Hacking on DevTools / Firefox directly in the Web (video)

[Jan Keromnes]

Hi team,

This past few years, I've been experimenting with a lot ways to do software
development completely in the web, because it removes the need to download
and build anything locally on my computer (a major pain point in software
development, to me at least).

Today, I'm publishing a video of a proof-of-concept, web-only workflow
where I make a code change to the Firefox source code, recompile it, and
then run the modified browser, without ever leaving my browser window:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sNDMIh-iVw

More details:

[Jan Keromnes]

(Sorry for the double post, an unfortunate keyboard shortcut send the email
out before I was done...)

[...] More details:

When the new version of Cloud9 IDE came out not too far back, it caught my
attention because suddenly there was a web-based "coding solution" that
addressed many of the needs I had imagined for a web-only coding system. So
I began trying to hack on large software projects like Firefox and Chromium
from inside Cloud9. One day I was even able to make a quick change to a
patch I had under review and re-upload it, using only my smartphone (I
wouldn't recommend it though).

To make my demo work, I had to use Cloud9, but also develop a backend for
Cloud9 to connect to (I call it the Janitor), which is able to provision
large software-development environments (in the form of a Docker container
including many dependencies, the source code and pre-compiled objects),
keep these environments up-to-date, and allow many users to "fork" these
environments multiple times in a very fast and lightweight manner (using
Docker's copy-on-write feature).

This is still very much experimental, so many things might break or not
work, but I'd be happy to answer any questions if you're curious about this.
Jan

[Dave Camp]

This is really cool.

-dave

On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 8:31 AM, Jan Keromnes <j...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> Hi team,
>
> This past few years, I've been experimenting with a lot ways to do software
> development completely in the web, because it removes the need to download
> and build anything locally on my computer (a major pain point in software
> development, to me at least).
>
> Today, I'm publishing a video of a proof-of-concept, web-only workflow
> where I make a code change to the Firefox source code, recompile it, and
> then run the modified browser, without ever leaving my browser window:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sNDMIh-iVw
>
> More details:

> _______________________________________________
> dev-developer-tools mailing list
> dev-devel...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-developer-tools
>

[Jason Laster]

neat!

--

--
Jason Laster
*Software Engineer*
Etsy