Last Monday was a Canadian holiday, and this coming Monday will be a US holiday, so with no Mozilla Foundation meeting, I’m resorting to announcing this in a blog post.

Lukas Blakk has joined RelEng as a fulltime employee.

If you’ve never met Lukas, you should know that last summer, Lukas arrived for her internship, and had barely unpacked when we handed her the entire unittest infrastructure without warning. With very little guidance, she took it all on. Lukas worked non-stop stabilizing and streamlining machine configs in a million-and-one little details, chasing intermittent unittest failures to figure out if they were caused by code bugs, testware bugs, RelEng bugs or IT bugs… or a combination! She was so great, we hired her as a part-time contractor when she was heading back to Seneca. In that role, she worked with catlee and myself to consolidate all the build and unittest machines into one shared pool (details here). This project massively simplified life in RelEng, improved end-to-end turnaround time for developers; more importantly, it was a pre-req to getting unittests running on TryServer, and also to separating out build from unittest for faster turnaround times (details here, here and here). All massive stuff.

We’re delighted she’s graduated and is coming back to Mozilla. If you’ve never met Lukas before, go find her in the Toronto office or on irc (lsblakk) and say hello.

Welcome (back) Lukas… oh, and by the way, we’ve got a project called xulrunner we’d like you to have a look at! 🙂