Thursday, November 1, 2007
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Club Moz - Tuesday Oct 30, 2007
I hope everyone is rested up well from our week off. It was great to see a few of you at FSOSS last week. We are gearing up for another round of Club Moz sessions to go until exam week in December. Just a reminder that we will be running sessions every Tuesday from 430-6pm in S2119, SEQ Building, Seneca @ York Campus.
This week we will be assisting the Mozilla community with their Bug Day. What is a "Bug Day"?
Come and find out.
Hope to see you there!
This week we will be assisting the Mozilla community with their Bug Day. What is a "Bug Day"?
Come and find out.
Hope to see you there!
Friday, October 26, 2007
FSOSS 07 - Day 2
Well, day 2 is over now. I must say this was truly a spectacular event. Many thanks and gratitude go out to all the efforts of Seneca staff, students, speakers and volunteers that made this even possible. I will definitely be attending next year. This event has only intensified my desire and passion for Open Source.
As with yesterday, the talks were divided into 4 tracks. Since I can only be in one place at once (I know...excuses!), I was able to attend 5 talks.
The first talk I went to today was a about using DHTML (among other technologies) to create open source, accessible, and rich internet applications. This talk was given by two of the accessibility architects for the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto, David Bolter and Simon Bates. I found this talk, and the accompanied demo, to be very interesting. It was pretty cool to see a dynamic menu on a web page being created by the click of a button (or key press) and witnessing a screen reader application effectively interacting with the dynamic menu control. The personal information management demo they provided, based on the DoJo Toolkit, was pretty cool to see as well (drag + drop, animated tree views, tabbed information, inline rich text editing, etc).
The second talk I attended was about the OpenOffice.org community. This talk was interesting because I was able to draw on my experience with Mozilla. Many of the challenges OpenOffice.org is facing in their community, and many of the areas of need that exist for them exist for Mozilla as well. In fact, I suspect, these are parallels that are reflected in many of the open source communities out there and are the needs of the Open Source community as a whole. It was reassuring to hear Louis Suarez-Potts, Community Manager and Chair of the Community Council for OpenOffice.org, talk about the importance of QA. From the outside looking in, I get the feeling that QA folks are the unsung heroes of the software industry. Having been on the inside however, I think we are okay with that; not that I can speak for everyone.
The third talk I attended was a very thought provoking and mind opening experience. It was a talk conducted by Jesse Hirsh, Canadian Internet Evangelist at large, about the "problems" with Open Source. Now this was not a negative talk at all; it was not about why closed source is better than open source or why open source is better than closed source. This was about what needs to be done to extend open source beyond the confines and barriers of the community. I really enjoyed this talk. If you watch any of the video clips on the FSOSS website (see below), watch this one. I won't spoil it for you.
Over the lunch hour, most of us took part in a conversational exercise put on by David Eavesand Mark Surman from the Shuttleworth Foundation. I really enjoyed this exercise. It started with everyone getting in a big circle and introducing ourselves by first name and a colour that described our mood at that point. We did this in turn until everyone had introduced themselves to the group. We then proceeded with the meat of the exercise. There was a line taped down the middle of the room. One end with a 'Y', the other with an 'N'. Each end represented how strongly ones opinions might be for or against an idea given to the group by David. People were asked to stand wherever on the line they personally felt about the idea. Then they were asked to explain why, which resulted in people moving up and down the line; thus, explaining why they moved. This was a really interesting activity in conversation, collaboration, and the exchange of ideas. After this exercise, the talks recommenced.
The fourth talk I attended was given by Bryan Kirschner, Director of Platform Community Strategy at Microsoft. This talk was Microsoft's community and Open Source initiatives. It highlighted some of the technologies that Microsoft is developing (ie. Silverlight) and some of their Open Source initiatives (ie. SharedSource). I found this talk fairly interesting. It was cool to see that Microsoft was making an attempt to reach out to Open Source. I am not 100% convinced that they are well intentioned or whether they are just trying to harness the power of Open Source to minimize profit losses in the face of competition. I do not like to judge a book by it's cover, so I will take this with a grain of salt and see how this plays out.
The fifth talk I attended was scheduled to be a talk by Marcus Bornfreund, Co-director of Creative Commons Canada about Creative Commons and the public domain. Unforunately, Marcus could not make it and had to cancel his talk. Fortunately, one of the FSOSS attendees had been doing research into copyrights and licenscing in an effort to improve the current system. He volunteered to give us a talk and open discussion surrounding these issues. It went real well, considering the impromptu nature of this talk, and actually stimulated quite a bit of honest and open discussion.
This led into the final keynote of the event conducted by Dirk Riehle, Lead of the Open Source Research Group at SAP Labs. While I enjoyed Bob Young's keynote yesterday on a much more personal level, I found Dirk's keynote to be very informative. He talked about open source economics from the perspective of the stakeholder. It definitely gave me another window into the Open Source community.
I really enjoyed this entire event, even if it did mean getting up for 8:15am both days on my week off. I hope I can participate in an event like this again sometime soon.
I have added more pictures from today's talks. Feel free to check them out here. You can also see them using the fsoss2007 flickr feed posted yesterday.
All of the talks are online and available here. I have proposed to David Humphrey that we put these videos onto DVD format so that we can distribute the talks to folks who may benefit from them that do not want to sit through a lengthy download process. Some of the Mozilla folks that were unable to attend come to mind. Please feel free to comment to this post if you think this might be something of interest.
I would again like to extend a sincere thank you out to everyone who made this event possible. I cannot wait until FSOSS 08.
As with yesterday, the talks were divided into 4 tracks. Since I can only be in one place at once (I know...excuses!), I was able to attend 5 talks.
The first talk I went to today was a about using DHTML (among other technologies) to create open source, accessible, and rich internet applications. This talk was given by two of the accessibility architects for the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto, David Bolter and Simon Bates. I found this talk, and the accompanied demo, to be very interesting. It was pretty cool to see a dynamic menu on a web page being created by the click of a button (or key press) and witnessing a screen reader application effectively interacting with the dynamic menu control. The personal information management demo they provided, based on the DoJo Toolkit, was pretty cool to see as well (drag + drop, animated tree views, tabbed information, inline rich text editing, etc).
The second talk I attended was about the OpenOffice.org community. This talk was interesting because I was able to draw on my experience with Mozilla. Many of the challenges OpenOffice.org is facing in their community, and many of the areas of need that exist for them exist for Mozilla as well. In fact, I suspect, these are parallels that are reflected in many of the open source communities out there and are the needs of the Open Source community as a whole. It was reassuring to hear Louis Suarez-Potts, Community Manager and Chair of the Community Council for OpenOffice.org, talk about the importance of QA. From the outside looking in, I get the feeling that QA folks are the unsung heroes of the software industry. Having been on the inside however, I think we are okay with that; not that I can speak for everyone.
The third talk I attended was a very thought provoking and mind opening experience. It was a talk conducted by Jesse Hirsh, Canadian Internet Evangelist at large, about the "problems" with Open Source. Now this was not a negative talk at all; it was not about why closed source is better than open source or why open source is better than closed source. This was about what needs to be done to extend open source beyond the confines and barriers of the community. I really enjoyed this talk. If you watch any of the video clips on the FSOSS website (see below), watch this one. I won't spoil it for you.
Over the lunch hour, most of us took part in a conversational exercise put on by David Eavesand Mark Surman from the Shuttleworth Foundation. I really enjoyed this exercise. It started with everyone getting in a big circle and introducing ourselves by first name and a colour that described our mood at that point. We did this in turn until everyone had introduced themselves to the group. We then proceeded with the meat of the exercise. There was a line taped down the middle of the room. One end with a 'Y', the other with an 'N'. Each end represented how strongly ones opinions might be for or against an idea given to the group by David. People were asked to stand wherever on the line they personally felt about the idea. Then they were asked to explain why, which resulted in people moving up and down the line; thus, explaining why they moved. This was a really interesting activity in conversation, collaboration, and the exchange of ideas. After this exercise, the talks recommenced.
The fourth talk I attended was given by Bryan Kirschner, Director of Platform Community Strategy at Microsoft. This talk was Microsoft's community and Open Source initiatives. It highlighted some of the technologies that Microsoft is developing (ie. Silverlight) and some of their Open Source initiatives (ie. SharedSource). I found this talk fairly interesting. It was cool to see that Microsoft was making an attempt to reach out to Open Source. I am not 100% convinced that they are well intentioned or whether they are just trying to harness the power of Open Source to minimize profit losses in the face of competition. I do not like to judge a book by it's cover, so I will take this with a grain of salt and see how this plays out.
