March 2011 – Stormy's Corner

March 22, 2011

Mozilla Developer Engagement Update, March 21, 2011

Christian went to Login in Lithuania and tried to hypnotise the audience with the content injection demo once more – also, ended up in the conference newspaper.

Louis-RÃ©mi met many fellow mozillians both at “cafÃ© numÃ©rique” in Brussel and “State of the Browsers” in London.

Firefox still rocking, at State Of The Browsers

Lots of Firefox fans from around Austin and SXSW attendees stopped by our Firefox for Mobile ice cream truck throughout the week. Lots of opportunity to educate people about Firefox going mobile… except there weren’t a lot of Android devices.Â Most people had iPhones and were excited to learn about Firefox Home.Â But overall, a great way to raise brand awareness and give people a chance to know Firefox a little bit better. 🙂

We had lunch with Mozillians and friends at SXSW.

Making good progress on the hiring front … for interns, evangelists and writers!

Have a great week!

The Developer Engagement Team
Christian, Janet, Jay, Louis-RÃ©mi, Paul, Sheppy and Stormy

March 19, 2011March 19, 2011

Mozilla Developer Engagement Update, March 14, 2011

Louis-RÃ©mi, an intern based in Paris, joined us on the Mozilla Developer Engagement Team!

Jay and Janet met a lot of JavaScript and front-end developers in Austin during SXSW. And some guys in kilts were spotted wearing Mozilla shirts.

Eric wrote a demo for mobile among other things.

Paul was on press tour.

Christian was motivating people in Montreal.

Stormy was having some great discussions about education, open source & non-profits at HFOSS.

Let us know if you have any questions.

Have a great week!

The Developer Engagement Team
Christian, Janet, Jay, Louis-RÃ©mi, Paul, Sheppy and Stormy

March 18, 2011March 19, 2011

Mozilla Developer Engagement Update, March 7, 2011

We pushed Demo Studio live on Thursday with some great teamwork on IRC.

We added browser compatibility information to our documentation on MDN.

We prepared for conferences:
http://confoo.ca
http://www.login.lt/
http://www.funkanu.se/Tillganglighetsdagar
http://swsw.com
http://hfoss.org/hfoss2011/

We got ready for SXSW where 5 Guys in Kilts will wear Mozilla shirts on Saturday.

We launched Web O’Wonder!

We agreed to sponsor JSConf.

We discussed technical evangelist candidates, interviewed technical writers and interviewed potential interns.

Let us know if you have any questions.

Have a great week!

The Developer Engagement Team
Christian, Janet, Jay, Paul, Sheppy and Stormy

March 15, 2011

The secret to getting your way

You know those people that come into every meeting and everyone just loves their idea? Or they propose an idea on the mailing list and everyone immediately pipes in to say how great it is?

Ever wonder how they do it?

They do their homework.

Before they propose their idea to a large group, they’ve floated it by a lot of people. They’ve discussed it in various settings, public and private, with individuals and with small groups. They’ve explained it, adapted it, discussed it. Most importantly, they addressed a lot of key people’s issues ahead of time and incorporated their feedback.

In some meetings, I know the person proposing the idea has actually discussed it with every single person at the meeting before hand.

Yes, that’s a lot of work. But that’s how they get their ideas accepted.

It’s not sneaky. It’s getting feedback.

It’s not broken. It’s communication.

It works.

So if your idea didn’t get accepted, stop to consider if you could have done more homework. Communicated more. Incorporated more feedback. Addressed more concerns.

March 14, 2011

Actually, a good book on fish

Did you know that not only are there entire books on fish, but there are entire books on single types of fish?

Much to my delight, my four year old sees the library as a treasure house of information. He’s not interested in the stories (although I push them every time), he just wants to head to the nonfiction section. Sometimes he has a topic in mind, but if not, we always end up looking at fish books.

This weekend, a book about sharks caught his eye, Sharks and Other Creatures of the Deep. As we read through it, I was really impressed at how much information they taught in a fun way. For example, they taught about ocean currents (and pollution) by talking about 29,000 rubber duckies that fell of a container ship in the Pacific and how they’ve been found from Hawaii to Greenland over time.

I think the best part of the book is the layout. It varies from page to page but really keeps little guys interested when they might not be able to follow whole pages of prose. (And even though I’d said I wasn’t going to read it right then, I found myself peering over his shoulder pointing things out.) And it’s not just about sharks … that was just the teaser.

(Last week the topic he was interested in was space, and with the librarians’ help, I managed to get my hands on a book I read over 25 years ago, The First Travel Guide to the Moon. That was fun.)

March 9, 2011March 9, 2011

RPI students create some cool things

At the Rensselaer Center for Open Source Software students develop open source software solutions to solve societal problems.

For example, at the HFOSS Symposium today I talked to Graylin Kim who is working on the New York Senate Open Legislation Service where people can look up any bill that is being discussed in the New York Senate, get a permanent url to share and discuss on their own websites or grab all the data via REST. The idea is to encourage more citizens to get involved in legislature. Developers can get involved at http://nysenate.gov/developers or #nyss_openlegislation @ Freenode.net for OpenLegislation

I also discovered that Ease, a slide share program for GNOME, that is currently being developed by Nate Stedman. (An earlier version, Glide, was created by an RPI student, Rob Carr.)

You can check out the RPI Center for Open Source and the other projects students are working on. The program was started by a grant from an RPI alum, Sean O’ Sullivan. He started MapInfo (now PBInsight) and JumpStart International (article).

They were at the HFOSS Symposium sharing how their program worked with other educators.

[Post edited for accuracy on March 9, 2011.]

March 6, 2011

Denver Museum promotes Linux

Today we went to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

They had this very cool exhibit where this huge sphere would light up as different planets and moons:

And they could add text to point out locations:

But even cooler yet was they explained how they did it and they used “Linux”. Usually when they list an operating system, I assume it’s a paid advertisement, but in this case it just said “Linux”.