I should mention my actual work while I’m blogging about stuff. “My” Firefox release is now in beta, Firefox 66. We have a team of release managers so can rotate ownership of upcoming releases. Usually this means you’re in the hot seat every 3 releases, about every 4 months. We have a bigger team now so there is more breathing room and we can support each other more; basically that means we’re less burned out. Yay! (A couple of years ago there were like, 3 of us and one was the team manager.)
The feeling of ownership is somewhat silly since it is an enormous collaborative effort, but it helps in the job to follow one version closely, you care about it and are able to filter out & not pay so much attention to the other versions in development. (In practice, that is a lot of email I can skim and archive when it isn’t for “my” release.) The release engineers also rotate through version ownership. It’s a good system.
If you’d like to see all the bugs fixed for Firefox 66 so far, between its birth as Firefox Nightly last December and now, here’s a Bugzilla query which you shouldn’t click if you’re on your phone or a slow connection because it’s going to take a while to load – it will show a list of the 3000+ bugs already fixed. Probably don’t click that unless you really want to wait a minute and a half for the page to load.
While Firefox 66 is in beta, I’m watching for fixes in the version right behind it, Firefox 67, that we might be able to bring to users more quickly. We backport, or uplift, between 200 and 400 issues while a version is in beta. Here’s what I’ve approved to uplift so far, patches from about 40 bugs. It’s helpful when looking at these lists to sort the information different ways (by clicking on the column headers.) These next few weeks till March 19 (the release date) will be my crunch time.
Today I did about one million different things. Hilariously, as so much of our work is right out in the open, you can see some of those one million things (in 68 bugs), at least the bits of it that were me reading a lot of bug reports and figuring out what to do with them (poke someone from another team, engineers, QA, etc, add relevant tags or other info, and while I’m looking, decide how important it is for it to be in Firefox 66.)