At Mozilla, we've been using Mattermost [https://mattermost.com] to facilitate communication between employees and contributors for the better part of this year. Mattermost is an open source (more like open core - but the team edition is still awesome), self hosted Slack alternative. It's been really great so far,…
Five or so years ago, I began an incredible journey [https://chrisdecairos.ca/greetings-open-source-community/]. My professor at the time, David Humphrey [http://blog.humphd.org/], introduced me to the concept of open source software and the Mozilla Project, and I dove right in. Thanks to my explorations in open source…
Configuring and running services for Webmaker is a real pain in the ass. (Webmaker services = Webmaker API, Webmaker ID, and Webmaker LoginAPI) There's database and caching services to install and configure, npm dependencies to install, native NodeJS bindings to compile (sorry, Windows), and database scripts/migrations to run. This makes…
In my previous post [https://chrisdecairos.ca/one-time-passwords], I wrote about the new login system we're working on for Webmaker. In short, the new system facilitates the authentication of a user by generating a one time use password and sending it to the user's email account. The user can then…
Webmaker [https://webmaker.org] users currently sign in to their accounts using Persona [https://persona.org], Mozilla's privacy respecting authentication system. It's fairly simple, and has worked really well since our rewrite this past march [https://chrisdecairos.ca/webmaker-sso]. You can read the details of the implementation in the blog…
This past week, I traveled to Revelstoke, BC [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelstoke,_British_Columbia] for an Appmaker [http://appmaker.mozillalabs.com/] workweek. Appmaker is an application designed to enable anyone to create mobile web apps without needing to learn about coding. By combining various widgets together and connecting…