Back from two weeks of vacation. Now we're working on hardening APIs (start reading here, but also, see news:netscape.public.mozilla.porkjockeys in general).
Simon Fraser has done some profiling (start reading here) that suggests the old implementations strategy for `chunk'- allocating strings may do more harm than good. Current thinking is to make people do the optimization themselves with SetCapacity, and otherwise always allocate strings to be exactly the right length. This is already mitigated by nsPromiseConcatenation which allows you to add up hunks of things with only a single allocation. It could be further mitigated by a policy of `chunk'-allocating only in the case where someone appends a single character and the string had to grow anyway. This would catch callers who build strings a character at a time, and don't call SetCapacity themselves, e.g., the html parser (in places). I've asked him to add this information to the uber-bug we have for profiling, fixing, and deploying the best string solutions.
I'm going to be setting up monthly Mozilla face-to-face `tech' sessions where experts on particular modules distribute their expertise. They will be like our current brown bags, except longer (maybe 4-5 hours), held Friday afternoons or evenings so that people can come from far away without disturbing their schedules, (cheaply) catered (e.g., pizzas maybe?), and more in-depth. Each session will cover a specific area, e.g., layout one month, XUL on month, etc., and be hosted by the 2-4 engineers best able to explain the details and answer any question. Knowledge hoarding is bad; knowledge sharing is good.
I'm preparing a session for MacHack on C++ IOStreams and locales. We'll probably have a Mozilla session as well. Mike Pinkerton or Mike and I together would like to do a session on XUL and skinnability. I don't think I'm speaking at the O'Reilly conference, but I am planning to attend.