Today marks two years since I became a Mozillian and MoCo Staff.

What did I do this year… well, my team was switched out from under me again. This time it was during the large Firefox + Platform reorg, and basically means my team (Telemetry Client Engineering) now has a name that more closely matches what I do: writing client-side Telemetry code, performing ad hoc data analysis, and reading a lot of email. I still lurk on #fce and answer questions for :ddurst about data matters from time to time, so it’s not a clean break by any means.

This means my work has been a little more client-focused. I completed my annual summer Big Refactor or Design Thing That Takes The Whole Summer For Some Reason. Last year it was bug 1218576 (whose bug number is lodged in my long-term memory and just won’t leave). This year it was bug 1366294 and its friends where, in support of Quantum, we reduced our storage overhead per-process by quite a fair margin. At the same time we removed excessive string hashes, fast-pathing most operations.

Ah, yes: Quantum. Every aspect of Firefox was under scrutiny… and from a data perspective. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been called in to consult on data matters in support of the quickening of the new Firefox Quantum (coming this November to an Internet Near You!). I even spent a couple days in Toronto as part of a Quantum work week to nail down exactly what we could and should measure before and after shipping each build.

A pity I didn’t leave myself more time to just hang out with the MoCoTo folks.

In All Hands news we hit Hawai’i last December. Well, some of us did. With the unrest in the United States and the remoteness of the location this was a bit more of a Most Hands. Regardless, it was a productive time. Not sure how we managed to find so much rain and snow in a tropical desert, but we’re a special bunch I guess?

In June we were in San Francisco. There I ate some very spicy lunch and helped nail down some Telemetry Health metrics I’ve done some work on this autumn. Hopefully we’ll be able to get those metrics into Mission Control next year with proper thresholds for alerting if things go wrong.

This summer I mentored :flyingrub for Google Summer of Code. That was an interesting experience that ended up taking up quite a lot more time than I imagined it would when I started. I mean, sure, you can write it down on paper how many hours a week you’ll spend mentoring an intern through a project, and how many hours beforehand you’ll spend setting it up… but it’s another thing to actually put in the work. It was well worth it, and :flyingrub was an excellent contributor.

In last year’s Moziversary post I resolved to blog more, think more, and mentor more. I’ve certainly mentored more, with handfuls of mentored bugs contributed by first-time community members and that whole GSoC thing. I haven’t blogged more, though, as though I’ve written 23 posts with only April and July going without a single writing on this here blog, last year I posted 27. I also am not sure I have thought more, as simple and stupid mistakes still cast long shadows in my mind when I let them.

So I guess that makes two New MozYear Resolutions (New Year Mozolutions?) easy:

actually blog more, even if they are self-indulgent vanity posts. (Let’s be honest, though: they’re all self-indulgent vanity posts).

actually think more. Make fewer stupid mistakes, or if that’s not feasible at least reduce the size of their influence on the world and my mind after I make them.

That might be enough to think about for a year, right?

:chutten