Author: stormy

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Mozilla Developer Engagement Update, March 14, 2011

Louis-Rémi, 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-Rémi, Paul, Sheppy and Stormy

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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

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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.

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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.)

 

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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.]

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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”.

They did not say what software they used to control the images and rotation …

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Mozilla Developer Engagement Update, Feb 28, 2011

Our week in photos.

We had a video conference call between Mountain View, Paris and several individuals. We could understand (and see) everyone! Yeah!

Paul finished the Firefox 4 demos!

We wrote lots of documentation.

We had four web developers in for a visit and hosted brownbags. (We’ll be sharing them on the Hacks blog.)

Created plans for new MDN swag including tshirts and stickers.

We got a hold of 3 of the just released Xoom tablets for showing off demos at SXSW.

Jay took the week off and celebrated his son’s 1st birthday in style!

Have a great week!

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

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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!

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Random highlighting

The Kindle now lets you see what other readers have highlighted. I look forward to the day when I can filter this by what my friends have highlighted.

I find what people highlight in fiction books is baffling. For example, is this quote meaningful to you?

Jace didn’t take his eyes off Simon; there was an electric anger in his gaze, and a sort of challenge that made Simon long to hit him with something heavy. Like a pickup truck.

It was to many others. They highlighted it. Is it memorable because of the pickup truck? If not, why? If so, is that really the most memorable thing they’ve read today? If so, I have a few RSS feeds to recommend.

I love reading things my friends recommend through Twitter and Google Reader. Kindle highlights, which are not by friends but by everybody, have not been so interesting …

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Kindle Covers Reviewed

I reviewed three Kindle covers for my latest generation Kindle 3 Wireless Reading Device and found the perfect one.

Three Kindle covers

I tried out 3 covers, the M-Edge GO!, the M-Edge Latitude and the Belkin Grip Sleeve.

LatitudeThe M-Edge Latitude Kindle Jacket is the one I liked best for my Kindle 2 but unfortunately they changed the material. The new jacket is a lot stiffer, less pleasant to hold and did not fold over very well for reading. So if you have a Kindle 2, I recommend the Latitude jacket, but not for a Kindle 3.

The Kindle does fit very nicely and snugly into the jacket and I felt like it protected my Kindle better than either of the others.

BelkinI also tried a Belkin Grip Kindle Sleeve that I really liked. It was very light, padded and very comfortable to hold. I didn’t however want a sleeve. For sleeves, you take the Kindle completely out in order to read. This means that when you are holding your Kindle, or when you set it down for a second, it’s not protected. I imagined setting it down on the arm of the sofa and then having the dog or one of the kids knock it off. With the sleeve sitting on the table beside it … But if you are looking for a sleeve, I would recommend the Belkin one. It’s light weight, feels nice and has good padding without being bulky.


m-edge

The M-Edge GO! Kindle Jacket is the cover I decided to keep. It’s a very nice pseudo leather and adds no bulk or weight to the Kindle. (An improvement over the Kindle 2 version which was rather heavy.)

I enjoy carrying it in my hand and it fits into my briefcase quite nicely, taking up almost no room at all.


Please let us know what cover you end up buying!