The fifth talk I attended was scheduled to be a talk by Marcus Bornfreund, Co-director of Creative Commons Canada about Creative Commons and the public domain. Unforunately, Marcus could not make it and had to cancel his talk. Fortunately, one of the FSOSS attendees had been doing research into copyrights and licenscing in an effort to improve the current system. He volunteered to give us a talk and open discussion surrounding these issues. It went real well, considering the impromptu nature of this talk, and actually stimulated quite a bit of honest and open discussion.
This led into the final keynote of the event conducted by Dirk Riehle, Lead of the Open Source Research Group at SAP Labs. While I enjoyed Bob Young's keynote yesterday on a much more personal level, I found Dirk's keynote to be very informative. He talked about open source economics from the perspective of the stakeholder. It definitely gave me another window into the Open Source community.
I really enjoyed this entire event, even if it did mean getting up for 8:15am both days on my week off. I hope I can participate in an event like this again sometime soon.
I have added more pictures from today's talks. Feel free to check them out here. You can also see them using the fsoss2007 flickr feed posted yesterday.
All of the talks are online and available here. I have proposed to David Humphrey that we put these videos onto DVD format so that we can distribute the talks to folks who may benefit from them that do not want to sit through a lengthy download process. Some of the Mozilla folks that were unable to attend come to mind. Please feel free to comment to this post if you think this might be something of interest.
I would again like to extend a sincere thank you out to everyone who made this event possible. I cannot wait until FSOSS 08.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
FSOSS 07 - Day 1
Well today was rather interesting. It was my first FSOSS (Free Software and Open Source Symposium) and I must say I had a blast. For those of you the may be unfamiliar, Seneca College (based in Toronto, Canada) invites members of the Open Source community to a two day sharing of ideas and information. This year attracted speakers from Mozilla, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, the Shuttleworth Foundation, and even Rob Young (Red-hat father).
Since there are so many speakers, the event has to be divided into 4 tracks (A,B,C, and a workshop track). I attended talks about usability, Facebook's thrift framework, Open Education in South Africa, OpenKomodo, and of course the Keynote by Rob Young. All of them were very interesting, however I have to give the award of most entertaining speaker to Mr. Young. From looking around the room, I do not think his talk fell on any deaf ears. Everyone in the room gave 100% attention to him for the entire hour (especially when he was asked his opinion of Linux's alleged "patent infringements).
I was able to snap some pictures which can be found here. There is also a flickr feed of pictures from FSOSS. The tag is "fsoss 2007".
To top it all off, I won a ticket to see tonight's Raptor's game and they kicked ass! I have uploaded some pictures of that here.
A brilliant success for the first day. Thanks to the speakers and everyone who helped to organize this event. I cannot wait to see what tomorrow holds.
Stay tuned for my report on Day 2.
Since there are so many speakers, the event has to be divided into 4 tracks (A,B,C, and a workshop track). I attended talks about usability, Facebook's thrift framework, Open Education in South Africa, OpenKomodo, and of course the Keynote by Rob Young. All of them were very interesting, however I have to give the award of most entertaining speaker to Mr. Young. From looking around the room, I do not think his talk fell on any deaf ears. Everyone in the room gave 100% attention to him for the entire hour (especially when he was asked his opinion of Linux's alleged "patent infringements).
I was able to snap some pictures which can be found here. There is also a flickr feed of pictures from FSOSS. The tag is "fsoss 2007".
To top it all off, I won a ticket to see tonight's Raptor's game and they kicked ass! I have uploaded some pictures of that here.
A brilliant success for the first day. Thanks to the speakers and everyone who helped to organize this event. I cannot wait to see what tomorrow holds.
Stay tuned for my report on Day 2.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Club Moz - Tuesday Oct 16, 2007
Hey folks! Your friendly neighbourhood Club Moz President here. I wanted to let everyone know that we will be having our second Club Moz session on Tuesday Oct 16th in room S2119 from 430-6. The room will actually be open at 330, so feel free to stop on by early. I have class until 415, so I will show up shortly after.
We had a session last week, but I suspect that after oh so much turkey, most folks forgot that Tuesday Oct 9 was the first session. Unfortunately we only had one person show up. I take responsibility for that as I should have ensured there was an announcement up on the CS main page and My.Seneca. I am working to rectify this today.
Due to this poor showing, we are going to be using last week's agenda for this week: An Introduction to IRC, and Seneca Testday - An Introduction to Litmus via Firefox 3.0 alpha 9 pre.
Anyone who is not interested in these items is free to show up and find a project that they want to work on.
If you don't know how you want to get involved, but you do have certain interest areas, we will help find a project that is catered to what you want to do.
If you just want to come and hack away, feel free to stop by and hack away. All are welcome!
I hope to see some of you folks here tomorrow.
Cheers!
We had a session last week, but I suspect that after oh so much turkey, most folks forgot that Tuesday Oct 9 was the first session. Unfortunately we only had one person show up. I take responsibility for that as I should have ensured there was an announcement up on the CS main page and My.Seneca. I am working to rectify this today.
Due to this poor showing, we are going to be using last week's agenda for this week: An Introduction to IRC, and Seneca Testday - An Introduction to Litmus via Firefox 3.0 alpha 9 pre.
Anyone who is not interested in these items is free to show up and find a project that they want to work on.
If you don't know how you want to get involved, but you do have certain interest areas, we will help find a project that is catered to what you want to do.
If you just want to come and hack away, feel free to stop by and hack away. All are welcome!
I hope to see some of you folks here tomorrow.
Cheers!
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Club Moz Presentation
Well, I have to say, today was a great success. Even though the announcement did not go out to the Computer Studies website until it was too late, we still had about 15-20 people turn up. I would like to thank everyone that came out and hope to see you folks again on Tuesday.
I have received a lot of great feedback from faculty and enthusiasm from attendees to contribute. This is great. Armen, Cesar and I will probably continue giving this presentation to other classes throughout the year and perhaps do another large scale one as we did today.
If anyone missed the presentation today, no worries. Come out to room S2119 on Tuesday Oct 9th. We welcome all!
We were able to snap a couple post presentation photos. Here they are, for your enjoyment.
Dave and I
Armen and I
Cesar, Dave and I
Anyway, I hope everyone had a good time and I really look forward to where we are going.
Cheers!
I have received a lot of great feedback from faculty and enthusiasm from attendees to contribute. This is great. Armen, Cesar and I will probably continue giving this presentation to other classes throughout the year and perhaps do another large scale one as we did today.
If anyone missed the presentation today, no worries. Come out to room S2119 on Tuesday Oct 9th. We welcome all!
We were able to snap a couple post presentation photos. Here they are, for your enjoyment.
Dave and I
Armen and I
Cesar, Dave and I
Anyway, I hope everyone had a good time and I really look forward to where we are going.
Cheers!
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Club Moz presentation follow up
Just a follow up to yesterday's post regarding Club Moz.
Myself, Armen, and Cesar will be giving a presentation about Club Moz tomorrow (Thurs Oct 4th) at 3:30pm EST in room S1209 of the SEQ building at Seneca@York.
All Seneca students and faculty, and Mozilla Toronto employees are free to attend. There will be a Q+A session following the presentation as well as free pizza and pop.
I hope to see some of you there.
Myself, Armen, and Cesar will be giving a presentation about Club Moz tomorrow (Thurs Oct 4th) at 3:30pm EST in room S1209 of the SEQ building at Seneca@York.
All Seneca students and faculty, and Mozilla Toronto employees are free to attend. There will be a Q+A session following the presentation as well as free pizza and pop.
I hope to see some of you there.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Club Moz, FSOSS, and things to come
Well, it has been a while. I am still trying to settle into a groove here back in Canada. I am finding it to be increasingly difficult, however I am pushing on.
Over the last month, I have been working hard to get Club Moz started back up again. I am happy to say that Club Moz now has a member board organized, a dedicated computer lab and a pretty solid action plan. Here are some of the basics of that action plan:
- meetings every tuesday from 330-6pm
- every meeting to include a "Seneca Testday" or "Seneca Bugday" designed to both mirror and supplement the Mozilla test/bug days, as well as give students an introduction to the tools commonly used by QA. The first test day will be a general Minefield test day so students can wet their palette a little before diving deep into a certain feature. Thanks Tomcat for helping us out with this.
- workshops to introduce students to the tools of the trade. The first workshop will be an intro to IRC.
- provide students with the support and guidance they need to become involved in Mozilla projects
- provide students in the Open Source course at Seneca with a couple hours a week where they can get help and work on their projects
- show students that Mozilla is not just Firefox and help them pursue other "Mozilla-based" projects if interested (Songbird, Thunderbird, Flock, Joost, Miro, etc)
- show students that Mozilla is not just coding for Firefox (QA, Webdev, documentation, extensions/themes, etc)
This list is a work in progress. We will have a better idea, more specifically, of what we are actually going to be doing once we get started.
