Author: stormy

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Mozilla Developer Engagement, April 25-May 11, 2011

These updates are not meant to be all inclusive updates of everything we’ve done. We’re giving you a snapshot of some of the things we work on …

Janet’s been working on the upcoming Doc Sprint. Preparations are proceeding for the next doc sprint. At least 10 community members are expected in Cincinnati, and several of them are arriving early to attend the Open Help Conference.

In case you are wondering what a doc sprint looks like, here they are hard at work at the last doc sprint. (Rumor has it they had a bit of fun too!)

Please join us at the next one if you’d like to help:

Sheppy continued to make sure you can learn about web technologies:

Will was getting ready to ship the Add-on SDK’s final beta, lots of new APIs.

Christian spoke at a certain company about open web stuff and distributed working.

Jay’s intern John emailed back and is excited to join us in a few weeks!  He starts on May 27 and will be working with us on MDN related projects, including Demo Studio outreach, Kuma development, and other developer research and engagement work.   Jay gave John some homework, so he’ll be ready to go when he gets out to Mountain View at the end of the month!  Now Jay says he just need to let him know he can just call me Jay.  🙂

Christian having fun at the Jax Conference …

And in the time it took me to get out this update, Eric has been busily cranking out content and updating existing material for Firefox 5 and 6.

And Will has been busy working on the last development cycle before Add-on SDK 1.0 ships. He’s been integrating the example add-ons that ship with the SDK into the documentation system.

I had a great time at JSConf where I got to track down a new Fire suit with help from …

… Ryan Snyder. More on our adventure later!

Have a great week!

The Developer Engagement Team
Christian, Janet, Jay, Louis-Rémi, Paul, Sheppy, Will and Stormy

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Book Review: Drive by Dan Pink

I really enjoyed Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Dan Pink. I quote Dan Pink in just about every talk I give ever since I read his book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.

In Drive he talks about rewards as motivation and how they apply to the work place with some pretty startling results. It turns out that really big bonuses actually make us perform worse. People focus so much on the bonus that they get really nervous and do worse.

He also talks about the things that make us perform better like:

  • autonomy (self-direction and being engaged),
  • mastery (getting better at something) and
  • purpose.

He uses open source software projects of examples of how that works.

For an entertaining 10 minute version of the book check out this video:

(I wish I could do presentations like that. I am now working on that!)

Thanks to Barbara Hueppe for the pointer to the video. She passed it on as an excellent example of what motivates communities like Mozilla’s community.

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The secret to my success in a field of men? All my friends. My guy friends.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks talking about why we have so few women in open source and web development and how to encourage more women to join. (I even got to spend an awesome afternoon with a bunch of girls. I was supposed to be mentoring them but they were already Python game developers and small business owners – at the ages of 10 and 15!)

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that I am in this field because I really like the people. And 95% of those people are men and I appreciate them. I appreciate all the help they’ve given me whether they knew they were helping or not!

So I decided it’s time to thank all the men that I appreciate, who have helped me in my interests and my career.

First, there’s my dad. He not only told me I could do whatever I wanted to do, but promised to make sure I had the opportunities. I think he’s always been secretly disappointed I didn’t want to play football.

To my grandpa. He told me it was his sandbox, so I could play in it. He taught me how to defend my right to participate with out a leg to stand on — it wasn’t his sandbox. (And to Chris who taught me how to play toy soldiers in that sandbox. I still consider that to be one of the most boring games I know but it taught me how to steer the game or the conversation in the direction I wanted it to go.)

To my uncle John who saved all his computer magazines. He asked me once if I wanted to organize conferences. I stand by my firm answer of no, you’d have to be crazy. (But I do help out occasionally!)

To my uncle Larry who used to save me boxes of science fiction books. Boxes! Boxes of science fiction books! When you live in Spain and can’t get them that was a treasure.

To my great uncle Ted who was more delighted than I was when I finally managed to beat him in a game of cards.

To my boyfriend Frank who projects complete confidence that I can do anything. Except mow the lawn. But he is willing to get in a small boat in a big ocean with me. And he listens to my excited stories and my gripes and promises to beat up anyone who bothers me. I know he’s got my back.

