Today was one crazy day.

The build peers all sat down with Release Engineering and Axel Hecht to talk l10n packaging. Mike Hommey has a Q1 goal to fix l10n packaging. There is buy-in from Release Engineering on enabling him in his quest to slay dragons. This will make builds faster and will pay off a massive mountain of technical debt that plagues multiple groups at Mozilla.

The Firefox build system contributors sat down with a bunch of Rust people and we talked about what it would take to integrate Rust into the Firefox build system and the path towards shipping a Rust component in Firefox. It sounds like that is going to happen in 2015 (although we're not yet sure what component will be written in Rust). I consider it an achievement that the gathering of both groups didn't result in infinite rabbit holing about system architectures, toolchains, and the build people telling horror stories to wide-eyed Rust people about the crazy things we have to do to build and ship Firefox. Believe me, the temptation was there.

People interested in the build system all sat down and reflected on the state of the build system and where we want to go. We agreed to create a build mode optimized for non-Gecko developers that downloads pre-built binaries - avoiding ~10 minutes of C/C++ compile time for builds. Mark my words, this will be one of those changes that once deployed will cause people to say "I can't believe we went so long without this."

I joined Mark Côté and others to talk about priorities for MozReview. We'll be making major improvements to the UX and integrating static analysis into reviews. Push a patch for review and have machines do some of the work that humans are currently doing! We're tentatively planning a get-together in Toronto in January to sprint towards awesomeness.

I ended the day by giving a long and rambling presentation about version control, with emphasis on Mercurial. I can't help but feel that I talked way too much. There's just so much knowledge to cover. A few people told me afterwards they learned a lot. I'd appreciate feedback if you attended. Anyway, I got a few nods from people as I was saying some somewhat contentious things. It's always good to have validation that I'm not on an island when I say crazy things.

I hope to spend Friday chasing down loose ends from the week. This includes talking to some security gurus about another crazy idea of mine to integrate PGP into the code review and code landing workflow for Firefox. I'll share more details once I get a professional opinion on the security front.