Mission Control: Ready for contributions

One of the great design decisions that was made for Treeherder was a strict seperation of the client and server portions of the codebase. While its backend was moderately complicated to get up and running (especially into a state that looked at all like what we were running in production), you could get its web frontend running (pointed against the production data) just by starting up a simple node.js server. This dramatically lowered the barrier to entry, for Mozilla employees and casual contributors alike.

I knew right from the beginning that I wanted to take the same approach with Mission Control. While the full source of the project is available, unfortunately it isn’t presently possible to bring up the full stack with real data, as that requires privileged access to the athena/parquet error aggregates table. But since the UI is self-contained, it’s quite easy to bring up a development environment that allows you to freely browse the cached data which is stored server-side (essentially: git clone https://github.com/mozilla/missioncontrol.git && yarn install && yarn start).

In my experience, the most interesting problems when it comes to projects like these center around the question of how to present extremely complex data in a way that is intuitive but not misleading. Probably 90% of that work happens in the frontend. In the past, I’ve had pretty good luck finding contributors for my projects (especially Perfherder) by doing call-outs on this blog. So let it be known: If Mission Control sounds like an interesting project and you know React/Redux/D3/MetricsGraphics (or want to learn), let’s work together!

I’ve created some good first bugs to tackle in the github issue tracker. From there, I have a galaxy of other work in mind to improve and enhance the usefulness of this project. Please get in touch with me (wlach) on irc.mozilla.org #missioncontrol if you want to discuss further.