As far as promoting Club Moz and Mozilla at the school, the QA Flyer has finally been posted around the school. This was put up late last week and we are now preparing a presentation to be given at one of the theatre rooms at Seneca.
Here are some of the highlights of the presentation:
- My Mozilla Journey
- Cesar's Mozilla Journey
- What is Club Moz and what do we do?
- How can you help?
- Other Mozilla project demos (Thunderbird, Songbird, Flock, Joost, Miro)
- Networking, Experience, Academic opportunities of becoming involved
- Testdays, Bugdays, Hackdays
Since we submitted to the Seneca Student Federation (SSF) for official club status, I am hoping that we can get some free pizza for the presentation. I also have some swag available for handing out to people that show up.
It should be stated, that while I am targeting this presentation toward students and perspective members of Club Moz, I will be welcoming faculty members to come out to see the presentation so they can see what we are doing.
The Club Moz board is having a meeting tomorrow evening to finalize on the details of the presentation and start a couple day promotion plan. This will most likely include passing word around to faculty of Seneca to pass onto their students as well as posting announcements on the school's website.
I am really looking forward to getting this started up. All of the Club Moz board members have put in a lot of planning, personal time and effort to get to where we are today. This should be less taxing on us once we get the ball rolling.
I hope to see some of you folks at FSOSS this year. It takes place on Oct 25th and 26th at Seneca College and I will be volunteering, so I hope to see some of you there!
As far as the future, I will be using this blog for Club Moz updates, so stay tuned. If any Mozillans want to stop by for one of our sessions to see what we are doing or to lend a helping hand, I would be very interested in talking more about this. Just ping me on irc (ashughes).
Anyway, I have neglected my homework for far too long tonight.
Cheers!
Over the last month, I have been working hard to get Club Moz started back up again. I am happy to say that Club Moz now has a member board organized, a dedicated computer lab and a pretty solid action plan. Here are some of the basics of that action plan:
- meetings every tuesday from 330-6pm
- every meeting to include a "Seneca Testday" or "Seneca Bugday" designed to both mirror and supplement the Mozilla test/bug days, as well as give students an introduction to the tools commonly used by QA. The first test day will be a general Minefield test day so students can wet their palette a little before diving deep into a certain feature. Thanks Tomcat for helping us out with this.
- workshops to introduce students to the tools of the trade. The first workshop will be an intro to IRC.
- provide students with the support and guidance they need to become involved in Mozilla projects
- provide students in the Open Source course at Seneca with a couple hours a week where they can get help and work on their projects
- show students that Mozilla is not just Firefox and help them pursue other "Mozilla-based" projects if interested (Songbird, Thunderbird, Flock, Joost, Miro, etc)
- show students that Mozilla is not just coding for Firefox (QA, Webdev, documentation, extensions/themes, etc)
This list is a work in progress. We will have a better idea, more specifically, of what we are actually going to be doing once we get started.
As far as promoting Club Moz and Mozilla at the school, the QA Flyer has finally been posted around the school. This was put up late last week and we are now preparing a presentation to be given at one of the theatre rooms at Seneca.
Here are some of the highlights of the presentation:
- My Mozilla Journey
- Cesar's Mozilla Journey
- What is Club Moz and what do we do?
- How can you help?
- Other Mozilla project demos (Thunderbird, Songbird, Flock, Joost, Miro)
- Networking, Experience, Academic opportunities of becoming involved
- Testdays, Bugdays, Hackdays
Since we submitted to the Seneca Student Federation (SSF) for official club status, I am hoping that we can get some free pizza for the presentation. I also have some swag available for handing out to people that show up.
It should be stated, that while I am targeting this presentation toward students and perspective members of Club Moz, I will be welcoming faculty members to come out to see the presentation so they can see what we are doing.
The Club Moz board is having a meeting tomorrow evening to finalize on the details of the presentation and start a couple day promotion plan. This will most likely include passing word around to faculty of Seneca to pass onto their students as well as posting announcements on the school's website.
I am really looking forward to getting this started up. All of the Club Moz board members have put in a lot of planning, personal time and effort to get to where we are today. This should be less taxing on us once we get the ball rolling.
I hope to see some of you folks at FSOSS this year. It takes place on Oct 25th and 26th at Seneca College and I will be volunteering, so I hope to see some of you there!
As far as the future, I will be using this blog for Club Moz updates, so stay tuned. If any Mozillans want to stop by for one of our sessions to see what we are doing or to lend a helping hand, I would be very interested in talking more about this. Just ping me on irc (ashughes).
Anyway, I have neglected my homework for far too long tonight.
Cheers!
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Great White North
Well, I am back on the ground in Canada. It is great to be home! What a great summer! I really enjoyed my summer at Mozilla. I learned a great deal, accomplished a lot, and had quite a few laughs. As I am writing this, I am kind of torn. On one hand, I am glad to be back at school. Progress is good, and we all like progress. On the other hand, I am really going to miss Mozilla, the people, and the weather :D
You may be wondering whether or not I will continue to be involved with the Mozilla Project, being back at school and the workload that entails. I can tell you that I remain fully committed to the Mozilla Project. I obviously will not be able to contribute to the Mozilla Project on the same level that I was while in Mountain View over the Summer, however I want to help out with QA efforts about an hour each day or about 6-10 hours a week. More specifically, I am planning on contributing through Bug Days and Test Days, as well as helping with community outreach through the Campus Reps program and becoming much more involved with Club Moz at Seneca College.
As far as Club Moz is concerned, I am going to be having meetings with people in the coming days to figure out what we want to do with Club Moz this year. I will use this blog space to update the community on what is going on with Club Moz.
As far as community outreach is concerned, I am currently working on a joint event with the York University Campus Rep to piggyback on their Frosh Week to hand out some gear.
I also have a bunch of the QA fliers to get posted around the school. I am still working with the Student Federation on getting those posted.
At this point I would like to extend a sincere thank you to everyone at Mozilla that made everything that I accomplished this Summer possible. I am truly appreciative of all the support, advice and knowledge that was given to me throughout the Summer. Mozilla truly is a family and everyone at Mozilla made me feel like an important member of that family.
Thank you very much and have a great Fall/Winter.
Cheers.
You may be wondering whether or not I will continue to be involved with the Mozilla Project, being back at school and the workload that entails. I can tell you that I remain fully committed to the Mozilla Project. I obviously will not be able to contribute to the Mozilla Project on the same level that I was while in Mountain View over the Summer, however I want to help out with QA efforts about an hour each day or about 6-10 hours a week. More specifically, I am planning on contributing through Bug Days and Test Days, as well as helping with community outreach through the Campus Reps program and becoming much more involved with Club Moz at Seneca College.
As far as Club Moz is concerned, I am going to be having meetings with people in the coming days to figure out what we want to do with Club Moz this year. I will use this blog space to update the community on what is going on with Club Moz.
As far as community outreach is concerned, I am currently working on a joint event with the York University Campus Rep to piggyback on their Frosh Week to hand out some gear.
I also have a bunch of the QA fliers to get posted around the school. I am still working with the Student Federation on getting those posted.
At this point I would like to extend a sincere thank you to everyone at Mozilla that made everything that I accomplished this Summer possible. I am truly appreciative of all the support, advice and knowledge that was given to me throughout the Summer. Mozilla truly is a family and everyone at Mozilla made me feel like an important member of that family.
Thank you very much and have a great Fall/Winter.
Cheers.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
All Hands
Well, this week was the Mozilla All Hands event. It was actually my very first All Hands event...ever! I have never experienced anything quite like it. For anyone that has never heard of the concept of an All Hands, it is essentially bringing everyone that is an employee together for information, education, team building, and fun. I have been to company events with the various companies where I have found myself to be employed, however this one dwarfs them all.
I really do not know how this event was organized so well. I mean, the logistics of this event must have been a nightmare undertaking on its own. Half of Mozilla employees do not actually live in Mountain View. Mozilla is an international company with employees all over the world. With other offices in Canada, Europe, China and Japan (to name a few), and employees everywhere in between; it must have been a massive undertaking to not only organize their transportation to and from Mountain View, but their accommodations, meals during the three day event, and transportation to and from the off site events that were scheduled. Kudos to whomever organized all of this. It could not have been easy. From my point of view everything went really smooth.
The Mozilla All Hands was a three day event, starting on Tuesday and ending on Thursday. The days were filled with talks ranging from Intern Show and Tells, the state of Mozilla and Firefox, the Spread Firefox initiative, RSS, the No Asshole Rule, and everything in between. After the days were complete, there was a fun event planned for the evening. The first night was an evening out in Palo Alto. The second night was a fun filled evening with the 1954 film "Gojira". The final evening was quite interesting. We all took part in team building event called "Hands On Gourmet". This event took place at a beautiful location nestled in the mountains of Los Gatos. It involved laughs, drinks and each of us cooking our own food. We were divided into several groups who shared in the responsibility of making a specific dish. The team I was part of was in charge of making the pecan pies. The secret ingredient for the pie was whiskey and they were very tasty.
