Two weeks ago the developer tools teams and a few others met in the Portland office for a very successful week of discussions and hacking. The first day was about setting the stage for the week and working out what everyone was going to work on. Dave Camp kicked us off with a review of the last six months in developer tools and talked about what is going to be important for us to focus on in 2014. We then had a little more in-depth information from each of the teams. After lunch a set of lightning talks went over some projects and ideas that people had been working on recently.

After that everyone got started prototyping new ideas, hacking on features and fixing bugs. The amount of work that happens at these meet-ups is always mind-blowing and this week was no exception, even one of our contributors got in on the action. Here is a list of the things that the team demoed on Friday:

• Joe Walker showed off CSS and JS code coverage tools.
• Rob Campbell showed us status codes and image previews in the network monitor as well as Mihai’s patches for nicer output and cd in the web console.
• Anton Kovalyov demonstrated a sourceeditor add-on that embeds metrics and contextual information into the code you see.
• Alex Poirot showed UI to select which frames in the page or Firefox OS app to monitor in the developer toolbox.
• Brandon Benvie amazed us with autocompletion and type inference using tern.
• Irakli Gozalishvili developed a plugin for Light Table that allowed it to connect to Firefox through the debugging protocol.
• Victor Porof made game developers happy with a demo of a canvas tracer.
• Brendan Dahl wanted to make his own life easier so created a hex editor for JavaScript typed arrays.
• Patrick Brosset made the inspector show badly formed style entries and synced changes between the inspector and style editor.
• I made the box model view in the inspector editable for on the fly layout tinkering.
• Mike Ratcliffe added events and font tooltips to the inspector as well as creating a test log syntax highlighter for Sublime Text.
• Jordan Santell created a tool for viewing, editing and debugging web audio nodes.
• Erik Vold made Itchpad able to live edit add-ons.
• Brian Grinstead improved itchpad with drag and drop file manipulation and file/folder watching.
• Jeff Griffiths showed off a telemetry dashboard.
• One of our contributors, Optimizer, dialled in to show off his storage inspector.
• Panagiotis Astithas played with some widgets for a small live view of Firefox’s performance.
• Will Bamberg created an add-on to add [tooltips to CSS rules in the inspector](https://github.com/wbamberg/devtools-mdn-tooltips, http://i.imgur.com/9SByeXG.jpg) which showed documentation from MDN.
• Jan Keromnes showed more metrics and settings for the developer HUD in Firefox OS.
• Soledad Penades created app templates to help new developers get started quickly.
• Ryan Stinnett wirelessly debugged of Firefox OS with autodiscovery.
• Jan Odvarko showed off Firebug debugging dynamic scripts like eval.
• Shu-yu Guo made it possible to debug JavaScript already on the stack like during the slow script warning.
• Eddy Bruel demonstrated some of his work on making workers debuggable.
• Mateo Ferretti showed us a game that you play by using the developer tools.

This only covers the work demoed on Friday, a whole lot more went on during the week as a big reason for doing these meet-ups is so that groups can split off to have important discussions. We had Darrin Henein on hand to help out with UX designs for some of the tools and Kyle Huey joined us for a couple of days to help work out the final kinks in the plan for debugging workers. Lot’s of work went on to iron out some of the kinks in the new add-on SDK widgets for Australis, there were discussions about memory and performance tools as well as some talk about how to simplify child processes for Firefox OS and electrolysis.

Of course there was also ample time in the evenings for the teams to socialise. One of the downsides of being a globally distributed team is that getting to know one another and building close working relationships can be difficult over electronic forms of communication so we find that it’s very important to all come together in one place to meet face to face. We’re all looking forward to doing it again in about six months time.