2016 Challenge : Week #8

If you did not, read the initial blog post announcing the challenge

On Monday, I was waiting for review on Bug 1208204, which aimed to enable spacebar key shortcut to play/pause animation in the animations panel. They were some minor nits to fix, and my edited patch landed on Wednesday.

I also had a pending review for Bug 1247243, which contained some server side tests I had to create. After some back and forth, and a rebase, I was r+’d and thought everything was good. I pushed my patch to TRY and oh boy it saved my ass. I quickly saw that 2 tests were failing pretty badly.

I did not executed those tests while developing as they were on a different folder from the one I added my test to. I edited the tests and made sure every of them pass, and pushed a new patch to review on Thursday.

As my week was a success and I had a pending review, I search a new Bug to work on. I found Bug 711942, which goal is to have a visual editor to edit angle units ( deg, grad, rad, turns). This is kind of rad ( :D ), and kind of what the Devtools are heading to : provides easy and visual ways to edit the styles of a webpage ( see this article from Patrick Brosset on Medium ). Patrick chimmed in the bug’s comments, and proposed that we should also allow the user to cycle angle units with Shift+Click, just like we do it for the colors (switching from Hexa, HSL, RGB). I accepted the challenge and Bug 1250835 was created for this.

On the same time, Tim N’Guyen reaches me on IRC and told me he gave me editing and assigning permissions on Bugzilla, which means I can assign myself on whatever bug I want to work on, without asking someone from the team ! He also pointed me to Bug 1246514 and asked me if I was willing to work on it. The goal is to switch the toolbox options panel from XUL to HTML. I started looking around to see how things work for this, and I’ll work on this this week.

On a side note, I released Bugzilla Timeline on Tuesday.

You can read about it on the blog post I wrote. Feedback was quite positive and I was even given some ideas on how to make it more fun.

This week, I also moved my blog posts from CodePen to my own website, as you can see it. I had a proper domain for several years, but I cancelled my Linode subscription a year ago as I was barely using it. A tweet from Sara Soueidan followed by a quick chat made me realize I could use Github pages, like I do with Bugzilla Timeline.

I wish developers/designers wrote more articles on their own blogs. I’d rather share links to those blogs than to articles on Medium, tbh.

— Sara Soueidan (@SaraSoueidan) 23 février 2016

Github Pages provides a Jekyll integration to handle static sites. It is new to me, so the whole thing is not perfect yet, but it’s good to have my words on my site. I will eventually enhance it, when I have some free time ( not immediatly so ).

So next week I’ll work on the XUL to HTML conversion bug and on the angle units in the rules panel. I will be in Dijon for 2 days, at my company’s office, for some meeting with clients. Hopefully I’ll dodge around the flu that’s spreading there. If so, see you next Sunday :)