If you have ever used one of the Feature Pages or Feature Lists on the Mozilla Wiki, please help us improve the system by participating in our Feature Page Survey.

We’re going to close the survey down at the end of January, and we need to get as many responses as we can. The survey should only take 5-8 minutes to fill out, and we’d really appreciate all the feedback we can get.

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Thanks!

This is really simple and yummy. Can be a side dish or a main with baby spinach or field greens.

Ingredients

• 1 med clove garlic, finely minced (about 1 tsp)
• 1/2 shallot, minced (about 1 tsp)
• 1 tbsp capers, chopped
• 2 tbsp fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 1 tbsp fresh lemon juice
• 1/2 tsp fresh ground pepper
• pinch salt
• 1 tin white kidney beans, rinsed and well drained (low/no salt)
• 1 tin flaked tuna, drained

Method

1. Mix garlic, shallot, capers, parsley, olive oil, vinegar, lemon juice, salt and pepper in a medium bowl and whisk well to make a simple vinaigrette
2. Add beans & tuna and mix well
3. Let sit for 15-20 minutes for the flavours to meld a bit

Serve as a side dish or just as a simple meal. Squeeze more lemon juice over if you’re into that sort of thing.

Sole is pretty boring, generally, so I decided to jazz it up a bit. The ingredients list makes this look way more complicated than it is. Takes about 15-20 mins to prepare, and 25 mins to bake. I also totally failed to take a picture of this, but will next time.

Ingredients

• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tbsp parsley, minced
• 2 tbsp chives, minced
• 2 tbsp tarragon, minced
• 1 tbsp thyme leaves
• Zest from 1 lemon
• 2 tsp dijon mustard
• 4 filets of sole, no skin
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 med shallot, minced
• 1 tin white kidney beans, well rinsed and drained
• 1 tin diced tomatoes (low sodium)
• Juice from 1 lemon
• Salt & pepper

Method

1. Heat oven to 325.
2. Mix the parsley, chives, tarragon, lemon zest, and half of the garlic together in a small bowl.
3. Heat a saute pan over med heat and heat the olive oil. Toss in the shallot, thyme, and the rest of the garlic & saute for a minute or two.
4. Add the beans to the pan and continue sauteing for 3-4 mins. Add the tomatoes and heat until simmering. Stir in the lemon juice, and some salt and pepper to taste. These should simmer for 8-10 mins or so while you’re preparing the fish bundles.
5. While the beans and tomatoes are simmering, lay filets out on a cutting board, skinned side up. Spread the dijon over each in a thin layer (this should use up all the mustard). Sprinkle the herb/zest mixture over the filets. Drizzle the garlic butter over the filets, including all the garlic. Roll the filets up into bundles, starting at the tail end, and secure with 2-3 toothpicks each.
6. Pour the tomatoes and beans into a glass* 8″ x 8″ baking dish. They should be in an even layer and slightly soupy.
7. Nestle the 4 sole bundles into the tomatoes and spoon tomatoes and beans over each so the fish won’t get dried out. Grate fresh pepper over it all and bake for 20-25 mins.

Fish is cooked through when it’s 130-140 on an instant read thermometer, or opaque all the way through. Serve in pasta bowls, removing the toothpicks, with plenty of the tomato & bean mixture.

* glass is vital for baking anything with tomatoes in it — a metal pan or dish will just taste weird and tinny and don’t do it. Don’t be like me.

Grocery shopping gets a bit tricksy this time of year because there’s often a surfeit of food, a metric crapton of people out shopping for that food (& gifts & booze & all the rest), and the stores are closed for at least a few days right in the middle of it all.

