Extending Glean: build re-usable types for new use-cases

(“This Week in Glean” is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release notes, documentation, hopes, dreams, or whatever: so long as it is inspired by Glean. You can find anindex of all TWiG posts online.) The last blog post:This Week in Glean: Cargo features – an investigation by Jan-Erik. The philosophy of Glean has always been to offer higher-level metric types that map semantically to what developers want to measure: a Timespan metric type, for instance, will require developers to declare the resolution they want the time measured in....

February 14, 2020 · 5 min · Alessio Placitelli

GeckoView + Glean = Fenix performance metrics

(“This Week in Glean” is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release notes, documentation, hopes, dreams, or whatever: so long as it is inspired by Glean. The previous post of the series lives here.) This week in Glean we tell a tale of components, design, performance and ponies (I promise!): how to bridge different telemetry worlds, with different semantics and principles?...

November 19, 2019 · 4 min · Alessio Placitelli

Add-on recommendations for Firefox users: a prototype recommender system leveraging existing data sources

By: Alessio Placitelli, Ben Miroglio, Jason Thomas, Shell Escalante and Martin Lopatka. With special recognition of the development efforts of Roberto Vitillo who kickstarted this project, Mauro Doglio for massive contributions to the code base during his time at Mozilla, Florian Hartmann, who contributed efforts towards prototyping the ensemble linear combiner, Stuart Colville for coordinating integration with AMO. Last, but not least, to Anthony Miyaguchi who helped shaping the current code thanks to his reviewing efforts....

December 8, 2017 · 12 min · Alessio Placitelli

Recording Telemetry scalars from add-ons

The Go Faster initiative is important as it enables us to ship code faster, using special add-ons, without being strictly tied to the Firefox train schedule. As Georg Fritzsche pointed out in his article, we have two options for instrumenting these add-ons: having probe definitions ride the trains (waiting a few weeks!) or implementing and sending a new custom ping (doing some pipeline work!). Both solutions are not very appealing when shipping code faster....

October 6, 2017 · 3 min · Alessio Placitelli

Getting Firefox data faster: introducing the `new-profile` ping

Let me state this clearly, again: data latency sucks. This is especially true when working on Firefox: a nicely crafted piece of software that ships worldwide to many people. When something affects the experience of our users we need to know and react fast. The story so far… We started improving the latency of the data coming from Firefox, in the previous quarters, and got to the point where the majority of pings reach our servers within 1 hour, instead of days (latest Beta only): there’s an extremely satisfying plot by :chutten about that!...

July 14, 2017 · 3 min · Alessio Placitelli