To all my friends that I hang out with online and at conferences. I couldn’t possibly hope to list you all in one blog post but you’ve made all the difference. Especially those that welcomed me in the beginning. Meeting all the HelixCode guys. An afternoon hanging out with Havoc Pennington and the Eazel guys in Copenhagen trying to stay awake. Dave Neary encouraging me not just to be GNOME Foundation member but to run for the board! I didn’t run for the board then but he did later convince me to apply for the executive director job.  Dinner with Bastien Nocera, Jeff Waugh and Glynn Foster.  A cab ride with Daniel Veillard during which he explained why he didn’t trust OpenOffice. An afternoon hunting for saffron with J5. Conversations with Bradley Kuhn about free software and community and who was always helpful even when I was causing him great grief. All the questions that Vincent Untz answered for me when I started as Executive Director of GNOME – he was probably starting to get worried there! For Luis Villa, Brian Cameron, Lukas Rocha, Germán Póo-Caamaño, Behdad Esfahbod, Diego Escalante Urrelo, who took all my suggestions seriously and never acted like any question was stupid even when they were. For Jeff Schroeder who regularly pings me and encourages me on the ideas I’ve mentioned. For Paul Cutler for always making time to meet in person even when I delayed his trip home! For Ragavan Srinivasan who taught me we can be the ones to start something. And for all my new friends in the world of JavaScript and web development. Dave Herman, Christian Heilmann, Trevor Lalish_Menagh, Robert Nyman, Peter Svensson … Even after I’ve shown I have no clue how to write good JavaScript, you’ve still made me welcome.

And a whole bunch more people that I’ve talked to on IRC, IM, in hallways, over lunch or a beer, … I’m not leaving you out. But I do have to get back to work at some point.

Thanks to all of you. For all the conversations, for all the ideas you’ve shared, ideas you’ve given me feedback on, questions you’ve answered, trust you’ve shown, … I thank you. Hopefully I am successful in returning the favor or passing it on because I think it’s what makes our communities great. It’s what will continue to bring more men and more women to our communities.

That’s why I’m part of these free and open source software communities and why I’ve chosen this career path. For the people in the communities and the way we are making the world a better place together.

And I love the 5% that are women too! But I feel like I owe the guys a special thank you as we don’t often mention how encouraging and helpful they are.

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Mozilla Developer Engagement Update, April 15-24, 2011

Louis-Rémi completed his inventory of the AppCache and showed some demos on stage with Tristan Nitot at the Firefox4 launch party in Paris.

Wrote lots more documentation for Firefox 5 and 6, including material about CSS animations.

Various updates for the Add-on SDK’s final beta, including documentation for the new “passwords” module.

With Luke Crouch and Les Orchard forming an official “team” for MDN webdev, we reviewed all the features for Kuma and decided to take the Firefox team’s “Feature pages” approach to planning and tracking development. We are building out a set of pages for each component and related features on the Kuma wiki to more effectively implement the pieces that will make up MDN 2.0 later this year.

Mark Giffin is helping us write some SpiderMonkey documentation.

Have a great week!

The Developer Engagement Team
Christian, Janet, Jay, Louis-Rémi, Paul, Sheppy, Will and Stormy

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Mozilla Developer Engagement Update, April 4-15, 2011

Will Bamberg joined our team! He will continue working on Jetpack documentation.

Louis-Rémi posted his first blog post on hacks.mozilla.org: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/04/using-client-side-storage-today/

During the Mozilla all-hands meeting, we invited several folks from Google over for lunch: Paul Irish, Alex Komoroske, Kevin Lim, and Kathy Walrath. We talked about how to work together to improve open web technology documentation, especially browser compatibility information. We also shared ours plans for Kuma.

No pictures were taken, but they did bring some HTML5 t-shirts:

(If you want HTML5 pants, see Christian Heilmann.)

Spoke at a few accessibility conferences driving sign language translators nuts. Blogged here: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/04/accessibility-and-web-innovation-a-constant-struggle/

Had a meeting about doc processes. We have some exciting ideas!

Localising and writing documents in other languages

After providing feedback on initial mockups, the MDN Learning pages are taking shape.   Chowse has most of the page design completed and we will be starting implementation soon on the staging server for the landing page + HTML, CSS and JS pages.

Been cranking out Firefox 5 documentation left and right.

Been working on Marble Run port for WoW.

The learn pages continue to evolve and improve.  We are close to wrapping up the MDN 0.9.4 development and are on track for a late April launch.

Set up some HTML, CSS and JavaScript training. Trying it out on Mozilla folks.

Another successful Documentation Sprint focused on compatibility info. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Stormy gave the keynote at CCSCNE to a room full of professors and students.

Photo by Todd Binger

Have a great week!

The Developer Engagement Team
Christian, Janet, Jay, Louis-Rémi, Paul, Sheppy, Will and Stormy

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How to get the right Twitter or Identica followers

I don’t think you should try to get more Twitter or Identica followers just because you want big numbers. But if you are trying to build up a set of followers that will have interesting conversations with you, here’s what I’d recommend:

  1. Follow people you know first.
  2. Add people you are interested in talking to (but don’t know) slowly. You don’t want the number of people following you to drop too far behind the number of people you follow. It’ll make people wonder why all those people don’t follow you.
  3. Have interesting conversations with people. Reply to their tweets/dents.
  4. Don’t make all your tweets the same. If you want, they can all be about the same topic, but it should be a mix of thoughts, observations, replies, etc.
  5. Follow people after you’ve interacted with them, not before. (This one is a bit tricky, but it’s more likely they will follow you this way. They’ll get a notification about you after they’ve interacted with you.)
  6. Don’t follow thousands of people. If you follow 15,000 people, others are unlikely to believe you are looking for conversation.
  7. Tweet primarily in the language of the people you want to talk to. If they check out your profile and don’t see any tweets/dents they understand, they are unlikely to follow you back.
  8. Don’t bug any one person. Or stalk them. Most “conversations” in the microblogging world go back and forth just a few times. Watch for a bit to see how people usually end a conversation.