To avoid last minute grocery dashes (and crowds) as much as I can, I’m planning the next couple of week’s worth of menus now. This is what the current working list looks like:

Big fancy dinners

• Turkey breast roast & all the fixin’s
• Beef tenderloin roast, sauted mixed wild mushrooms, garlicky bitter greens, potatoes gratin

Regular ol’ workaday dinners

• chili & toast
• beef curry, rice, channa dal
• roast chicken w/ lemon & thyme, cauliflower & broccoli gratin, wild rice
• pork loin roast, braised brussels sprouts, baked potatoes
• ground pork & cabbage szechuan noodles
• seafood chowder
• carnitas, guacamole
• baked salmon w/ lemon & capers, spinach, boiled new potatoes
• spicy shrimp stir fry w/ snowpeas and cashews
• pan-seared rib eye, salt-baked potatoes, caesar salad

Lunches will largely be made up of leftovers, and breakfasts probably be more extravagant/leisurely than normal, including stuff like bagels w/ smoked salmon, baked french toast, frittata w/ spinach and mushrooms, etc etc.

If you have ever read, edited, or created a Feature Page or Feature List in the Mozilla Wiki, please help us improve the system by taking our Feature Page Survey.

The survey should only take 5-8 minutes to fill out, and we’d really appreciate all the feedback we can get.

Feature Page Survey

Thanks!

Quick cocktail recipe for the holidays (there may be more of these):

1. 2oz gin (Tanq or Tanq 10 works well)
2. 1 tbsp rosemary simple syrup
3. 2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
4. Chilled club soda to top

Build over ice in a highball or med highball. Stir.

Before you post a rant about something going on in the Mozilla project, take a moment to put yourself in the other person’s shoes — getting blindsided by a bunch of criticism on a widely-read forum when no one had previously asked you about it or tried talking to you is never, ever fun.

Posting a rant is also a pretty crap way to get your point across, because:

a) It’s hurtful and humiliating to the person being criticised
b) It immediately puts the other person on the defensive
c) It brings the situation to the direct attention of a larger number of people, which makes the other person feel even worse if they do turn out to be wrong
d) It often doesn’t accomplish a lot other than bring some widespread drama to a situation that probably could have been resolved in a much more sensible way

Mozillians are almost invariably smart, capable people who care deeply about what they’re doing and are always genuinely trying to do the right thing. Always start from that premise, give them the benefit of the doubt, and just talk to them if there’s a problem.

I’ve made one small-but-awfully-helpful change to how the product Feature Lists are going to work. Now, if you start working on one of the items on the list, please change the “Rank” for that item on the Feature List to “In Progress”. Don’t worry about moving it to the top of the list, we’ll sort that part out.

I’ve done a few on the Firefox Feature List, as an example. Obviously this makes it a lot easier to figure out what is currently being worked on.

If you are working on a Feature from one of the Feature Lists, please do me a huge favour and flag it as “In Progress” on the Feature List Page. Thanks!

Made this for dinner tonight (blurry, oversaturated pic courtesy my iPhone). Tasty, but feel free to adjust the garlic and red pepper flakes as you see fit. We like us some garlics.

Ingredients

• 2-3 mild or hot Italian sausages
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 3-4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 shallot, minced
• 1-2 tsp hot red pepper flakes (optional)
• 1 med zucchini, chopped into rough chunks
• 1 yellow pepper, chopped into rough chunks
• 1 med red onion, chopped into rough chunks
• 1-2 tsp fresh oregano (or 1/2-1 tsp dried)
• 1 large tin diced tomatoes (796ml, 28oz)
• Fresh ground pepper
• Penne or other chunky pasta
• Fresh shredded parmesan to serve

Method

1. Fry the sausages in a saute pan over med heat. When done, slice and throw the slices back in to the pan to brown up a bit more. The trick here is to get all sorts of nice brown bits all over the sausages because that makes ‘em yummy.
2. Leave the sausage rounds in the pan and add the olive oil. Then toss in the minced garlic, shallot, and red pepper flakes. Saute that all together for a couple of minutes.
3. Throw in the zucchini, pepper, and onion. Saute those for a couple of minutes, then add the oregano and a few gratings of fresh pepper. Stir a few times, then add the diced tomatoes with all the juices and stuff.
4. Bring up to simmer, and let that go for 10-15 mins…the idea is to let the tomatoes cook down and become more of a sauce. This is a matter of taste, really, so you can cook it for as long as you like, just don’t totally overcook the veggies.
5. While the sauce simmers, bring a big pot of water up to boil and cook your pasta when the sauce is almost done.
6. Serve in big ol’ pasta bowls with lots of parmesan cheese and fresh pepper.

