JavaScript Work Week & more
The last few weeks in my life have been both very taxing and unbelievable cool.
- I went to Ireland for two weeks doing language study travel with my high school. A lot of fun and beautiful landscape. School starts at 9am, how cool is that? I actually had to leave one week earlier to attend the work week.
- I was featured in Bonjour Mozilla.
- And because it was already revealed: I will be doing an internship with Mozilla next year in Toronto, if everything goes well with visas etc.
So the Mozilla JavaScript team had their first work week in the last two years on 22th October until the 26th October in Mountain View. I actually arrived on Saturday already after about 27h of traveling. We usually had session from 11am to 3pm with an hour of lunch in between. Most of the session was explaining different internals of SpiderMoney. Dave Mandelin did an inspiring talk about “Interest and Impact”. We had talks about IonMonkey and SpiderMonkey in general. We concluded with a Brainstorming session about the future of SpiderMonkey/Firefox/Mozilla. We tried to find things that we think are important for the future (eg. FirefoxOS, Open Web) and how we could make them happen. We came up with literally pages of ideas. Including “better documentation”, “better communication”, “better debugging tools”, but also thinks like “Baseline Compiler” or “ES6 property refactoring” which are pretty SpiderMonkey specific.
I was very happy to meet some people I only knew under their IRC nickname or name, but had no idea what they look like, not even thinking of their voice. I was actually surprised that the team is so big! You just don’t even realize everyone who is involved when you are just working in your own little niche. There also quite some people from Europe, yaay. I talked to some people and got them to know a lot better. For example, Naveed Ihsanullah, who put a lot of work into creating this event (Thank you!), worked with Windows Internals before, once a “passion” of mine, but I never got to talk about it with somebody.
You can really feel the difference when you can just walk across the table and talk to somebody, instead of staying on the computer at night, because of your weird timezone. Some stuff I was never really able to make sense of, were so unbelievable easy to explain in person. Some days I would stay in the office until 11pm just to watch other people work :).
If you are keeping up with JS development it might be interesting to know that we started working on a new Baseline Compiler. We are still working heads-down on everything required to make Generational Garbage Collection possible, or even still fixing bugs in the Incremental GC! The JavaScript Debugging API v2 is also still a hot topic. Same for IonMonkey. Oh and people are working on ES6 support, for example Eddy on Harmony modules.
Oh and we had nice food, really, yummy! I think we sadly forgot to take a proper group photo. So here are most of us working!
I probably forgot thousands things I wanted to mention, but forgot in the last 3 weeks, when I was trying to get back into my regular school days.