASE keep your WordPress updated and be careful about which plugins you install!

Outside of my tech work, my wife and I had our 2nd baby girl on April 8th - River Daphne. It's been quite a learning experience with 2 kids under the age of 2, but we're starting to adapt. I've also made a couple of trips out to Clear Creek Abbey to help Brother Paul start brewing beer for the monks and guests. This last time I got to sample an American Pale, an English Brown, and a Munich Lager - all of them were great; hard to believe Brother Paul has only been brewing a few months.

Enough words. Time for more code.