Mozilla pushes - September 2014

Here's September 2014's monthly analysis of the pushes to our Mozilla development trees.
You can load the data as an HTML page or as a json file.


Trends
Suprise!  No records were broken this month.

Highlights
12267 pushes
409 pushes/day (average)
Highest number of pushes/day: 646 pushes on September 10, 2014
22.6 pushes/hour (average)

General Remarks
Try has around 36% of pushes and Gaia-Try comprise about 32%.  The three integration repositories (fx-team, mozilla-inbound and b2g-inbound) account around 22% of all the pushes.

Records
August 2014 was the month with most pushes (13,090  pushes)
August 2014 has the highest pushes/day average with 620 pushes/day
July 2014 has the highest average of "pushes-per-hour" with 23.51 pushes/hour
August 20, 2014 had the highest number of pushes in one day with 690 pushes

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Release Engineering in the classroom

The second week of October, I had the pleasure of presenting lectures on release engineering to university students in Montreal as part of the PLOW lectures at École Polytechnique de Montréal.    Most of the students were MSc or PhD students in computer science, with a handful of postdocs and professors in the class as well. The students came from Montreal area universities and many were international students. The PLOW lectures consisted of several invited speakers from various universities and industry spread over three days.

View looking down from the university

Université de Montréal administration building

École Polytechnique building.  Each floor is painted a different colour to represent a differ layer of the earth.  So the ground floor is red, the next orange and finally green.

The first day, Jack Jiang from York University gave a talk about software performance engineering.

The second day, I gave a lecture on release engineering in the morning.  The rest of the day we did a lot of labs to configure a Jenkins server to build and run tests on an open source project. Earlier that morning, I had setup m3.large instances for the students on Amazon that they could ssh into and conduct their labs.  Along the way, I talked about some release engineering concepts.  It was really interesting and I learned a lot from their feedback.  Many of the students had not been exposed to release engineering concepts so it was fun to share the information.

Several students came up to me during the breaks and said "So, I'm doing my PhD in release engineering, and I have several questions for you" which was fun.  Also, some of the students were making extensive use of code bases for Mozilla or other open source projects so that was interesting to learn more about.  For instance one research project looking at the evolution of multi-threading in a Mozilla code bases, and another student was conducting bugzilla comment sentiment analysis.  Are angry bug comments correlated with fewer bug fixes?  Looking forward to the results of this research!

I ended the day by providing two challenge exercises to the students that they could submit answers to.  One exercise was to setup a build pipeline in Jenkins for another open source project.  The other challenge was to use a the Jenkins REST API to query the Apache projects Jenkins server and present some statistics on their build history.  The results were pretty impressive!

My slides are on GitHub and the readme file describes how I setup the Amazon instances so Jenkins and some other required packages were installed before hand.  Please use them and distribute them if you are interested in teaching release engineering in your classroom.

Lessons I learned from this experience:

• Computer science classes focus on writing software, but not necessarily building it is a team environment. So complex branching strategies are not necessarily a familiar concept to some students.  Of course, this depends on the previous work experience of the students and the curriculum at the school they attend. One of students said to me "This is cool.  We write code, but we don't build software".
• Concepts such as building a pipeline for compilation, correctness/performance/
  regression testing, packing and deployment can also be unfamiliar.   As I said in the class, the work of the release engineer starts when the rest of the development team things they are done :-)
• When you're giving a lecture and people would point out typos, or ask for clarification I'd always update the repository and ask the students to pull a new version.  I really liked this because my slides were in reveal.js and I didn't have to export a new PDF and redistribute.  Instant bug fixes!
• Add bonus labs to the material so students who are quick to complete the exercises have more to do while the other students complete the original material.  Your classroom will have people with wildly different experience levels.

The third day there was a lecture by Michel Dagenais of Polytechnique Montréal on tracing heterogeneous cloud instances using https://lttng.org/  (tracing framework for Linux).  The Eclipse trace compass project also made an appearance in the talk. I always like to see Eclipse projects highlighted.  One of his interesting points was that none of the companies that collaborate on this project wanted to sign a bunch of IP agreements so they could collaborate on this project behind closed doors.  They all wanted collaborate via an open source community and source code repository.  Another thing he emphasized was that students should make their work available on the web, via GitHub or other repositories so they have a portfolio of work available.  It was fantastic to seem him promote the idea of students being involved in open source as a way to help their job prospects when they graduate!

Thank you Foutse and  Bram  for the opportunity to lecture at your university!  It was a great experience!  Also, thanks Mozilla for the opportunity to do this sort of outreach to our larger community on company time!

Also, I have a renewed respect for teachers and professors.  Writing these slides took so much time.  Many long nights for me especially in the days leading up to the class.  Kudos to you all who do teach everyday.

References
The slides are on GitHub and the readme file describes how I setup the Amazon instances for the labs

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Beyond the Code 2014: a recap

I started this blog post about a month ago and didn't finish it because well, life is busy.  

I attended Beyond the Code last September 19.  I heard about it several months ago on twitter.  A one-day conference about celebrating women in computing, in my home town, with an fantastic speaker line up?  I signed up immediately.   In the opening remarks, we were asked for a show of hands to show how many of us were developers, in design,  product management, or students and there was a good representation from all those categories.  I was especially impressed to see the number of students in the audience, it was nice to see so many of them taking time out of their busy schedule to attend.

View of the Parliament Buildings and Chateau Laurier from the MacKenzie street bridge over the Rideau Canal

Ottawa Conference Centre, location of Beyond the Code

 
There were seven speakers, three workshop organizers, a lunch time activity, and a panel at the end. The speakers were all women.  The speakers were not all white women or all heterosexual women.  There were many young women, not all industry veterans :-) like me.  To see this level of diversity at a tech conference filled me with joy.  Almost every conference I go to is very homogenous in the make up of the speakers and the audience.  To to see ~200 tech women in at conference and 10% men (thank you for attending:-) was quite a role reversal.

I completely impressed by the caliber of the speakers.  They were simply exceptional.

The conference started out with Kronda Adair giving a talk on Expanding Your Empathy.  One of the things that struck me from this talk was that she talked about how everyone lives in a bubble, and they don't see things that everyone does due to privilege.  She gave the example of how privilege is like a browser, and colours how we see the world.  For a straight white guy a web age looks great when they're running the latest Chrome on MacOSx.  For a middle class black lesbian, the web page doesn't look as great because it's like she's running IE7.  There is less inherent privilege.  For a "differently abled trans person of color" the world is like running IE6 in quirks mode. This was a great example. She also gave a shout out to the the Ascend Project which she and Lukas Blakk are running in Mozilla Portland office. Such an amazing initiative.

The next speaker was Bridget Kromhout who gave talk about Platform Ops in the Public Cloud.
I was really interested in this talk because we do a lot of scaling of our build infrastructure in AWS and wanted to see if she had faced similar challenges. She works at DramaFever, which she described as Netflix for Asian soap operas.  The most interesting things to me were the fact that she used all AWS regions to host their instances, because they wanted to be able to have their users download from a region as geographically close to them as possible.  At Mozilla, we only use a couple of AWS regions, but more instances than Dramafever, so this was an interesting contrast in the services used. In addition, the monitoring infrastructure they use was quite complex.  Her slides are here.

I was going to summarize the rest of the speakers but Melissa Jean Clark did an exceptional job on her blog.  You should read it!

Thank you Shopify for organizing this conference.  It was great to meet some many brilliant women in the tech industry! I hope there is an event next year too!

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