Try out the new and awesome Firefox (codename Quantum)

Intentionally calling the upcoming Firefox the "new and awesome" because it has changed so much and it is so much faster.
The final version will be out in November, however, you can start trying it right now and you will enjoy every browsing moment from here on.

Try it now by installing on your computer and tell your friends about it.

You can also give us feedback by visiting this link.

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Looking back - 2017 edition

Around this time of the year Mozilla employees are evaluated to see if there are any compensation changes or promotions. It is also during this time we're encouraged to look back and reflect on what we have accomplished. Partly to help drive conversations.

This blog post is to look back at what I've done in the last 12 months and my first reaction is that I'm sad to see how little I've blogged in the last little bit! Nothing on the last four months :(

This last year has been good and strange year for me.

It's been good because of what I've managed to accomplish as well as seeing Firefox set itself up for great success (I've not been before as excited with our product as with Firefox 57; it looks and feels great!).
I also had almost 4 months of parental leave between my two kids (14 months apart). Thank you Mozilla!

It's been strange because I was caught in the middle of a re-org that affected me. I had been invested in the Platform Operations org for a while. Parental leaves have the side effect of having to pick up projects that no one had the time to pick up when you come back.

Overall I'm satisfied with what I accomplished. It was less focused in one domain (which is what I prefer) compared to the previous year, however, I had the opportunity to have an impact in important work.

With regards to work I've accomplished in the last year I can highlight the following:

• Fixed bugs assigned to me in the last year
• Some of my work tracked on GitHub
• SETA
• On Q4 I refactored the old SETA ("production-alertmanager" branch) and mikeling's Heroku version ("heroku" branch) and integrated it into Treeherder (bug 1306709)
• rwood on Q1 graciously finished this project as I went into parental leave
• Some recent SETA follow ups:
• Bug 1386405 - macosx64-stylo jobs are always running
• Bug 1388862 - Add SETA management command to initialize local data
• Bug 1389524 - Not all stylo jobs are showing up in the JobPriority table
• Talos quantum pageload
• Evaluated and dropped web-page-replay
• New talos job using mitmproxy instead of a talos pageset (zip file with pages)
• Bug 1361462 - Mozharness support for Python3 binaries
• Thanks gbrown! He wrapped this up when I left on parental leave 4 weeks early
• Bug 1361732 - Mozharness support for Python3 venv creation
• AWFY
• I fixed a couple of issues and I helped with "the speedometer bug"
• The laptop running on production the speedometer benchmark had a 15 minutes timer to "blank the screen"
• This was sufficient to make the benchmark score lower
• This caused confusion on the engineers running speedometer on the Quantum reference laptop
• In order to test PGO builds (nightly actually) I added support for downloading builds from the TaskCluster index rather than querying Treeherder
• Last week the Treeherder logic stopped working and I switched everything to using TaskCluster
• Mozi/pulse_actions
• Significant keeping the lights on
• pulse_actions bugs
• mozci fixes
• And now shutting it off:
• https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.tools/qasCliqygXg
• This year there's been a lot of platforms being ported to TaskCluster or using the Buildbot bridge
• This was expected to make mozci/pulse_actions obsolete
• Project management
• Wiki page for the project
• Part of the "Thunder Try - Improve end to end times"
• Sample blog post:
• Usability improvements for the Firefox automation initiative
• Front end work
• Currently prototyping a diff viewer + code coverage tool with React
• See it here: https://armenzg.github.io/code_cov_experiments/
• Harness work
• Bug 1272083 - Downloading and unpacking should be performed in process
• And few other related bugs
• Bug 1299702 - Add Linux32, Win32, Win64 and OSX artifact builds
• Tutorials
• How to green up Firefox test jobs on new infrastructure
• Learned
• How to increase test coverage for Python
• Docker work
• Created docker image that helps generate allthethings.json
• Very important artifact with metadata from Release Engineering Buildbot systems
• The importance of this file is dying (or already dead) as we move away from Buildbot

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Docker image to generate allthethings.json

I've created a lot of hackery in the past (mozci) based on Release Engineering's allthethings.json file as well as improving the code to generate it reliably. This file contains metadata about the Buildbot setup and the relationship between builders (a build trigger these tests).

Now, I have never spent time ensuring that the setup to generate the file is reproducible. As I've moved over time through laptops I've needed to modify the script to generate the file to fit my new machine's set up.

Today I'm happy to announce that I've published a Docker image at Docker hub to help you generate this file anytime you want.

You can find the documentation and code in here.

Please give it a try and let me know if you find any issues!

docker pull armenzg/releng_buildbot_docker
docker run --name allthethings --rm -i -t releng_buildbot_docker bash
# This will generate an allthethings.json file; it will take few minutes
/braindump/community/generate_allthethings_json.sh
# On another tab (once the script is done)
docker cp allthethings:/root/.mozilla/releng/repos/buildbot-configs/allthethings.json .

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Screencast: How to green up Firefox test jobs on new infrastructure

In this blog post I go over the basics of investigating if a new platform on the continous integration system is ready to run Firefox test jobs.

In this case we look at Windows 7 and Windows 10 jobs on TaskCluster.
Some issues are on the actually machines (black screenshots; audio set up) and others are tests that need developer investigation.

You need about 30 minutes to watch these.

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.