A love note to freecog.com

Posted by on 01.06.2012 No comments

This isn’t actually a eulogy .. I just wanted to show Alex some visuals on the hardware that is running freecog.com.

I’ve run my primary site from this little beast for years (previously on a PII box running FreeBSD).  It wasn’t a problem until I started working at Mozilla. I now get enough page hits that the lights dim at my apartment and the special lady friend, my partner, complains that the Internets noticeably slow.  This happens whenever I submit a post and more than a handful of people decide to read it.

freecogfreecog

I’m keeping the box and domain for dev/play purposes (no you can’t have the domain name … unless you want to swap something fun for it … I do like good beer from foreign countries or chew toys for my cat). I originally snagged the domain when I was a Psychology geek, Freecog == free cognition. I had the lofty goal of blogging about cognitive neuroscience.  At least for for the time being life has spun me into the domain of computer science.

Specs:

Rocking the New Year

Posted by on 01.05.2012 No comments

This past year on the Mozilla Web Team, 2011, was an incredibly fortuitous and ambitious adventure that finished off with excellent fireworks.  I’m currently a QA lead on 4 projects but two of them accomplished something special in the final days of the year.  Not too long ago Mozilla launched BrowserID; a secure, single sign on service that doesn’t have the privacy concerns associated with similar services (Google, Facebook, etc).

A year-end goal was to integrate BrowserID into two of our web properties without floundering on quality. I’m happy to write that both affiliates.mozilla.org (currently /en-US/ only) and mozillians.org landed BrowserID. The teams on both projects worked really hard to make this happen during an already full time of the year.

From the QA front this would not have been possible without help from the broader Mozilla community.  A large portion of our user base actively dove into the mud of Bugzilla and filed bugs. In addition to receiving feedback from our users a particular individual introduced himself and offered to help out.

I wanted to give a special thank you to Rajeev Bharshetty [:rshetty] for spending a significant amount of time during his winter holiday from school.  He did a truly staggering amount of exploratory and release testing. The level of quality of both releases and the teams understanding of the underlying risks was greatly effected by him.

 

rshetty

:rshetty

 

I look forward to 2012 and seeing what types of testing mischief we can get into.  The Mozilla QA community is going to get rocked to its core this year. There are some very curious ideas in the pipeline. This next year we’ll see broader exploration into enabling community collaboration and engagement mechanisms on our projects. Individuals like Rajeev will no doubt help define the future test strategies.

If you find yourself reading this post and would like to get involved on an open source project, pop into our irc channel at irc.mozilla.org#mozwebqa and say hello. We’re a friendly lot of mostly non-grumpy testers :-)

 

Rocky Mountain Wedding

Posted by on 10.05.2011 No comments

Erin and I just returned from a great trip to Durango, Colorado for her brother’s wedding. Durango is one of my favorite places in the United States. It’s located in the South West portion of Colorado and has both mountains and desert. At one point in my life I lived here, spending 10 years exploring and playing in this area. There is lots of hiking, biking, and climbing in this remote portion of the the state.