On the second night, the Gojira night, I actually took part in another off-site event. This was a QA team building event. Most of the QA folks went to Cupertino and had a fun night of bowling and arcade games. It was a lot of fun. Kudos to Tim for planning the event. I think everyone had great time. I discovered that I didn't suck any more or any less at bowling than I did the last time I played.
The whole All Hands was a really interesting experience and I learned a lot. It was great to finally meet the people I had chatted with so much on irc. Mozilla really has a great crowd of people.
Anyway, stay tuned for my next blog post, "a review of my internship".
Cheers
I really do not know how this event was organized so well. I mean, the logistics of this event must have been a nightmare undertaking on its own. Half of Mozilla employees do not actually live in Mountain View. Mozilla is an international company with employees all over the world. With other offices in Canada, Europe, China and Japan (to name a few), and employees everywhere in between; it must have been a massive undertaking to not only organize their transportation to and from Mountain View, but their accommodations, meals during the three day event, and transportation to and from the off site events that were scheduled. Kudos to whomever organized all of this. It could not have been easy. From my point of view everything went really smooth.
The Mozilla All Hands was a three day event, starting on Tuesday and ending on Thursday. The days were filled with talks ranging from Intern Show and Tells, the state of Mozilla and Firefox, the Spread Firefox initiative, RSS, the No Asshole Rule, and everything in between. After the days were complete, there was a fun event planned for the evening. The first night was an evening out in Palo Alto. The second night was a fun filled evening with the 1954 film "Gojira". The final evening was quite interesting. We all took part in team building event called "Hands On Gourmet". This event took place at a beautiful location nestled in the mountains of Los Gatos. It involved laughs, drinks and each of us cooking our own food. We were divided into several groups who shared in the responsibility of making a specific dish. The team I was part of was in charge of making the pecan pies. The secret ingredient for the pie was whiskey and they were very tasty.
On the second night, the Gojira night, I actually took part in another off-site event. This was a QA team building event. Most of the QA folks went to Cupertino and had a fun night of bowling and arcade games. It was a lot of fun. Kudos to Tim for planning the event. I think everyone had great time. I discovered that I didn't suck any more or any less at bowling than I did the last time I played.
The whole All Hands was a really interesting experience and I learned a lot. It was great to finally meet the people I had chatted with so much on irc. Mozilla really has a great crowd of people.
Anyway, stay tuned for my next blog post, "a review of my internship".
Cheers
Monday, August 13, 2007
Firedrills, Spreadsheets and Songbird...oh my!
Okay, okay! I know I have not blogged as much as I said I would, but I have been teh busy. To start with, I have prepared a short-list for your viewing pleasure. The following is a list of items I will cover in this blog post:
Firedrills...
Firedrills are interesting to say the least. I am actually glad that I was able to experience a firedrill or two, or three while I am here.
What is a firedrill? I am glad you asked. A firedrill is an accelerated point release. A typical point release schedule is 6 to 8 weeks. This means that from the time a point release is out, our next point release is typically planned for 6 to 8 weeks from that date.
So what is involved with a point release? Well there is a lot of QA work that goes into a point release. There is update testing, localization testing, smoketesting and basic functional testing. A typical point release involves about a week of QA dedicating most of its' resources to this task. It involves a lot of man hours.
This description really doesn't do the people working on a point release justice, however it gives you a real basic idea of how it works.
Now that you have a basic understanding of what goes into a point release, from a QA standpoint, a firedrill compresses that 6 to 8 week window down to a window of typically one to two weeks, or as Shaver put it "10 days". Of course, we try to get a release out as soon as possible. To ensure quality we usually make it within the one to two week window. This has certainly been the case for the firedrills for which I have been involved. This one or two week window is not just QA either. Everything that takes place in a point release has to happen in these one or two weeks leaving QA only a few days to do testing. It makes for many late nights and sometimes a few weekends. But all of our efforts usually pay off.
What warrants a point release being dubbed a firedrill? Typically it boils down to a security issue or some sort of bug in our code that could be used to harm users. In this instance, it was related to how protocol URIs were being handled when escaping quotes or being passed null values. I will get into this a little bit more later.
As I said earlier, I actually was glad that I was exposed to not one but two firedrills. No, I am not insane. The experience I gained from not only watching but being an active participant in dealing with multiple firedrills is invaluable. I was really able to learn a lot. It was also good to see that we put just as much care into Thunderbird as we do Firefox.
In the end, I believe we have done excellent work in protecting our users against potential flaws. Kudos to everyone involved with this massive effort.
So...spreadsheets *shiver*
Now don't get me wrong. I like spreadsheets as much as the next guy, but this thing was massive. I mean gargantuan! 8 columns times 498 rows comes out to 3984 tests. This was all in an effort to discover what sort of behaviour to expect when firefox 2, internet explorer 6, internet explorer 7, and the command line were passed 498 different protocol handler strings on windows XP and vista. Either way you slice it, it involved about 5 of us spending at least 40 hours each in 3 days to complete. Since we started this late on a Friday, some of us, myself included, came in on Saturday and Sunday so that we were able to complete this exhaustive set of tests late Monday (ahead of schedule). Again, kudos to everyone involved with this effort. That spreadsheet seemed to go on forever, but we were able to complete it and I think it was quite an effective tool. I just hope that in the future we can automate these sorts of tests.
So now, onto some of the lighter hearted events of the last month.
First off, the Intern Brown Bag. This was the first part of a three part series of interns presenting to the Mozilla employees what they had been working on for the Summer. Why three parts? There are so many of us, that's why. We are an intern army! Anyway, 9 of the interns presented what they had been working on for the summer and I have to say, it was really interesting to see the many varied projects that people were working on. There is really so much to do that not one intern was working on the same project, even though there is so many of us. I originally didn't think I had all that much to talk about. I seriously thought to myself, "this isn't even gonna fill three minutes". But I typed up a list of what I had actually accomplished this Summer and I was actually quite impressed. I was able to fill a good 10 minutes of talking time, enthralling the other interns and Mozilla employees. The entire brown bag was recorded and I have a copy of that video. I am still working on getting my section extracted from the video so it is small enough that it can be posted. The long and short of it is that I learned a lot about QA, had a blast doing it, and look forward to continued work in the Mozilla QA community.
The second item of interest was the Intern BBQ which followed soon after. This was organized fairly quickly after an email of disappointment was passed around from Karen to the intern population. What can I say? We aim to please! The intention of the BBQ was to thank the Mozilla employees for the great summer by giving them an evening of RnR at the Oakwood apartments with food and drink prepared and served by their loving interns. From all the feedback we received, it was a fun time had by all. Andrew Stein, one of the marketing interns, was able to snap some great pictures which can be found on my flickr here.
The third event, taking place just this last week, was the Mozilla invasion of a San Francisco Giants game. This was an awesome event. We all loaded onto a bus, enjoyed a brief tailgate party outside the stadium, then went in and watched a rather inactive game of baseball. This game saw the Giants falling to Washington by 3 to 1 (HA!) and saw Mr. Bonds getting out faster than it took him to come up to the plate (double HA!). At it's heart, this event was more about us all getting out and having a good time. I think it was safe to say that we all had a blast.
The fourth event, taking place this past Friday was another Mozillan invasion. This time of Songbird's new office in San Francisco. This was an awesome party. I was actually surprised how many people showed up. I figured there would be mostly Songbird people and Mozilla people there, with Mozilla people outnumbering the Songbird people. There was quite a crowd there. Great music, lots of laughs, a bike blender, great people, and a new found love for Mojitos. The Songbird folks have found a great new nest and I wish them the best of luck. I myself love the Songbird application (built on Mozilla no less) and encourage everyone to at least try it out. Not that any of them read my blog, but keep up the great work guys. It truly gets better with each release.
The final event of this whirlwind month was a rather relaxing afternoon at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. This was quite an interesting, if not geeky, stroll through the history of technology. It was really neat to see some of the relics that I had heard so much about in my freshman computer classes. If you want to see some pictures, I snapped quite a few. They can be found here. What was most interesting wasn't how bulky and obese computers used to be, it was how far technology has come in such a long time. It was really amazing and I encourage anyone visiting the area to check it out. It doesn't cost a cent and will easily eat up a couple hours on a lazy afternoon.
Anyway, I think I am finally done rambling on about what I have experienced in the last month or so. I hope I didn't put you to sleep too much this time. It is probably 10 times more daunting to read through all of this as it was for me to write it, however I am happy you made it this far. I am planning two more posts before I head back to Canada, which will be much shorter than this one. The first will be my take on what an All-hands is all about. The second, and the final post for my internship, will be my final thoughts on the internship.
