Dave Miller, is a sysadmin for the Mozilla project running a few thousand servers, during the official work hours, and leading the Bugzilla project in his little spare time.

He learned Perl by hacking on Bugzilla more than 10 years ago.

The interview is 38:31 min long.

Download: mp3 (35 Mb) 38:31 mins

Notes

Dave works at the Mozilla project that was created when Netscape released the source code of their browser.

He is the project leader of the Bugzilla project, which is one of the most well-known Open source Perl projects. (BTW it was originally written in Tcl.)

You can follow Dave Miller and the Bugzilla project on Twitter.

Firefox OS is one of the recent projects developed at the Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla Foundation has thousands of servers Dave helps to maintain. Most of them are used to handle the traffic of the Firefox marketplace and the Firefox sync services. They also have a large build-farm used to build their various products on a large number of diverse platforms. They use Buildbot to manage the builds.

Bugzilla uses Bazaar for version control. Check out the resources for developers for more information on how to get involved.

Both assistant project managers Max Kanat-Alexander, and Frédéric Buclin (LpSolit) have recently left the project that left a void in the project.

In the last Bugzilla developer meeting, two people: Byron Jones (glob on IRC) and Simon Green have stepped up for the patch approval process which is necessary to accept patches from every developer. You can watch the entire meeting on YouTube.

The main communication channel for the Bugzilla developers is IRC: #bugzilla on irc.mozilla.org. You can access it via Bugzilla IRC Gateway without installing anything. All the history of the Bugzilla IRC channel is also available.

The list of Perl Modules used by Bugzilla can be seen in the source code of the installer.

Some of the areas where contributions is needed are:

  • Writing documentation
  • Testing
  • Improve the User Interface, or even crate mobile web interfaces