Revolving Cow, LLC

Mozilla has recently publicly opened up a new tool Observatory at observatory.mozilla.org. The tool aims to help developers and security professionals be aware of potential issues and help resolve them for a more safe and secure Internet. This will be a dive in to targetting our own website at revolvingcow.com and then listing the issues and how we resolved or justified them. The actual results can be viewed here.

So recently we got it in our heads to record our daily work for later review. The idea was to assess various points: How much actually coding is done? How much work other than laying down code is performed? How frequently are we interrupted? How do we respond to interruptions? Our findings Our experiment spanned 5 days and we recorded approximately 40 hours of video and audio. Some portions were not recorded because of sensitive data and/or logic but the sampling is still pretty decent.

The Inspiration About a month ago an article written by Mathew Garret, The Desktop and the Developer, was published which made some ripples throughout the community (or at least was referenced through various sites). Here is a summary of his observations: Majority of deployments of OpenStack (for what the conference he was attending was all about) are Linux-based The most popular laptop vendor at the conference appeared to be Apple Macs are aesthetically pleasing Developers don’t want to use different hardware and operating systems for work and pleasure The new generation of developers are more interested in the overall user experience And here were some of the revelations: Why migrate to Linux where at best they would have a comparable experience?