After a great internship, we sadly waved goodbye to mjessome a few weeks
ago when he went back to UWaterloo to continue his studies.

Marc spent the summer working with Lukas Blakk on integrating two large parts of our developer infrastructure: TryServer and Bugzilla. Marc’s work is running in staging right now, and if all continues to go well, this should start to see light-of-day in production soon.

While it might sound strange to tie these two very different systems together like this, the idea here is quite fundamentally important to everyone who uses TryServer for Mozilla, and should roll out to other RelEng production systems soon afterwards. The curious can click here for more details or follow bug#657828.

I am happy to report that Marc seemed to still have lots of fun during his internship. Marc’s fire eating class at The Crucible was a sideeffect of a discussion he and I had during the RelEng work week in Toronto. By comparing these photos with photos taken when I took the class, you can easily tell that mjessome is much better at this then I ever was. I also discovered that interview questions about juggling and riding a unicycle, were somehow missing from RelEng’s list of interview questions, but I’ve now fixed that.

Thanks for all your great work, Marc, we really enjoyed working with you, and hope we cross paths again soon.

ps: if you are reading this, and are interested in an intership at Mozilla, have a look at our internship job postings.

On July 25-30, all of RelEng held a work week in Toronto. As usual for these work weeks, we do project planning for next quarter(s), brainstorm open issues, reviews of major projects completed since the last work week, do face-to-face reviews, and even (this time) practice some public speaking as well as sign up to write part of a book (more details soon)!

Between everything else, we made time to tour Mozilla’s still-under-construction new Toronto office. This photo taken at the freight elevator, at the back of the office, standing between piles of construction supplies.

This is Mozilla’s Release Engineering group.

In case you don’t know all these smiling faces, they are:
standing L->R: bear, joduinn, lsblakk, bhearsum, rail, mjessome, catlee, jhford, joey.
kneeling L->R: coop, aki, armenzg, nthomas.

Given the high-stress nature of the job, and also the very distributed nature of the group, our group cohesion, as well as our trust, respect, love for each other is self-evident and something I’m truly in awe of. This means more to me then I can find the right words for.

Every RelEng work week is always an exhausting hectic week, and yet, I always find it really invigorating also. At the end of each week, as we are saying our goodbyes and heading for various planes/homes, I find myself missing everyone deeply and starting to look forward to the next gathering….currently scheduled for February 2012.

I just realised it’s been almost 2 months since my last blogpost. There has been a lot of exciting stuff going on, and I apologize for not writing to share it all.

I will do better.