Monthly Archives: July 2008

Can you do this to your VP?

Last week, us Mozilla interns held our annual intern BBQ. I guess one of the traditions is to throw someone in the pool.

This year they chose Mike Schroepfer (also known as “Schrep”). Schrep is the VP of the Engineering, and about five seconds with him is enough to know he means business. He talks fast and asks deep technical questions about the projects he oversees. This is an interesting trait, as he’s both very bright on a technical level while also being a high-level manager.

So when five+ interns tried to gang up on Schrep (who, as always, was dressed as neat as a pin), people on the sidelines seemed a bit apprehensive about how that’d play out. Lo and behold, not well.

In the process of trying to grab him, they accidentally tore his shirt. Then as they got close to the pool, Asa Doltzer warned them that Schrep’s shoes were too nice to get wet, so the interns had to pull them off. After that they gave up and dropped him to the ground by the pool.

Schrep didn’t look terribly pleased but he took it all in stride, even making a joke about it at the all-hands company meeting on Monday: “For the record,” he said, “Despite it being five-on-one, you guys still couldn’t take me down!”

I have a feeling that if I end up at another company, throwing the VP into pools won’t be an employee perk. Though, the only people I have been known to throw into pools are my brothers (who, as a trait of being younger than I, eternally deserve it).

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.