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August 23, 2006
New folks working with Mozilla!
TR Fullhart joined Monday as a full time member of the build team. TR has been doing build and release work for the last 5 years and sysadmin work for several years prior to that. He's a top perl hacker and is fired up about being involved. We're really excited to have his help supporting the build infrastructure for all the Mozilla projects. He's around on IRC as trf. Welcome TR!
Matt Willis, whom you've definitely seen on irc as lilmatt, has been kicking butt on Calendar. He did the pinstripe theme, moved to toolkit based prefs, and done a lot of l10n and build work. We've brought him on under contract to make sure he has the time to continue to help out the Calendar team. Welcome Matt!
Lars Lohn, the author of sentry from bouncer and a hacker of mad proportions has also started working with us on contract to help out on addons.mozilla.org and other web tools projects. When he's not hacking he's playing the Oboe, riding his Harley, or working on his organic farm - hopefully not all at once. He's around as Lars on irc. Welcome Lars!
Mozilla is a collection of people gathered together working towards a shared goal. It is really exciting to be able to pull talented folks from other domains into the Mozilla projects and make it possible for those already contributing to focus more time on the project.
Welcome to all!
Posted by schrep at 4:52 PM | Comments (3)
August 18, 2006
Welcome to Brian Crowder!
Brian started Monday at the Mozilla Corporation to help hack on Gecko. He's first task will be to assist Brendan, Igor, and Blake with the JavaScript engine. Brian has used SpiderMonkey before during his work at Sony Online where we worked on everything from Untold Legends for PSP to EverQuest.
Brian's got a history of working on large complex systems which will be invaluable as he digs into the guts of Gecko. Everyone has been really impressed with his technical depth and enthusiasm for the project.
You can find him on irc (crowder). Please swing by and say hello!
Posted by schrep at 3:27 PM | Comments (1)
August 10, 2006
Asaf Romano now contributing full time!
Mano, as he's know on IRC, has been with the project for many years now - helping improve RTL issues, Mac support, and most the Firefox 2 tab overflow implementation. He's starting today under contract with Mozilla Corporation to contribute to the project full time. Everyone who's worked with Mano is super excited to have more of his time dedicated to the project. He's going to jump right in and help us finish up FF2. Glad to have you here Mano!
Posted by schrep at 10:52 PM | Comments (2)
Addons - now with more cowbell!
If you've uses AddOns since Saturday afternoon, or just checked for extensions updates within any Mozilla app, you might have noticed that AddOns is much snappier. External monitoring indicates about a 4x speedup in page-load times.
Even more important this means we have much more capacity during release time to keep everything up and responsive. This is the CPU utilization of a system on the old cluster. Note on Thursday during the 1.5.0.6 release we hit near 100% CPU. The big drop on Saturday is when the switchover happened:
Here's a server in the new cluster:
The speedup is a result of a new Caching and SSL/TCP accelerators sitting in front of the cluster.
Jeremy, Morgamic, and Matthew did the hard work to get the site up on the new cluster over the weekend. It leverages the sweat the Infra team has put in over the last 12 months to upgrade our core infrastructure. So there are lotsa folks to thank.
Why is this important? Extensions are one of the great things about Firefox. This makes it easier and more convenient for people to find and install extensions. It also means the browser experience is much improved whenever you check for extension updates. Like during a browser upgrade. It also means we can better keep pace with the rapidly growing user base and increased popularity of extensions.
The folks on the team are all too busy and bashful to brag about the kick-butt work they are doing - so I'm doing it for them :-).
Nice work!
Posted by schrep at 7:24 AM | Comments (4)
August 9, 2006
Welcome to Justin Dolske!
Justin starts today as an engineer working on Firefox. He has already come up to speed on parts of the codebase through his work on a few Firefox extensions and most recently by helping Myk with Microsummaries. In addition to the recent Firefox work, Justin brings with him a deep background in networking and security programming having worked for many years at Sun, F5, and UUNet. His deep background and passion for the project will enable him to contribute in many areas over the coming years. I'm really excited he could join us.
Please join me in welcoming Justin!
Posted by schrep at 12:42 PM | Comments (1)