Cheers!
PS.
You can find slideshow versions of all my pictures at the top of the page (if you feel so inclined).
- Firedrills
- Protocol Handler Testing
- Intern Brown Bag
- Intern BBQ
- Giants Game
- Songbird Party
- Computer History Museum
Firedrills...
Firedrills are interesting to say the least. I am actually glad that I was able to experience a firedrill or two, or three while I am here.
What is a firedrill? I am glad you asked. A firedrill is an accelerated point release. A typical point release schedule is 6 to 8 weeks. This means that from the time a point release is out, our next point release is typically planned for 6 to 8 weeks from that date.
So what is involved with a point release? Well there is a lot of QA work that goes into a point release. There is update testing, localization testing, smoketesting and basic functional testing. A typical point release involves about a week of QA dedicating most of its' resources to this task. It involves a lot of man hours.
This description really doesn't do the people working on a point release justice, however it gives you a real basic idea of how it works.
Now that you have a basic understanding of what goes into a point release, from a QA standpoint, a firedrill compresses that 6 to 8 week window down to a window of typically one to two weeks, or as Shaver put it "10 days". Of course, we try to get a release out as soon as possible. To ensure quality we usually make it within the one to two week window. This has certainly been the case for the firedrills for which I have been involved. This one or two week window is not just QA either. Everything that takes place in a point release has to happen in these one or two weeks leaving QA only a few days to do testing. It makes for many late nights and sometimes a few weekends. But all of our efforts usually pay off.
What warrants a point release being dubbed a firedrill? Typically it boils down to a security issue or some sort of bug in our code that could be used to harm users. In this instance, it was related to how protocol URIs were being handled when escaping quotes or being passed null values. I will get into this a little bit more later.
As I said earlier, I actually was glad that I was exposed to not one but two firedrills. No, I am not insane. The experience I gained from not only watching but being an active participant in dealing with multiple firedrills is invaluable. I was really able to learn a lot. It was also good to see that we put just as much care into Thunderbird as we do Firefox.
In the end, I believe we have done excellent work in protecting our users against potential flaws. Kudos to everyone involved with this massive effort.
So...spreadsheets *shiver*
Now don't get me wrong. I like spreadsheets as much as the next guy, but this thing was massive. I mean gargantuan! 8 columns times 498 rows comes out to 3984 tests. This was all in an effort to discover what sort of behaviour to expect when firefox 2, internet explorer 6, internet explorer 7, and the command line were passed 498 different protocol handler strings on windows XP and vista. Either way you slice it, it involved about 5 of us spending at least 40 hours each in 3 days to complete. Since we started this late on a Friday, some of us, myself included, came in on Saturday and Sunday so that we were able to complete this exhaustive set of tests late Monday (ahead of schedule). Again, kudos to everyone involved with this effort. That spreadsheet seemed to go on forever, but we were able to complete it and I think it was quite an effective tool. I just hope that in the future we can automate these sorts of tests.
So now, onto some of the lighter hearted events of the last month.
First off, the Intern Brown Bag. This was the first part of a three part series of interns presenting to the Mozilla employees what they had been working on for the Summer. Why three parts? There are so many of us, that's why. We are an intern army! Anyway, 9 of the interns presented what they had been working on for the summer and I have to say, it was really interesting to see the many varied projects that people were working on. There is really so much to do that not one intern was working on the same project, even though there is so many of us. I originally didn't think I had all that much to talk about. I seriously thought to myself, "this isn't even gonna fill three minutes". But I typed up a list of what I had actually accomplished this Summer and I was actually quite impressed. I was able to fill a good 10 minutes of talking time, enthralling the other interns and Mozilla employees. The entire brown bag was recorded and I have a copy of that video. I am still working on getting my section extracted from the video so it is small enough that it can be posted. The long and short of it is that I learned a lot about QA, had a blast doing it, and look forward to continued work in the Mozilla QA community.
The second item of interest was the Intern BBQ which followed soon after. This was organized fairly quickly after an email of disappointment was passed around from Karen to the intern population. What can I say? We aim to please! The intention of the BBQ was to thank the Mozilla employees for the great summer by giving them an evening of RnR at the Oakwood apartments with food and drink prepared and served by their loving interns. From all the feedback we received, it was a fun time had by all. Andrew Stein, one of the marketing interns, was able to snap some great pictures which can be found on my flickr here.
The third event, taking place just this last week, was the Mozilla invasion of a San Francisco Giants game. This was an awesome event. We all loaded onto a bus, enjoyed a brief tailgate party outside the stadium, then went in and watched a rather inactive game of baseball. This game saw the Giants falling to Washington by 3 to 1 (HA!) and saw Mr. Bonds getting out faster than it took him to come up to the plate (double HA!). At it's heart, this event was more about us all getting out and having a good time. I think it was safe to say that we all had a blast.
The fourth event, taking place this past Friday was another Mozillan invasion. This time of Songbird's new office in San Francisco. This was an awesome party. I was actually surprised how many people showed up. I figured there would be mostly Songbird people and Mozilla people there, with Mozilla people outnumbering the Songbird people. There was quite a crowd there. Great music, lots of laughs, a bike blender, great people, and a new found love for Mojitos. The Songbird folks have found a great new nest and I wish them the best of luck. I myself love the Songbird application (built on Mozilla no less) and encourage everyone to at least try it out. Not that any of them read my blog, but keep up the great work guys. It truly gets better with each release.
The final event of this whirlwind month was a rather relaxing afternoon at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. This was quite an interesting, if not geeky, stroll through the history of technology. It was really neat to see some of the relics that I had heard so much about in my freshman computer classes. If you want to see some pictures, I snapped quite a few. They can be found here. What was most interesting wasn't how bulky and obese computers used to be, it was how far technology has come in such a long time. It was really amazing and I encourage anyone visiting the area to check it out. It doesn't cost a cent and will easily eat up a couple hours on a lazy afternoon.
Anyway, I think I am finally done rambling on about what I have experienced in the last month or so. I hope I didn't put you to sleep too much this time. It is probably 10 times more daunting to read through all of this as it was for me to write it, however I am happy you made it this far. I am planning two more posts before I head back to Canada, which will be much shorter than this one. The first will be my take on what an All-hands is all about. The second, and the final post for my internship, will be my final thoughts on the internship.
Cheers!
PS.
You can find slideshow versions of all my pictures at the top of the page (if you feel so inclined).
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Kidnapped!
As promised yesterday, I am here to blog about my "adventure" on Sunday. It was one of the more interesting days I have spent in California for sure.
The day started with me being kidnapped around 1030am. It wasn't your run of the mill, blind folded, shoved into the back of a van, kidnapping. It was more of a get ready, you are coming with us, kidnapping. I was finally let in on the "secret" purpose of this kidnapping after a brief stop at Starbucks before we hit the freeway.
So, loaded up on caffeine, we proceeded along the freeway, through an extremely foggy San Francisco, across an even foggier Golden Gate Bridge, and along the north side of the bay to Napa. This was to be a day of winery hopping.
Our first stop was the Domaine Carneros Winery just south of Napa. We were able to snap a few pictures and enjoy some wine at this, rather swanky, winery.
After a brief stop at the Boon Fly, a restaurant just down the road, and a $16 lamb burger (it was worth every penny), we headed off to the next winery.
After about a 20 minute drive, we arrived at the Hagafen Cellars Winery in the heart of Napa. This was quite a bit smaller than the other wineries we visited that day. In fact, it was family owned and operated. Apparently, only manned by a few people. This is the kind of winery I have grown accustomed to living in Ontario. We paid $5 to taste 5 different wines. I was sold at that price. I ended up buying my first bottle of wine for the day from Hagafen.
So after tasting and buying some wine, we headed up the road to the Robert Mondavi Winery. I have been a bit of a fan of Robert Mondavi wines for a couple years now, so I was excited to visit this winery. This was quite a large operation compared to the previous two wineries. They have 550 acres of grapes that they harvest every year. It was quite amazing to see the entire operation. It cost us $25 for a 75 minute tour. This tour was very educational, interesting, and we were able to taste three different wines at the end. Like all tours, this one ended up in the store. I ended up purchasing my second bottle of wine here and the tour guide found out that it was my birthday, so he bought me a bottle of wine.
It was getting into the evening at this point, so we proceeded to head back south and stopped in at a restaurant called Mustards Grill for supper. The food was expensive, but it was well worth it. I had the rabbit, which was so mouth watering and delicious. It was definitely the perfect end to an awesome day.
But wait, there's more...
As an added surprise, we took the freeway along the east side of the bay on the way home. This involved a stop at Treasure Island just outside San Francisco. We were treated to a beautiful skyline. It was so dark and ominous, yet so pretty at the same time.
