So I’ve Finished: The Talos Principle
I know for a fact that if the narrative told me exactly what the inciting incident was it would lessen the experience. And yet. Maybe Horizon: Zero Dawn taught me to expect every mystery to be...
View ArticleDistributed Teams: A Test Failing Because It’s Run West of Newfoundland and...
(( Not quite 500 mile email-level of nonsense, but might be the closest I get. )) A test was failing. Not really unusual, that. Tests fail all the time. It’s how we know they’re good tests: protecting...
View ArticleFirefox Origin Telemetry: Putting Prio in Practice
Prio is neat. It allows us to learn counts of things that happen across the Firefox population without ever being able to learn which Firefox sent us which pieces of information. For example, Content...
View ArticleGoogle I/O Extended 2019 – Report
I attended a Google I/O Extended event on Tuesday at Google’s Kitchener office. It’s a get-together where there are demos, talks, workshops, and networking opportunities centred around watching the...
View ArticleVirtual Private Social Network: Tales of a BBM Exodus
On Thursday April 18, my primary mechanism for talking to friends notified me that it was going away. I’d been using BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) since I started work at Research in Motion in 2008 and...
View ArticleData Science is Hard: Validating Data for Glean
Glean is a new library for collecting data in Mozilla products. It’s been shipping in Firefox Preview for a little while and I’d like to take a minute to talk about how I validated that it sends what...
View ArticleMy StarCon 2019 Talk: Collecting Data Responsibly and at Scale
Back in January I was privileged to speak at StarCon 2019 at the University of Waterloo about responsible data collection. It was a bitterly-cold weekend with beautiful sun dogs ringing the morning...
View ArticleDistributed Teams: Regional Peculiarities Like Oktoberfest and Bagged Milk
It’s Oktoberfest! You know, that German holiday about beer and lederhosen? No. As many Germans will tell you it’s not a German thing as much as it is a Bavarian thing. It’s like saying kilts are a...
View ArticleThis Week in Glean: Glean on Desktop (Project FOG)
(“This Week in Glean” is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release notes, documentation, hopes, dreams, or...
View ArticleFour-Year Moziversary
Wowee what a year that was. And I’m pretty sure the year to come will be even more so. We gained two new team members, Travis and Beatriz. And with Georg taking a short break, we’ve all had more to do...
View ArticleDistributed Teams: Why I Don’t Go to the Office More Often
I was invited to a team dinner as part of a work week the Data Platform team was having in Toronto. I love working with these folks, and I like food, so I set about planning my logistics. The plan was...
View ArticleThis Week in Glean: Glean in Private
(“This Week in Glean” is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release notes, documentation, hopes, dreams, or...
View ArticleControlling a Linux Laptop’s Internet Access
I fear the Internet. It’s powerful and full of awesome and awful things. That might be why, in my house, there are no smart devices. This fear is now warring with my duties as a parent for ensuring my...
View ArticleThis Week in Glean: A Distributed Team Echoes Distributed Workflow
(“This Week in Glean” is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release notes, documentation, hopes, dreams, or...
View ArticleJira, Bugzilla, and Tales of Issue Trackers Past
It seems as though Mozilla is never not in a period of transition. The distributed nature of the organization and community means that teams and offices and any informal or formal group is its own tiny...
View ArticleDistributed Teams: Not Just Working From Home
Technology companies taking curve-flattening exercises of late has resulted in me digging up my old 2017 talk about working as and working with remote employees. Though all of the advice in it holds up...
View ArticleThis Week in Glean: How Much Does That Data Cost?
(“This Week in Glean” is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release notes, documentation, hopes, dreams, or...
View ArticleThis Week in Glean: Project FOG Update, end of H12020
(“This Week in Glean” is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release notes, documentation, hopes, dreams, or...
View ArticleFive-Year Moziversary
Wowee what a year that was. And I’m pretty sure the year to come will be even more so.Me, in last year’s moziversary post Oof. I hate being right for the wrong reasons. And that’s all I’ll say about...
View ArticleData Science is Hard: ALSA in Firefox
(( We’re overdue for another episode in this series on how Data Science is Hard. Today is a story from 2016 which I think illustrates many important things to do with data. )) It’s story time. Gather...
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