Developer Engagement at Mozilla

In November I joined the Developer Engagement team at Mozilla. We are working to make sure web developers every where know and use open technologies.

Mozilla’s mission is to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web. On the developer engagement team, we work to make sure web developers can use open technologies to help create open and innovative opportunities for everyone around the world.

We want web developers every where to use open technologies on the web. In order for that to happen we believe we need to raise awareness and provide a place where they can learn, share and discuss open technologies. We want all web developers, new and experienced, to  have good resources for learning about open web technologies, how to use them and why they are important.

Our work will be done when the entire web uses standards like open video, WebGL, SVG and JavaScript instead of proprietary technologies like Adobe Flash.

We do that by:

• Working with existing web developers to spread the word about open technologies. See Christian Heilmann’s People of HTML5 interviews.
• Working with open web experts and documentation contributors to provide awesome documentation about how to use web technologies like JavaScript. See the doc sprint that Janet Swisher just ran.
• Creating a place where developers can come learn and teach about web technologies, Mozilla Developer Network (MDN). Jay Patel is busy keeping it up and adding a place where people can show off and share demos as well.
• Promoting cool technologies and places to learn through our Hacks blog.
• Showing people what cool stuff can be done with open technologies like html5. Paul Rouget spends his time writing demos to show others how to do cool things, helping trouble shoot Mozilla’s technologies and working with others who are also writing demos.
• Documenting all the cool features available. Whenever I ask Eric Shepherd, aka sheppy, what he’s working on, I either get “writing” and I get a huge long list of features that he’s added documentation for.

So who are we?

Christian Heilmann is a long time developer evangelist. He joined Mozilla from Yahoo where he advocated Yahoo’s technologies as the lead evangelist for the Developer Network. He’s written a couple of books on JavaScript, web development and accessibility and released dozens of online articles and hundreds of blog posts in the last few years. You are likely to see him out and about speaking on web technologies. He lives in London.

Jay Patel has been part of the Mozilla community since … well, since it was Netscape. He joined Netscape in 1999. He has a background in engineering,  specifically in QA doing blackbox testing, crash analysis and debugging, and test development.  Over the years his interests led him to project management, marketing and community building.  Jay leads our MDN efforts. He lives in California.

Paul Rouget is a developer evangelist. He writes code, gives talks, finds bugs, helps others and in general has fun with the web! He is well respected and sought out after in the Mozilla community. He lives in Paris.

Eric Shepherd, aka. the Dcoumentation Overlord, aka Sheppy, is the developer documentation lead for Mozilla Corporation. His job is to organize, manage, and create documentation for the Mozilla project. That includes documentation to help web developers create amazing and effective web sites and web applications. He lives in Tennessee.

There’s much more that can be written about open web technologies than a couple of on-staff writers can cover. So Janet Swisher not only writes documentation, she also fosters doc contributions from the broader Mozilla and open web community. She organizes documentation sprints and community meetings for MDN contributors, and reaches out to related projects and communities. She lives in Austin, Texas.

And me, Stormy Peters.

Of course we don’t do this alone. We are joined in our efforts to promote open technologies for the web by Mozillians and web developers world wide.

And we are hiring! So if you’d like to be a developer evangelist, let us know!