Category: update

Rob Hawkes joined our team. Welcome, Rob!

He’s been getting up to speed with all the cool things going on in Developer Engagement and is really looking forward to settling in and sinking his teeth into the projects that he’s taking on. You can read his blog post about starting at Mozilla (and working remote.)

Some cross-browser testing for the Jetpack SDK docs.

With the Web O Wonder site going away soon, we are refreshing the Demo Studio on MDN to make it more presentable to not just developers, but consumer and the press as well.

With feedback from the community and a focus on bringing more to Web developers on MDN, we have redesigned the MDN home page to emphasize the documentation and demos we have at http://developer.mozilla.org.  With a new header, layout, and messaging about our vendor-neutral approach to community collaboration, we’ll be introducing the new home of MDN at part of the MDN 0.9.6 release as well.

John Karahalis has been encouraging web developers to share their work on the Mozilla Dev Derby, has begun applying Scrum practices within the MDN development team, and will soon be working with MDN users to ensure they will be pleased with the new version of the site.

The MDN Doc Sprint was a success!

Sheppy’s been writing about three versions of Firefox at once! Sometimes literally simultaneously! Woohoo!

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

Have you seen this man?  His name is John Karahalis and he’s from RIT.  He’ll be working with the Dev Engagement team this summer, with a focus on Kuma project management and various engagement efforts around MDN.

Start your engines!  We’ll be launching the Dev Derby developer challenge(s) soon with our first June contest around CSS3 Animations.  Developers will have an opportunity to play with the latest standards and technologies for a chance to win awesome prizes every month!   Next up for July is HTML5 <video> and then Touch on mobile for August.   More details to come… so be ready to spread the word!

Janet presented at the Open Help Conference. She talked about things we’re doing with MDN to engage with developers and community. There was a mix at the conference of people from various open source projects, plus a few who do other documentation and wanted to learn about open source and community.

Sheppy is working on getting old content from mozilla.org migrated to devmo; he has what he hopes is his last test run underway now, so he should be ready to do it for real next week!

John has been working to guide the Kuma team toward a more formal software engineering process. To do this, he has aggregated an official list of planned Kuma features and have written a Scrum guide for the Mozilla community.

John compiled a list of possible authors for the Mozilla Demo Studio and has begun reaching out to development groups that might be interested in contributing to the site.

Willl has been drafting FAQs for the SDK, integrating the AMO style into the docs, and helping to script the videos Dave Mason is recording this week. Starting to think about life after SDK 1.0, and how we can evolve the doc infrastructure to be more open, localizable and portable.

Louis-Rémi has been blogging about the release of Aurora 6 and preparing blog posts about specific features. He’s also taking some time to participate in jQuery development to make sure a large number of developers benefit from the progress Firefox makes in CSS3 and HTML5 support (CSS3 Transitions specifically these days).

Christian spoke at webinale in Berlin and observed his family falling in love with his brother’s puppy. Also sent out some more “people of HTML5” interviews.

Stormy took vacation and went to Huajuapan de Leon with a bunch of Kids on Computers folks to set up two labs and update two existing labs.

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

We finalized the design for the Dev Derby and will be kicking off our first developer challenge with CSS Animations in June.

Here’s how we hold our team meetings:

Published DZSlides V2 Beta (make your slides in HTML5!):

Janet and Sheppy attended the STC summit, where among other things, we had dinner with some of our writer compatriots from Google.

Janet spoke on “(Things to Think About) Before You Pick a Wiki”.

Janet and Sheppy spoke about what it’s like to do “Radically Open Documentation”.

We all attended a work week at the Mozilla offices in Mountain View. We went bowling on a team outing. I tried to take a picture but mobile phone cameras don’t do so well with action shots in dark bowling alleys … (We also spent a lot of time in productive conversations with other Mozillians.)

Have a great week!

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

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

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

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.

Have a great week!

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

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:)

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.

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

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

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