Hello 2014

Happy new year everyone! During the holidays I had been thinking about my goals for 2014, and I thought it’d be a good exercise to remember what I’ve done in the past year, the projects I worked on, etc. It’s nice to look back and see what was accomplished last year and think about how to improve it. So here’s my personal list; it doesn’t include everything but it includes the things I found most important:

Related to performance/removing main-thread-IO:

• Rewrote the storage for the AddonRepository module in the work with Irving to make the Addons Manager async.
• Did the Downloads API file/folder/mimetype launcher code and storage migrator for the new JS downloads API project.
• After Drew made the contentprefs API async I help update a number of the API consumers to async.

Related to hotfixes:

• Created a hotfix to decrease the update check interval which brought more users to up-to-date Firefox versions, who were lagging behind by never seeing the update message.
• Worked on a hotfix to deactivate pdf.js if necessary, when we were releasing it to all users for the first time. Fortunately we didn’t have to use it.
• Assisted in the work of another hotfix that was being prepared to change the update fingerprints but also luckily wasn’t needed.
• Wrote down some documentation about all of the hotfix process to streamline the creation of future ones.

Related to electrolysis:

• Worked on the tab crashed page
• Made <select> elements work
• Added support for form autocomplete
• Worked on improving the event handling for events that are handled by both processes

Other things:

• For mochitests: worked on fixing some of the optional parameters like –repeat which weren’t working for all kinds of mochitests, and added the –run-until-failure option.
• Added the –debug-on-failure option which works together with the –jsdebugger option.
• Helped organize the projects of Desktop Firefox for the Google Summer of Code and guide many students through the proposal phase while they drafted their proposals.
• Mentored one student for GSOC who created an add-on to visualize memory usage information from about:memory.

Events attended:

• FISL – The yearly 7k-people free software forum in Brazil
• The MozSummit Assembly meeting to help plan the summit, and the summit of course
• A Firefox OS campaign in Brazil
• The Firefox Performance week

And:

• Reviewed/feedbacked about 300 patches

That’s it. Looking forward to a great 2014!