It was the perfect way to spend a birthday. Many thanks go to those who planned it. Even though I was reluctant to allow myself to be kidnapped, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
If you ever find yourself in the area, I definitely recommend the Robert Mondavi tour and a stop at Treasure Island at night.
I have uploaded all of the pictures from the trip to my flickr. You can find a link for the slideshow on the top of the blog. I hope you enjoy the pictures almost as much as I enjoyed my trip.
Thank you again to everyone involved.
Until my next post,
Cheers.
The day started with me being kidnapped around 1030am. It wasn't your run of the mill, blind folded, shoved into the back of a van, kidnapping. It was more of a get ready, you are coming with us, kidnapping. I was finally let in on the "secret" purpose of this kidnapping after a brief stop at Starbucks before we hit the freeway.
So, loaded up on caffeine, we proceeded along the freeway, through an extremely foggy San Francisco, across an even foggier Golden Gate Bridge, and along the north side of the bay to Napa. This was to be a day of winery hopping.
Our first stop was the Domaine Carneros Winery just south of Napa. We were able to snap a few pictures and enjoy some wine at this, rather swanky, winery.
Carneros Winery
After a brief stop at the Boon Fly, a restaurant just down the road, and a $16 lamb burger (it was worth every penny), we headed off to the next winery.
After about a 20 minute drive, we arrived at the Hagafen Cellars Winery in the heart of Napa. This was quite a bit smaller than the other wineries we visited that day. In fact, it was family owned and operated. Apparently, only manned by a few people. This is the kind of winery I have grown accustomed to living in Ontario. We paid $5 to taste 5 different wines. I was sold at that price. I ended up buying my first bottle of wine for the day from Hagafen.
So after tasting and buying some wine, we headed up the road to the Robert Mondavi Winery. I have been a bit of a fan of Robert Mondavi wines for a couple years now, so I was excited to visit this winery. This was quite a large operation compared to the previous two wineries. They have 550 acres of grapes that they harvest every year. It was quite amazing to see the entire operation. It cost us $25 for a 75 minute tour. This tour was very educational, interesting, and we were able to taste three different wines at the end. Like all tours, this one ended up in the store. I ended up purchasing my second bottle of wine here and the tour guide found out that it was my birthday, so he bought me a bottle of wine.
Robert Mondavi Winery Cellar
It was getting into the evening at this point, so we proceeded to head back south and stopped in at a restaurant called Mustards Grill for supper. The food was expensive, but it was well worth it. I had the rabbit, which was so mouth watering and delicious. It was definitely the perfect end to an awesome day.
But wait, there's more...
As an added surprise, we took the freeway along the east side of the bay on the way home. This involved a stop at Treasure Island just outside San Francisco. We were treated to a beautiful skyline. It was so dark and ominous, yet so pretty at the same time.
San Francisco Skyline
It was the perfect way to spend a birthday. Many thanks go to those who planned it. Even though I was reluctant to allow myself to be kidnapped, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
If you ever find yourself in the area, I definitely recommend the Robert Mondavi tour and a stop at Treasure Island at night.
I have uploaded all of the pictures from the trip to my flickr. You can find a link for the slideshow on the top of the blog. I hope you enjoy the pictures almost as much as I enjoyed my trip.
Thank you again to everyone involved.
Until my next post,
Cheers.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Status Update
Well, it has been a while since my last blog post. So here goes with another round of quick updates of what has been going on in the last couple weeks.
First off, we have all been working hard on getting 2.0.0.5 ready. Many of us have been long hours into the night and many weekend hours. It seems that once we had one problem solved and builds ready, another ugly problem would rear it's head. Fortunately, we have persevered and testing continues. Priority right now is getting this release out to the public as soon as it is ready. The sooner we can get it ready and signed off, the sooner we can get this build out the door and patch that IE/Firefox security bug that most of us have heard so much about.
Secondly, I have been working a lot with Jay Patel trying to get a decent pool of ideas from members of the community for how we can both promote and expand community involvement with QA. The main target of this project is focussed but not limited to post-secondary schools. For more information, and to provide feedback, please click here. The following is a quick excerpt from the post:
Please do not be shy and do not hesitate to post any comments, feedback or ideas. The larger pool we have to draw from the better.
On the lighter side of life, I have two trips to tell you about.
The first was a trip I took down to the Santa Cruz area a couple weekends ago. The whole idea of going down to Santa Cruz was born out of boredom. Every weekend, the interns sit around wanting to do something (other than the communal pancake feast that inevitably ensues every saturday) but remain largely unmotivated to do anything. Having put up with this behaviour for far too long, I took it upon myself to plan a day trip to Santa Cruz. The message went out, "All those who want to come are welcome. I leave at 11am!" Initially, I received quite a lot of enthusiasm toward the idea. However, as the departure time approached, the level of motivation that I have grown accustomed to started to show itself. In the end, there were just three of us that went. I would like to think that we had a blast. The drive down CA-17 was interesting, especially in the intern van. The route down to Santa Cruz is a narrow, winding road that snakes through the mountains and the van isn't exactly the most nimble of vehicles at the best of times. The day involved some baking in the sun at the beach, a couple dips in the ocean, some more baking in the sun, a walk around the boardwalk, and an adventure to downtown Santa Cruz. For pictures of the entire event, please go here. To give you a taste of how Santa Cruz was, here is a shot of my new best friend:
The second trip I took was just this past Saturday. Preed, Cesar and I took a day long trip down to San Luis Obispo by plane. It was a nice flight down, taking about 90 minutes, through the valley. I enjoyed it a lot. San Luis was a nice town too. With Preed as our guide, we walked around downtown, got some eats (tri-tip beef is mouthwatering protein goodness), saw the Mission, bought some wine and even had a brief tour of Preed's alma mater. The pinnacle of the whole trip didn't appear until the trip back. Watching the sun set from 8500 feet is truly an amazing experience. You can see pictures of my trip to San Luis here. For a taste of the sunset, check this out:
I have one final event to tell you about that happened this Sunday, but I am still waiting on the photos to be ready. Once they are, I will make a post.
Until then,
Cheers.
First off, we have all been working hard on getting 2.0.0.5 ready. Many of us have been long hours into the night and many weekend hours. It seems that once we had one problem solved and builds ready, another ugly problem would rear it's head. Fortunately, we have persevered and testing continues. Priority right now is getting this release out to the public as soon as it is ready. The sooner we can get it ready and signed off, the sooner we can get this build out the door and patch that IE/Firefox security bug that most of us have heard so much about.
Secondly, I have been working a lot with Jay Patel trying to get a decent pool of ideas from members of the community for how we can both promote and expand community involvement with QA. The main target of this project is focussed but not limited to post-secondary schools. For more information, and to provide feedback, please click here. The following is a quick excerpt from the post:
I think the first priority for us to get more people involved in QA at Mozilla is to get key people on the ground (students and professors) interested in supporting a local community. QA or otherwise. The majority of students are ignorant as to the many avenues available to them in the software industry. I know I was! Getting the word out is key. Also,I think that all the lessons learned by Dave and everything that he has accomplished can be mirrored to many other schools across the globe.
Please do not be shy and do not hesitate to post any comments, feedback or ideas. The larger pool we have to draw from the better.
On the lighter side of life, I have two trips to tell you about.
The first was a trip I took down to the Santa Cruz area a couple weekends ago. The whole idea of going down to Santa Cruz was born out of boredom. Every weekend, the interns sit around wanting to do something (other than the communal pancake feast that inevitably ensues every saturday) but remain largely unmotivated to do anything. Having put up with this behaviour for far too long, I took it upon myself to plan a day trip to Santa Cruz. The message went out, "All those who want to come are welcome. I leave at 11am!" Initially, I received quite a lot of enthusiasm toward the idea. However, as the departure time approached, the level of motivation that I have grown accustomed to started to show itself. In the end, there were just three of us that went. I would like to think that we had a blast. The drive down CA-17 was interesting, especially in the intern van. The route down to Santa Cruz is a narrow, winding road that snakes through the mountains and the van isn't exactly the most nimble of vehicles at the best of times. The day involved some baking in the sun at the beach, a couple dips in the ocean, some more baking in the sun, a walk around the boardwalk, and an adventure to downtown Santa Cruz. For pictures of the entire event, please go here. To give you a taste of how Santa Cruz was, here is a shot of my new best friend:
The second trip I took was just this past Saturday. Preed, Cesar and I took a day long trip down to San Luis Obispo by plane. It was a nice flight down, taking about 90 minutes, through the valley. I enjoyed it a lot. San Luis was a nice town too. With Preed as our guide, we walked around downtown, got some eats (tri-tip beef is mouthwatering protein goodness), saw the Mission, bought some wine and even had a brief tour of Preed's alma mater. The pinnacle of the whole trip didn't appear until the trip back. Watching the sun set from 8500 feet is truly an amazing experience. You can see pictures of my trip to San Luis here. For a taste of the sunset, check this out:
I have one final event to tell you about that happened this Sunday, but I am still waiting on the photos to be ready. Once they are, I will make a post.
