2016 - Walty Blog

July 31, 2016Walty 1 Comment

A Fatal Bug of Simple Gmail Notes

Starting from weeks ago, there were two strange bug reports about Simple Gmail Notes. Bug reports of this extension were actually not rare, there were users complaining about various items from time to time.

However, those reports were a bit unusual, the users claimed their Gmail accounts were temporarily locked by Google because of excessive network requests, and they believed this extension was the culprit.

I was shocked at first, as it was a very serious charge. I carefully inspected my code, checked all possible places with network requests. Nothing suspicious was found. And according to my calculation, there was no way for the extension to perform endless network requests.

So after some further investigations, I concluded that they might be just false alarms.

June 14, 2016Walty 2 Comments

Git vs SVN

There are so many comparisons of Git vs SVN outside, but as far as I can tell, 99% of them are biased. (And so is this one, probably.)

And there are many Git tutorials outside, and none is clear enough so others could get on hand easily. In fact, it remains to be one of the major drawbacks of Git.

I have used SVN for many years, and used Git for quite a while now. I admit that I am not yet an expert of Git, but I have tried and suffered a number of traps of Git, and I learned a lot from those painful experiences. Some of the traps could get me stuck for one day.

Docker Basics

By the Aliyun conference of 2015, I saw a lot of news about docker. And it's the third time of the year that I heard about docker.

I was lucky enough to have some quick conversations with the docker developers there, and I found that it's really mature now. In fact, TaoBao also used docker for the internal deployment procedures, so I decided to try to move some projects of our company into the world of docker.

The Review Mechanism of Firefox Extension

Now, after 5 months of development for Firefox extension of Simple Gmail Notes, most features are stabilized and the features could be shared between Chrome and Firefox easily. In the last few revisions, the cross-browser migration (Firefox -> Chrome or Chrome -> Firefox) all took less than 1 hour. Basically, the initial pain on the development of extension development gradually passed away.

However, I would like to further discuss the review process of Firefox. As mentioned before, Firefox uses a manual review process, it is much more strict than Google Chrome extensions (which is, basically, nil).