Facebook, Mozilla and the MacArthur Foundation Team Up for a Hackathon to ...
Betabeat
Hosted in conjunction with the MacArthur Foundation, Facebook, Mozilla and the Family Online Safety Institute, the event focused on building a “more equitable, social, and participatory internet.” Teams showed up at the space and were treated to a hot ...

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Summary

I just finished up an overhaul of ElasticUtils and then an overhaul of the search infrastructure for support.mozilla.org. During that period of time, I thought about extending the ElasticUtils documentation to include things I discovered while working on these projects. Then I decided that this information is temporal---it's probably good now, but might not be in a year. Maintaining it in the ElasticUtils docs seemed like more work than it was worth.

Thus I decided to write a series of blog posts.

This one covers indexing. Later ones will cover mappings, searching and other things.

It's also long, rambling and contains code. The rest is after the break.

read more after the break...

[Comments]

The Next Web
Mozilla Offering Free Phones to Firefox OS Developers
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There are two exciting keynotes planned for Releng 2013

John O'Duinn, Director of Release Engineering at Mozilla will kick off the workshop with his keynote Release Engineering as a Force Multiplier.  The build and release process used to be a pain point at Mozilla, but now makes the company and community more productive as a whole.  John will describe how the team added support for project branches to allow concurrent development, rethought continuous integration and increased capacity by moving to a hybrid-cloud build infrastructure. These changes improved several aspects of the business, including switching to a rapid release model and reducing turnaround time on a release from weeks to hours.  As a result,  Mozilla improved its abilities against much bigger and better funded competitors in the marketplace while also allowing them to enter new markets and help ensure its long-term success.


Roman Scheiter, Engineering Services Director at LinkedIn, will present the afternoon keynote entitled Against All Odds – Completely Overhauling Linkedin's Release Process.  This session will cover the evolution of LinkedIn’s release process from its earliest days to the point where the rapidly growing engineering team necessitated a radical shift. This shift, an executive sponsored effort to address technical debt and introduce new thinking to boost engineering efficiency allows six hundred developers to release thousands of changes per week without compromising quality.  As part of this undertaking, LinkedIn learned many best practices, developed tools and custom infrastructure, and lived through the internal cultural changes needed to make this independent release process work.   Roman will detail the evolution and results of this shift so you can learn directly from LinkedIn's pain.
  In addition to these fantastic keynotes, we also have talks from release engineers and researchers from Netflix, Google,  Microsoft, Gnome, Red Hat, IBM, several universities and more!  We'll also have a panel at the end of the day to discuss the future of release engineering.

Check out the full program on the Releng 2013 site.  To register for the conference, which is managed as part of the larger ICSE conference, you can follow this link and choose the one-day-workshop.  See you in San Francisco on May 20!