Until then,
Cheers.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Major Update
Well folks, I have quite a few little points to mention today. I haven't posted in over a week now because I didn't have enough to talk about. I don't like to write a small blurb every day. I prefer to wait until I have something substantial to write about. With everything that has gone on the last week or so, I think I can throw them all together into one blog post. A sort of mystery stew of sorts.
First off, bug triaging. I have been spending a lot of my time triaging unconfirmed bugs for the Firefox Password Manager. I have been able to get the query of bugs down from 38 to 23 and I expect to drop that number to at least 13 by next week. By my math, the unconfirmed password manager bugs are down 39% after the first week and should drop by 43% by next week. These are very good numbers from where I sit.
Next at bat, Major Update. So Major Update, what is it? Well this is where we offer an update to users running an older version of Firefox to the latest version of Firefox. In this case, for users running Firefox 1.5 to be updated to Firefox 2.0.0.4. So Major Update was supposed to get pushed out last week, but there was a little snag with the CJKT (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan) locales regarding default homepage and default search engine. Needless to say, the snag has been pretty much tested to death and we are pretty satisfied with the results. We are pretty happy with the product and are confident it will be successful when it is released into the wild soon.
The next major event of the week is the Gran Paradiso Alpha 6 release. There are quite a few improvements and the developers have been working long, hard hours to get it to where it is today. I think everyone is pretty happy with the product as it is today. There is still much work to be done, but for an Alpha, things are looking pretty good. I have been using A6 for a while now and have only run into a couple minor hitches, which were fixed fairly quickly after reporting them. Kudos developers.
On a lighter note, last Friday was the intern hootenanny. There is not much that CAN be said about this event. It was a lot of fun and most of the interns showed up. We talked. We laughed. We played catchphrase. The party got shutdown at 10:30 by the man, so we moved it to the hot tub. Suffice it to say, we had a good time. It was a good icebreaker event for all the interns. I believe that Andrew Stein, marketing intern extraordinaire, took some excellent pictures. If you ask him nicely, he may share them with you.
The final event of the last few days was my aerial tour of the bay area. With Preed piloting and Alex Buchanan along for the ride, we took to the skies over the bay. This was originally supposed to be an aerial tour of San Francisco. Unfortunately, the cloud cover over the west end of the bay was too thick. If we had tried to go to San Francisco, we wouldn't have seen anything. So we opted for a tour of the east bay area (Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City, Livermore, San Jose). Even though I was a little down about not seeing San Francisco, I was not disappointed at all. It was still a nice trip. I was able to snap quite a few pictures, which I added to the flickr set from the time Reed went flying with Preed. You may notice that I renamed the "Preed & Reed's Flight Tour of Pismo Beech" to "Bay Area Aerial View". Since all the photos are pretty much the same area, it made sense for me to just collaborate them into a single set.
Oh, and let me tell you about "engine out procedures". This is basically where one forces the nose of the plane to drop taking the plane with it on a quick decent of a few hundred feet in a few seconds before taking control of the plane back and leveling it off. While this scared the crap out of me, it was a lot of fun. I couldn't put it any more eloquently as Preed: "it is like being on a roller coaster without any of the safety devices." Awesome Preed...just awesome. Hopefully we can get out to do an aerial tour of San Francisco soon. Maybe we will get out and do an aerial sunset tour of the coast as well. If so, expect many more photos to come.
Anyway, that is all for now.
Chimo!
First off, bug triaging. I have been spending a lot of my time triaging unconfirmed bugs for the Firefox Password Manager. I have been able to get the query of bugs down from 38 to 23 and I expect to drop that number to at least 13 by next week. By my math, the unconfirmed password manager bugs are down 39% after the first week and should drop by 43% by next week. These are very good numbers from where I sit.
Next at bat, Major Update. So Major Update, what is it? Well this is where we offer an update to users running an older version of Firefox to the latest version of Firefox. In this case, for users running Firefox 1.5 to be updated to Firefox 2.0.0.4. So Major Update was supposed to get pushed out last week, but there was a little snag with the CJKT (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan) locales regarding default homepage and default search engine. Needless to say, the snag has been pretty much tested to death and we are pretty satisfied with the results. We are pretty happy with the product and are confident it will be successful when it is released into the wild soon.
The next major event of the week is the Gran Paradiso Alpha 6 release. There are quite a few improvements and the developers have been working long, hard hours to get it to where it is today. I think everyone is pretty happy with the product as it is today. There is still much work to be done, but for an Alpha, things are looking pretty good. I have been using A6 for a while now and have only run into a couple minor hitches, which were fixed fairly quickly after reporting them. Kudos developers.
On a lighter note, last Friday was the intern hootenanny. There is not much that CAN be said about this event. It was a lot of fun and most of the interns showed up. We talked. We laughed. We played catchphrase. The party got shutdown at 10:30 by the man, so we moved it to the hot tub. Suffice it to say, we had a good time. It was a good icebreaker event for all the interns. I believe that Andrew Stein, marketing intern extraordinaire, took some excellent pictures. If you ask him nicely, he may share them with you.
The final event of the last few days was my aerial tour of the bay area. With Preed piloting and Alex Buchanan along for the ride, we took to the skies over the bay. This was originally supposed to be an aerial tour of San Francisco. Unfortunately, the cloud cover over the west end of the bay was too thick. If we had tried to go to San Francisco, we wouldn't have seen anything. So we opted for a tour of the east bay area (Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City, Livermore, San Jose). Even though I was a little down about not seeing San Francisco, I was not disappointed at all. It was still a nice trip. I was able to snap quite a few pictures, which I added to the flickr set from the time Reed went flying with Preed. You may notice that I renamed the "Preed & Reed's Flight Tour of Pismo Beech" to "Bay Area Aerial View". Since all the photos are pretty much the same area, it made sense for me to just collaborate them into a single set.
Oh, and let me tell you about "engine out procedures". This is basically where one forces the nose of the plane to drop taking the plane with it on a quick decent of a few hundred feet in a few seconds before taking control of the plane back and leveling it off. While this scared the crap out of me, it was a lot of fun. I couldn't put it any more eloquently as Preed: "it is like being on a roller coaster without any of the safety devices." Awesome Preed...just awesome. Hopefully we can get out to do an aerial tour of San Francisco soon. Maybe we will get out and do an aerial sunset tour of the coast as well. If so, expect many more photos to come.
Anyway, that is all for now.
Chimo!
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Litmus - An Analytical Approach (Update)
As some of you may already know, I have been working on a spreadsheet to track and log testday results from Litmus. My first release on Google Spreadsheet ha received some excellent feedback and some good suggestions. After deciding to implement these suggestions, I toiled with Google Spreadsheets for a good couple hours trying to get it to do what I want (mainly with charts). The best analogy I have for how that went is that it was like two children sitting in opposite corners of a small room, nose to the wall screaming "YOU DO IT!", "NO, YOU DO IT!", "NO, YOU DO IT!"...
You get the idea.
So I started to chew on ideas of how I could improve on the spreadsheet, without Google, but still allow the spreadsheet to be shared. I eventually settled on Microsoft Excel 2007 as my program of choice for the spreadsheet. I wanted to use Open Office, but found Microsoft Excel 2007 to be much more prepared for the task at hand. Once I had exported my Google spreadsheet to .xls and imported it into Excel, it was just a matter of making the improvements.
Now that I had the spreadsheet set up the way I wanted, I ran into the second dilemma. How am I going to share this as easily as Google does it. My first thought was, "Google must know!". So I googled a bunch of different searches trying to find a way to "share" Excel spreadsheets.
After about an hour of no luck, I remembered that Microsoft Office 2007 allows sharing documents on a network and over the internet through Sharepoint. After a little research, I realized that I would have to set up a Sharepoint server. Something I was not prepared to do. It sounded way to grandiose a thing just to share out one little spreadsheet.
I finally thought to myself, "what if I can convert the spreadsheet into html? People won't be able to modify the spreadsheet, but they will at least be able to get to it and view it easily enough." So I did a little digging through the Excel menus and found that it has a facility that allows me to convert XLS files to "Web Pages".
But wait! This is a Microsoft product. It is probably going to convert it to html and add all kinds of ActiveX crap and thus won't work properly in Firefox.
Much to my surprise, this was not the case. Excel quickly converted my spreadsheet into a bunch of files that made it cross-browser compatible. Each worksheet of the spreadsheet was created in it's own .htm file, all the charts were conveniently converted into .gif and .png images, and excel even kept all my formatting and styling through a .css file.
