otsukare Thoughts after a day of work

Week notes - 2020 w39 - worklog - A new era

by Karl Dubost
(Worked at Mozilla from 2013 to 2022)

Mozilla Webcompat Team New Management

So the Mozilla Webcompat team is entering a new era. Mike Taylor (by the time this will be published) was the manager of the webcompat team at Mozilla since August 2015. He decided to leave. Monday, September 21 was his last day. We had to file an issue about this.

The new interim manager is… well… myself.

So last week and this week will be a lot about:

Hence these notes restarting. I will try to keep a track of what I do and what I learn both for the public, but mostly for my team mates.

Currently the Mozilla webcompat team is composed of these wonderful people:

Regular Contributors:

Softvision Contractors:

Mozilla Employees:

A lot of reading, a lot of thinking around management (probably more about that later).

I always said to Mike (and previous managers) in the past, that I was not interested in management position. But I deeply care about the webcompat project, and I want it to thrive as much as possible. I never associated management with a sense of promotion or career growth. I'm very careful about the issues that positions of power create both ways: from the manager toward the people being managed and from the people toward their manager. Power is a often tool of corruption and abuse and makes some people abandon their sense of autonomy and responsibility. The interim word in the title here is quite important. If someone more qualified wants to jump into the job, please reach out to Lonnen or Andrew Overholt. If anyone from the webcompat team is not satisfied, I will happily step down.

Last but not least, Thanks to Mike to have done this job for the last couple of years. Mike has a talent for being human and in touch with people. I wish a bright journey on his new endeavors.

Firefox Cross-Functional meeting

ETP workarounds for site breakage

Rachel Tublitz asked to give an update about ETP workarounds for site breakage for the What's New with Firefox 82 for the SUMO team. She's doing an amazing job at compiling information for the sumo team to be prepared in advance of the release and be able to support users.

Thomas delivered on it two months ago. Add support for shimming resources blocked by Tracking Protection. The progress is tracked on the webcompat OKR board. Latest update from Thomas is

We're likely to slip the release of ETP shims slip into the 83 release instead of 82, due to the UX team wanting some more time to think through the way the ETP "blocked content" interfaces interact with shims. In that case they will continue to be a nightly-only feature during the 82 release cycle.

Webcompat reported on Fenix

Congrats on Dennis for releasing AC Report Site Issue improvements. This is done.

WPT sync to Python 3

WPT stands for Web Platform Tests. The code was in python 2 and it has been fully ported to Python 3 by James. This created a major sync issue at a point that James recovered these last couple of days and started to implement safe guards for it to not happen again.

Webcompat Outreach Generator

Ksenia has been on a tool for generating outreach templates to contact people with regards to web compatibility issues. She has been using Svelte and the work seems to be in a pretty good shape. Mike and Guillaume have been helping with the review.

Webcompat triage and testing

Oana and Ciprian have tiredlessly triaged all the incoming issues of webcompat. And more specifically starting to test some JavaScript frameworks to detect webcompat issues. The JS frameworks were installed by Guillaume.

Webcompat Bug Triage Priority

How do define the priority on bugs causing webcompat issues?

Some webcompat bugs

Some meetings

Some notes, thoughts

Otsukare!