Week 3 of #teachtheweb is right around the corner, and I thought it might be nice to do a quick shareout of the planning and running of the MOOC. Kudos! Before I say another word, I have to give my partner in crime a gigantic love bomb. The word “collaboration” only begins to describe the epic brain connection Michelle and I have seemingly developed. Additionally, as Michelle noted, the entire Webmaker Mentor team has been massively supportive and absolutely integral to getting Mozilla's first MOOC off the ground. High-fives all around! Conspiring We've been having calls with wonderful community members who signed up to help create the #teachtheweb experience. We've been calling them the Super Mentor Calls. The Super Mentor Kick-off call on April 19 had 41 attendees from 17 different countries. They are designers, developers, educators, makers, architects, librarians, youth workers, entrepreneurs, teens and more, who answered our call to be super mentors in #teachtheweb. This call was used to help the Super Mentors understand what we were asking them to do throughout the 9-week course. This blog post explains the job. We also used the opportunity to explain the concept of a cMOOC and to thank everyone for signing up before they even knew what they signed up for. Follow our Twitter List of Super Mentors The next week, April 25, we took some time to celebrate Super Mentor makes after many created introductions using Webmaker tools. We gave each other virtual high fives for being engaging, thoughtful digital citizens and shared a few moments of excitement centered around the fact that the Webmaker Community is full of intelligent human beings looking to change the world. Next, we explained our launch strategy with a “Heads up! It's going to get busy!” and proposed the formation of Study Groups. We created a lightweight google doc and asked if anyone would be interested in running a smaller study group during the experience. Many were, and the Google Doc started filling up with ideas for Study Groups based on interest, language and/or geography. We also talked about the content creation procedure and came up with a plan to braindump into Etherpads, filter and curate. We want to make sure any one who wants to contribute to the content of #teachtheweb can. If you want to help plan, see the planning page! We talked about the connection between #teachtheweb and #MakerParty (#teachtheweb is kind of like Party Prep), and the Super Mentors began to volunteer to spread the word about both initiatives in their local areas as well as online. Finally, Super Mentors volunteered to help moderate the various #teachtheweb channels during the May 2nd Live Session and #teachtheweb Kick-off. On the #teachtheweb launch date, May 2nd, we had a relatively quick call with Super Mentors to celebrate the G+ Community's growth and talk about the Live Session. Super Mentors signed up to participate via video, monitor channels, serve as tech support and help out on IRC. The session went, I heard, nicely. You can watch the video here. Yesterday, May 9th, we spent a little time talking about how to get participants more involved and how to be better at sharing with each other and the larger community. We decided to try to give each other weekly report backs on how Study Groups were doing in the following Super Mentor calls. Content Creation Each week a post is released in the Planning section of #teachtheweb, which invites any and everyone to contribute their thoughts to a particular topic. The Super Mentors get extra reminders, but the content creation process is completely open. If you're interested in contributing your thoughts to a particular topic, check the planning page for new topic etherpads each Monday. Monday is also the day that we've been distilling these Etherpads into a digestible blogpost with extra readings, resources and tasks. The filtering and curation of everyone's braindump is massively interesting but quite difficult. The posts need to be relatively short to keep people engaged. We would rather that people spend their allotted MOOC time completing the weekly Make Projects and reflecting on their own work, instead of focusing too heavily on truncated descriptions of complex topics. We believe in Making as Learning, so we want to spend as much time as possible making, sharing, remixing, iterating and making some more. Tuesday's we post new topics to the #teachtheweb site. We also do shareouts in the Weekly Webmaker Community call. Thursday's are the days we do live sessions (only 3 throughout the 9 weeks, one on May 2nd, May 23rd and June 13th) and Twitter Chats. Which leads me to the visualization piece of this post. This morning, I really just wanted to MAKE stuff. So I started fishing through the Twitter archive Jeannie Crowley created for #teachtheweb. Then I got a data bug and started looking at other numbers. I made two things: A Visualization of Relationships between Words used in #teachtheweb Tweets [caption id="attachment_1916" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Click the image to play with this interactive visualization thingie[/caption] A Slightly Interactive Infographic [iframe src="//infogr.am/teachtheweb-27148" width="550" height="2161" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none;"] teachtheweb | Infographics MOOC Attrition One of the things that has been bugging me is the rumors of MOOC attrition rates. I've read percentages from 85% to 98% in the last couple of months, and I was worried that the participants in #teachtheweb will soon be dropping out and the conversation will come to a standing halt. Up until a few days ago, I was basically waiting for the ball to drop. Then I read this post from a mathematician at Stanford and decided to just stop worrying about it. It's easy to sign up for things. You just put in one of your many email addresses and that's that. It's easy to begin the journey into a specific community. You just use the hashtag, comment on people's posts, follow some people and start trying to know people through their digital representations and artifacts. But it's not easy to remain an active member of a community. Being active takes time, perseverance, patience, understanding, collaboration, connection, mentorship, and a whole mess of other things. We all participate in multiple communities, and it's natural that one community or another will take precedence on a given day. I just hope that the those of you who have found the Webmaker Mentor Community through #teachtheweb decide to give this community precedence from time to time. We're teaching the world the Web – and we definitely need your help.

Mozilla offering phones for apps to get more developers on board - IntoMobile
IntoMobile
Mozilla has started a campaign to attract more developers to its nascent mobile platform. The company is (obviously) targeting HTML5 app developers, both existing ones (which have an app for other mobile platform) and those just entering the market.

Last week I finished up the first section of The Object Oriented PHP Masterclass. The class was great, and I learned about as much from my students as they learned from me. One of the most common questions I got from my students was “how do I make decisions about how to design my object [...]

As developers we are incredibly lucky. We work in a very growing and immensely well paid market, our companies shower us with benefits, companies offer us jobs rather than having to send out hundreds of CVs on the off-chance and even the mass media and politicians start talking about “coding” being a skill everybody needs.

Quite some part of this success is based on the stubbornness we showed in the past. When we got a task to build something we didn’t give up on it and said it is impossible. Instead we went back in our corner and tried and failed and tried again with sparks flying and code explosions happening until we achieved what we wanted. Think Dr. Bunsen Honedew’s laboratory instead of Statler and Waldorf.

