Category Archives: Mozilla

Valve’s Changes to the Iterative Model

Today Mike Beltzner (Firefox Director) gave a very interesting presentation on software development models and how they apply and evolve at Mozilla. When he put up a slide about the iterative model, it included a picture from Wikipedia that looked like:

“Plan -> Design -> Implement -> Deploy -> Test”

Instead of:

“Plan -> Design -> Implement -> Test -> Deploy”

This elicited a few chuckles, since obviously no one tests after deployment. I almost shouted out, “Well, Valve does that.”

But I didn’t, since that’d be just wrong. Valve doesn’t test at all.

No, I do not consider that comment flamebait. In the past few weeks patches have had to go out twice because of things like servers crashing on load or massive memory leaks.

A Drive Through the Country

As I alluded to in February, I’m going to try and shy away from the gaming scene while I experiment with other fields. That doesn’t mean “leave completely,” but my activity will be hampered. That is partially the reason SourceMod moved to a “rolling release” concept so we can push out incremental feature updates easier.

As part of this endeavor, I’ve accepted an internship at Mozilla. I don’t know what I’ll be working on yet, but my primary interest is in language development, so hopefully it will be EMCA4/JavaScript 2/Tamarin. It requires relocation to Mountain View, California.

I’m really looking forward to this, but the next two weeks I am not. I managed to schedule myself into a rather nasty hole. In specific, finals last until April 29th. My apartment lease ends on April 30th. I said I’d be in California by May 5th. That means I need to finish school, move all of my belongings to storage, and move — in a time span of a week.

What makes this feat particularly amusing is that, against better judgment, I have decided to drive to my destination. This is not a short road trip. Clocking in at 3,100 miles, I can expect to spend at least a few days on the road. I’ve gotten a friend to tag along to make sure I don’t accidentally drive in a direction other than “West.”

While I’m resigned to the fact that I will probably miss my deadline by a few days, it’s both a long journey and a stressful two weeks ahead. As of May 1st, I will probably not be on IRC for a week or so. You probably won’t see any commits from me for at least two weeks though I will try to read the forums and bug reports as I have time. Blog articles will resume on May 5th (I have a rather scathing, two-part overview of the JVM spooled up).

And so…
Mozilla or Bust

Sayonara, bickering with Valve!