I think that’s it. I just kinda make these up as I go, so feel free to riff on this. Sometimes I’ll add a tin of white kidney beans, or other veggies, etc.

If you take a look around Mozilla these days, you’ll notice that there are a lot more of us trying to do a lot more things a lot faster.

To manage all of this, we need to be a bit more disciplined about what we do and how we do it. Prioritizing what we want to do (and when) is a big part of what this post is all about — we can’t do everything all at once, so we need to be more deliberate about what we focus on at any given time.

We also have to be more conscientious about what and how we communicate with each other — there simply isn’t enough time for any one of us to dig through our various channels to find out everything we need to know. We need a consistent and centralized place where everyone can go to get the information they need.

How are we doing this?

We’ve developed a system to help us manage this stuff, and it looks something like this:

simplified, but you get the idea

Roadmaps are where we set forth our vision for each product and what we believe our priorities need to be in order to achieve that vision. Roadmaps often include other stuff as well, but for the most part the Roadmaps define where we want to go (vision) and how we’re going to get there (priorities).

Product Managers don’t weave these out of whole cloth, but drive the process of creating the Roadmaps through extensive discussion with people throughout the community. These are also not things to be dusted off once a year when we sit down to write a new roadmap — we will evolve them as we go.

Feature Lists are the things we believe need to be changed or added in our various products over the next year or so. These lists are derived from the Roadmaps and then divided by engineering group. The purpose of Feature Lists is to make it easier for engineers to know what they should work on next.

Like Roadmaps, Feature Lists will be revised constantly as we add, remove, and reprioritize things based on changing circumstances and information, and as we ship features out. Ultimately, each Feature List will be rank ordered by priority — #1, #2, #3, etc. with no ties — but we’re not quite there yet.

Feature Pages are really the heart of this system, as this is where each Feature is defined, specified, staffed, and tracked during development. The goal is that eventually (by Firefox 7) all significant development projects will be defined and tracked via Feature Pages.

When we talk about a feature, we’re talking about a “shippable unit”, a well-scoped and atomic piece of work that improves a part of one of our products. This is a smaller unit than what we normally think of as a feature, but conceptually larger than a typical bug fix.

Something like “Create a Home Tab as a Permanent App Tab” is a feature under this definition, whereas “App Tabs” is too large to be well-scoped. “App tab rendering glitch on OS X” is too small to be worth feature tracking, as it is really just fixing a flaw rather than adding to the product or changing how something behaves.

Feature Pages are really guidelines rather than strict templates to be slavishly filled out. Use them as you see fit. The only requirements are:

• The status block at the top be filled in and kept up to date.
• The team list must be fleshed out as completely as possible (and everyone on that list should be aware that they’re on that list).

After that, you’re free to do whatever you need with the Feature Pages. The sections in the template are really just prompts to help you get things clarified and written down, but you can ignore them if it makes sense to do so.

With the vision and priorities defined in the Roadmaps, and the Features defined and tracked through Feature Pages, we’re just missing a place to track the collective progress for each release. This is where the Release Tracking page comes in.

Once a Feature is underway and we know which release it’s going to target, the status block from that Feature Page will be transcluded into the appropriate table on the Release Tracking page.

Throughout development, with Feature Page statuses being updated regularly, the Release Tracking page will make it easy to see at a glance how things are progressing. Should a feature miss a release, it’s easy to move the feature into the next release table and continue tracking progress there.

No Surprises

The primary goal for this system can be summed up as “no surprises”. Everyone across the organization — engineering, QA, marketing, PR, web dev, IT, build & release, etc. — should be able quickly and easily to find out:

• what is currently planned for each release
• how things are progressing
• what they need to do
• when they need to do it

No surprises. This will never be a failsafe system, but I think we can get a lot closer to there than where we are now. This is a first step, and we will evolve the system as we learn more.