This gave especially the web a strange “hack it together” reputation that many people keep bringing up when it comes to replacing JavaScript for example with “more organised and professional” languages. But you know what? I really think when it comes to the web, this is its main strength.

The fun of coding

As explained earlier in my Flash is not the enemy post, whimsy and spontaneous ideas is what made the web a larger media outlet than it was. It wasn’t the large sites that got non-technical people excited. It was the funny animation and short-lived game that you could mail to your friends.

Therefore I think it is important to celebrate this for yourself from time to time. Personally I find myself extremely lucky to have been at the right time (and moving around to the right places) when the web exploded into an offering of amazingly cool things and while I am sure as hell not proud of the code I had to write to get things done in the past, I am happy that I did and that I didn’t give up or wait until someone else solves my problems for me.

Having just taught a workshop on HTML5 at Industryconf I found that we are losing a bit on that. Attendees were worried that they need to learn a lot of libraries and find the right plugins to get started and once shown that they have the power to do most of what they want using the things browsers come with out of the box got quickly into enjoying themselves reaching new levels.

One thing I did with the attendees is a To-Do List App in plain HTML/JS/CSS (No sound).

This is what the Mozilla Webmaker Project is about – to get non-programmers excited about building things for the web. And it is incredibly exciting to see some of these events as a “professional”.

I think it is very important to never forget about the wonder we experienced the first time we made something show up on screen or wrote our first condition that printed out “is amazing” when you entered your name or “is boring” when it was another one.

Be fearless

A lot of times being creative means being fearless. Watching Bret Victor’s talks and seeing his Learnable programming course and Seb Lee-Delisle’s training courses they consist of one main thing – play with things and worry about them breaking later. Amazing results happen when the outcome and the input get as close together as possible – not when things happen using dozens of abstractions.

This does not have to be visual from the get-go though. The MPEG-1 decoder in pure JavaScript for example is pure byte-shifting but blew me away in its fearlessness of what could go wrong.

Go, code!

Why not have a go? Take 10 minutes, half and hour, an hour out of your life right now and use it to #justcode something, anything. Just play with an idea, put it on JSFiddle, Codepen, JSBin, Dabblet, or whatever other amazing tool we have right now and share it.

Don’t build a perfect plugin, don’t build a solution dependent on preprocessors and libraries. Go vanilla and just play with what we have in browsers today. CSS Animations and Transitions, Canvas, Audio and Video, HTML5 and Friends – we have so many cool toys to play with. Don’t explore the main use case either. Yes, Canvas is for putting things on the screen, but it is also about reading image data.

We got were we are by playing with things. Never forget this and never stop playing.

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Facebook To Mozilla: Add WebP Support To Firefox
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Best case, Mozilla's Firefox for Windows 8 will ship in October
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A new addition to a Mozilla wiki noted that the browser will be completed Oct. 2, 2013, at the earliest, or nearly a year after the launch of Windows 8. But the project could be delayed until March 20, 2014. The most probable finish date -- based on ...

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Best case, Mozilla's Firefox for Windows 8 will ship in October
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A new addition to a Mozilla wiki noted that the browser will be completed Oct. 2, 2013, at the earliest, or nearly a year after the launch of Windows 8. But the project could be delayed until March 20, 2014. The most probable finish date -- based on ...

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Ars Technica
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Hitting the right markets. In February, Mozilla announced four hardware partners that it intended to work alongside to make this vision a reality: Alcatel, LG, ZTE, and Huawei. But in a conversation with Ars, Chris Lee, the Firefox OS product manager ...

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Facebook heeft Firefox-ontwikkelaar Mozilla openlijk verzocht om ondersteuning voor het WebP-formaat in de browser in te bouwen. De sociale netwerksite wil meer gebruik gaan maken van het nieuwe compressieformaat, dat op dit moment alleen ...

As promised last time, let’s do something more serious today…

Let a be any expression. We will call x the fixed point of expression a if x names ax. (Reminder: lower-case letters in our programming language represent a combination of upper-case letters.)

The fixed-point principle says that for each expression a there exists its fixed point x. Furthermore there is a (quite simple) “manual” for constructing the fixed point x of any expression a.

So the question of the day is: can you find that “manual” proving fixed-point principle?
(E.g. a program x that names ABCx, for a = ABC.)

 

Solution To see the correct solution, click 'Show' button... SelectShow

Answer: x = RQaRQ
Why? Because that names aRQaRQ, which is ax, which is exactly what we wanted .

The post Programming Brain Teaser #6: Fixed-point principle appeared first on Salsita Software.