Or ignore the whole list and just use Identica or Twitter in which ever way is fun for you. That’s what I do.

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Please solve the problem, not the symptoms

[This is not a pro-choice or pro-life post. I would feel exactly the same whether I was pro-life or pro-choice.]

I was reading the Economist and was astounded to see that funding for abortions was a big enough issue to be mentioned as part of an article about the Washington DC economy:

But the latest budget deal largely spared the region’s economy. The federal government will continue to chip in for the city’s rail transit system; but as part of the deal the District can no longer use its own money to pay for abortions. This will hurt the city’s poorer residents

(What the Economist doesn’t say is that the real reason people are upset is not because it will hurt poor people but because (a) it’s a case of the federal government trying to control the city’s budget and (b) it’s part of the whole abortion debate we’ve been having for years.)

But what really struck me was, “wow, how many women in DC get abortions?” I mean, if it’s big enough to impact the city budget, shouldn’t we try to help them not have unwanted pregnancies?

I wasn’t able to find an answer I trust but this obviously biased site claims that DC has 265 abortions for every 100 live births. Wow. And people are worried about whether abortion is legal or not, funded or not, … that’s not the issue. How come so many women end up pregnant that don’t want to? Is it lack of education? Lack of birth control? Relationships that are ending prematurely? Did they want to get pregnant and changed their minds? Did they get pregnant accidentally? Do many women have more than one abortion? What is going on here? Why aren’t we addressing that?

So I think the issue of how the federal government controls DC’s budget is important. But I also think it’s really important to help these women not get pregnant, if they don’t want to be.

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Mozilla Developer Engagement Update, March 28, 2011

Many thanks to Janet Swisher for putting together this update.

Demo Studio is going well without much promotion yet:

We planned a doc sprint for the weekend:

We took delivery of the MDN promo buttons:

Sheppy is working on fixing the WebGL examples based on spec changes:

Christian created a site to urge Windows XP users to upgrade to any modern browser:

And of course, we celebrated the Firefox 4 Desktop launch. Here’s a pic from Paris:

(And now it’s launched on Mobile:)

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Join us for the Kids on Computers Summit in Huajuapan!

Hermes and a student. Hermes is a local volunteer who with a few of his friends maintains all the labs in the area!

Kids on Computers is planning a Kids on Computers Summit in May in Huajuapan de Leon and we need your help!

We have had a lot of success setting up labs in the Huajuapan de Leon area and getting local community involved. Our first school, 18 de Marzo, counts on a lot of parental support. They built the building for the lab and a library and their school has gone from one of the least desirable to one of the most respected. We’ve also set up labs in a school for kids with disabilities and in a boarding school for girls from difficult situations. And we’ve gotten equipment donations from local banks.

The school at Savcitlan de Morelos in the mountains. They have computers but nobody to help them get them set up.

Now what we need is people to help! We have several schools with computers but nobody to set them up. Schools with labs but not much know how. We have local people helping but their time is stretched thin and they could use some help!

We are going down the week of May 23rd to:

  • Take down some new equipment.
  • Set up computers in new labs.
  • Replace broken equipment in existing labs.
  • Teach kids and teachers.
  • Update software, add things like Wikipedia in Spanish to the computers in a school without internet yet.
  • Show excitement, drum up support.
  • Thank all the local people and organizations that have helped.

So we need you! There are all sorts of tasks and we need people that can do any one of the following. (No need to be able to do them all.)

The new building they made for the computers in Savcitlande Morelos. Adults will be able to use the computers in the evenings.
  • Plug in computers, turn them on, make sure they work.
  • Create logins, install software.
  • Swap out a fan or a hard drive.
  • Setup networking.
  • Speak Spanish and translate for other volunteers that don’t speak Spanish.
  • Talk to teachers about how computers can be integrated into education.
  • Run errands, stick Spanish key stickers on American keyboards, clean up cables, pick up boxes, …
  • Use a computer and show someone else how to use a mouse and start a game.

So there is something for everyone and we could use your help! We had a great time on our last trip and we are all looking forward to this one.

Let me know if you’d like to join us. We’d love to have your help!

The first grade class at 18 de Marzo, our first school lab
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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-Rémi met many fellow mozillians both at “café numérique” 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.  Most people had iPhones and were excited to learn about Firefox Home.  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.

Photo by Tantek

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

Have a great week!

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