Top all-time · #8887
John O'Duinn
Personal blog · oduinn.com/blogprogrammingcareer
John O'Duinn writes John's blog, a personal blog at oduinn.com about programming and career. Since 2010, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link John O'Duinn's posts as sources on Mozilla release engineering, CI costs, remote and distributed team practice, and Faraday-cage phone isolation. Comments do not judge the writing itself.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
While I was at Mozilla, John O'Duinn gave a pretty great presentation about this sort of stuff. The core message (mixed with my own takeaway) was that you have to consider all of your offices, even HQ, more like just another field office or coworking site--no location is "central" compared to others. As long as you consider accommodating remote people to be a separate task, it's a task that can be deprioritized. Ide…
Comment linking /blog/2014/11/09/we-are-all-remoties-nov2014/
on “GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down”Submitted Mozilla's Faraday cage for 400 test phones as a story · 26 points
HN discussionEven ignoring the google.com thing, estimates are they're spending at least $500 million a year on Chrome marketing for ads on other sites, various bundling deals (including pre-installs on new PCs and auto-installs with other software), etc. As far as people on Chrome go, you're right that back in 2008 they likely did not have 1000+ people on it. The best data I can find for mid-2008 on the Internet says about 50 i…
Comment linking /blog/2012/09/04/infrastructure-load-for-august-2012/
on “Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?”Submitted Looking for a job in a “remote friendly” company? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionOkay, I stand corrected. Sorry about that. After some googling... Are you referring to Tinderbox? https://oduinn.com/2014/06/04/farewell-to-tinderbox/ (It looks like Tinderbox predates CruiseControl by 3/4 years.) Also, the CI Wikipedia page should probably be fixed to also include info about Mozilla's CI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration
Comment linking /2014/06/04/farewell-to-tinderbox/
on “ThoughtWorks has been sold to private equity”Submitted Farewell to Tinderbox, the world’s 1st? 2nd? Continuous Integration server as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI did at first, and I am a Mozilla engineer. Mozilla makes heavy use of AWS for running portions of our continuous integration system; the cost is significant: http://oduinn.com/blog/2013/12/13/the-financial-cost-of-a-ch...
Comment linking /blog/2013/12/13/the-financial-cost-of-a-checkin-part-2/
on “Moz Dumps Amazon Web Services, Citing Expense and 'Lacking' Service”Submitted The financial cost of a checkin as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe problem with a modern web browser project is it's expensive to operate. All the ones I know of have extensive regression test suites, both correctness and performance, that get run from continuous integration systems in multiple configurations and on multiple platforms. That's not to mention the continuous fuzz testing farms looking for security bugs. I'm most familiar with the Firefox case: according to https:/…
Comment linking /blog/2013/03/27/at-mozilla-releaseengineering-release-automation-continuous-integration/
on “Firefox Developer Tool Features for Firefox 23”Submitted Mozilla Release Engineering "We are all Remotes" talk at Hass Business School as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou could take a lesson from the Mozilla Foundation about isolating phones in Faraday Cages: http://oduinn.com/blog/2010/02/11/unveiling-mozillas-faraday... Or you could stick it in a microwave. (I've used this to test if my home 'repaired' microwave is leaking radiation. Stick your phone in it and close the door. Call it. If it rings, chuck your microwave out :-) If it doesn't, well, I wouldn't stake my life on it…
Comment linking /blog/2010/02/11/unveiling-mozillas-faraday-cage/
on “Michigan Police Search Cell Phones During Traffic Stops”Mozilla's Release Engineering team shares their experiences with a distributed team in a slide presentation called We Are All "Remoties" : http://oduinn.com/blog/2012/04/04/we-are-all-remoties/ IRC and video chat are two critical components for Mozilla's teams.
Comment linking /blog/2012/04/04/we-are-all-remoties/
on “Full Distributed Teams: are they viable?”
