Once a month, web developers from across the Mozilla Project get together to talk about our side projects and drink, an occurrence we like to call “Beer and Tell”.

There’s a wiki page available with a list of the presenters, as well as links to their presentation materials. There’s also a recording available courtesy of Air Mozilla.

emceeaich: Gopher Tessel

First up was emceeaich, who shared Gopher Tessel, a project for running a Gopher server (an Internet protocol that was popular before the World Wide Web) on a Tessel. Tessel is small circuit board that runs Node.js projects; Gopher Tessel reads sensors (such as the temperature sensor) connected to the board, and exposes their values via Gopher. It also can control lights connected to the board.

groovecoder: Crypto: 500 BC – Present

Next was groovecoder, who shared a preview of a talk about cryptography throughout history. The talk is based on “The Code Book” by Simon Sign. Notable moments and techniques mentioned include:

499 BCE: Histiaeus of Miletus shaves the heads of messengers, tattoos messages on their scalps, and sends them after their hair has grown back to hide the message.

~100 AD: Milk of tithymalus plant is used as invisible ink, activated by heat.

~700 BCE: Scytale

49 BC: Caesar cipher

1553 AD: Vigenère cipher

bensternthal: Home Monitoring & Weather Tracking

bensternthal was up next, and he shared his work building a dashboard with weather and temperature information from his house. Ben built several Node.js-based applications that collect data from his home weather station, from his Nest thermostat, and from Weather Underground and send all the data to an InfluxDB store. The dashboard itself uses Grafana to plot the data, and all of these servers are run using Docker.

The repositories for the Node.js applications and the Docker configuration are available on GitHub:

craigcook: ByeHolly

Next was craigcook, who shared a virtual yearbook page that he made as a farewell tribute to former-teammate Holly Habstritt-Gaal, who recently took a job at another company. The page shows several photos that are clipped at the edges to look curved like an old television screen. This is done in CSS using clip-path with an SVG-based path for clipping. The SVG used is also defined using proportional units, which allows it to warp and distort correctly for different image sizes, as seen by the variety of images it is used on in the page.

peterbe: react-buggy

peterbe told us about react-buggy, a client for viewing Github issues implemented in React. It is a rewrite of buggy, a similar client peterbe wrote for Bugzilla bugs. Issues are persisted in Lovefield (a wrapper for IndexedDB) so that the app can function offline. The client also uses elasticlunr.js to provide full-text search on issue titles and comments.

shobson: tic-tac-toe

Last up was shobson, who shared a small Tic-Tac-Toe game on the viewsourceconf.org offline page that is shown when the site is in offline mode and you attempt to view a page that is not available offline.

If you’re interested in attending the next Beer and Tell, sign up for the dev-webdev@lists.mozilla.org mailing list. An email is sent out a week beforehand with connection details. You could even add yourself to the wiki and show off your side-project!

See you next month!