All that was left was to try it out. Upon loading the main .htm file from my desktop, I noticed that everything was laid out as it was in the excel file. The charts had become a bit degrade, but it is still quite readable. Excel even created tab buttons at the bottom of the screen so that I could navigate from sheet to sheet.
That being successful, I just uploaded the files to the appropriate locations on my people account, which is where it exists now.
For your viewing pleasure:
http://people.mozilla.com/~ahughes/Litmus_Results.htm
While this isn't a perfect solution, at the very least it allows people to view the Litmus Testday results quite easily now. I can also modify the spreadsheet, save to html and easily upload any changes. I can also import the raw data into Google Spreadsheets for collaboration if needed. It just won't have the pretty charts there.
I hope you find it somewhat useful.
You get the idea.
So I started to chew on ideas of how I could improve on the spreadsheet, without Google, but still allow the spreadsheet to be shared. I eventually settled on Microsoft Excel 2007 as my program of choice for the spreadsheet. I wanted to use Open Office, but found Microsoft Excel 2007 to be much more prepared for the task at hand. Once I had exported my Google spreadsheet to .xls and imported it into Excel, it was just a matter of making the improvements.
Now that I had the spreadsheet set up the way I wanted, I ran into the second dilemma. How am I going to share this as easily as Google does it. My first thought was, "Google must know!". So I googled a bunch of different searches trying to find a way to "share" Excel spreadsheets.
After about an hour of no luck, I remembered that Microsoft Office 2007 allows sharing documents on a network and over the internet through Sharepoint. After a little research, I realized that I would have to set up a Sharepoint server. Something I was not prepared to do. It sounded way to grandiose a thing just to share out one little spreadsheet.
I finally thought to myself, "what if I can convert the spreadsheet into html? People won't be able to modify the spreadsheet, but they will at least be able to get to it and view it easily enough." So I did a little digging through the Excel menus and found that it has a facility that allows me to convert XLS files to "Web Pages".
But wait! This is a Microsoft product. It is probably going to convert it to html and add all kinds of ActiveX crap and thus won't work properly in Firefox.
Much to my surprise, this was not the case. Excel quickly converted my spreadsheet into a bunch of files that made it cross-browser compatible. Each worksheet of the spreadsheet was created in it's own .htm file, all the charts were conveniently converted into .gif and .png images, and excel even kept all my formatting and styling through a .css file.
All that was left was to try it out. Upon loading the main .htm file from my desktop, I noticed that everything was laid out as it was in the excel file. The charts had become a bit degrade, but it is still quite readable. Excel even created tab buttons at the bottom of the screen so that I could navigate from sheet to sheet.
That being successful, I just uploaded the files to the appropriate locations on my people account, which is where it exists now.
For your viewing pleasure:
http://people.mozilla.com/~ahughes/Litmus_Results.htm
While this isn't a perfect solution, at the very least it allows people to view the Litmus Testday results quite easily now. I can also modify the spreadsheet, save to html and easily upload any changes. I can also import the raw data into Google Spreadsheets for collaboration if needed. It just won't have the pretty charts there.
I hope you find it somewhat useful.
Giants 3, Blue Jays 2
Last night, Cesar and I were given the opportunity to go see the San Francisco Giants play my Toronto Blue Jays at AT&T Park thanks to a free ticket courtesy of Dan Portillo. Thanks Dan.
Unfortunately, since we took the Caltrain and didn't board until 7:01p, we missed the first 3 innings of the game. Which, coincidentally, would turn out to be the most exciting innings of the game. You see, all of the runs were scored within the first 3 innings.
It wasn't a total loss however. I was able to see AT&T Park, which was a good experience. For anyone who hasn't been inside the walls of AT&T Park, it feels like an old ball park and overlooks the bay. It definitely felt a lot different from watching my Jays play back home in the Skydome. I also was able to snap a few pictures while at the game, which I have posted on my flickr. To see them, follow the link I added at the top of this page.
On a final note, next time I need to dress warmer. A t-shirt, shorts, and cons are not ideal attire for a San Francisco night. As I learned the hard way.
I look forward to the next time I can watch the Jays play the Giants. Hopefully we can do better next time. Go Jays!
Unfortunately, since we took the Caltrain and didn't board until 7:01p, we missed the first 3 innings of the game. Which, coincidentally, would turn out to be the most exciting innings of the game. You see, all of the runs were scored within the first 3 innings.
It wasn't a total loss however. I was able to see AT&T Park, which was a good experience. For anyone who hasn't been inside the walls of AT&T Park, it feels like an old ball park and overlooks the bay. It definitely felt a lot different from watching my Jays play back home in the Skydome. I also was able to snap a few pictures while at the game, which I have posted on my flickr. To see them, follow the link I added at the top of this page.
On a final note, next time I need to dress warmer. A t-shirt, shorts, and cons are not ideal attire for a San Francisco night. As I learned the hard way.
I look forward to the next time I can watch the Jays play the Giants. Hopefully we can do better next time. Go Jays!
Monday, June 11, 2007
Litmus - An Analytical Approach
As promised, I am writing about my experience with Litmus this week and my findings. I have heard mention that there is some worry about the turn-out for this weeks testday. So I decided to go and look at the numbers.
Upon first glance, these feelings seemed to be completely unfounded. Especially since I had completed 197 tests on my own. So I decided to conduct a little research on my own.
I took my time and queried every test day completed since August 2005, in search of the number of testers and the number of results in a given test day. Having found these numbers, I plugged them into a spreadsheet and analyzed the numbers. To make it easier to see, I also created three charts. One for the results of the tests for each testday, another for the number of testers for each test day, and a final chart displaying the ratio of tests complete to testers. This last chart is used to "score" how well that test day went.
Before I go into my findings I would like to show you copies of the charts for your reference:
Number of Results Per Testday
Number of Testers Per Testday
Testday "Score" - Results per Tester
After going over these numbers, I can theorize the following:
It is my hope that this will become a good initial dataset to help with deciding how to draw more people to the testdays.
I think the best line of defense is to get out to the schools more. Not just the colleges and universities either. Perhaps try to get to graduating high school students entering into this field.
As a sidebar, I have a couple ideas for Litmus and Bugzilla that I would like to air.
First off, the test cases in Litmus need to be cleaned up. Often when I run a Litmus test on a specific platform, there will be tests that say "mac only" or "linux only" when I am running windows tests (for example). This means that I either have to go run that test on the other platform so I can mark the test as "pass" just to get my 100% coverage, or I have to leave it as "not run" never achieving 100% coverage.
Secondly, Litmus should be able to recognize multiple build ids for one program. For example, every night there is a nightly of Minefield put out with a different build id. So if I want to continue my tests from last day, I have to fool Litmus into thinking I am still running the old build id. Perhaps we can program a window of build ids into Litmus?
My final idea I had was related to Bugzilla. Is there a way we can implement some kind of duplicate bug detection like Digg's duplicate story submission detection. For those that do not know, when a user submits a story to Digg, it checks to see if that story might already be submitted. I believe this is based on URL and the title and description the user gives for the story. It then returns a list of possible duplicate stories that the user can read to verify that they aren't dupes or submit their story anyway. I know the system isn't perfect, but I believe that we could learn something from this and that it would make Bugzilla better. Both from the end-user perspective and from Bugzilla's maintainers' perspective. I realize that this will not help with our current duped bugs, but it will help as a preventative measure for avoiding future duplicate bugs.
Before I leave you for today, I would like to mention an idea that tchung mentioned to me today. What if testers on Litmus could vote on whether they found a certain test useful or not? Like digg, reddit, delicious, or any of those sites. Sounds kind of interesting to me.
Anyway, that is all for today.
Stay tuned for another post later this week.
Upon first glance, these feelings seemed to be completely unfounded. Especially since I had completed 197 tests on my own. So I decided to conduct a little research on my own.
I took my time and queried every test day completed since August 2005, in search of the number of testers and the number of results in a given test day. Having found these numbers, I plugged them into a spreadsheet and analyzed the numbers. To make it easier to see, I also created three charts. One for the results of the tests for each testday, another for the number of testers for each test day, and a final chart displaying the ratio of tests complete to testers. This last chart is used to "score" how well that test day went.
Before I go into my findings I would like to show you copies of the charts for your reference:
Number of Results Per Testday
Number of Testers Per Testday
Testday "Score" - Results per Tester
After going over these numbers, I can theorize the following:
- Thunderbird tests have always had a low turnout when compared to Firefox tests. Since 2007-06-08 was the first time Firefox and Thunderbird were separated into their own test-days and held during the same time, we are seeing the results more accurately than before.
- Our highest results for number of testers always falls during school semesters, so the fact that school is out in the summer could be contributing to low numbers as well
- It was mentioned that IRC traffic was low during testday. In my opinion, IRC traffic is not a good indicator of a successful test day. A low amount of traffic tells me that there were few issues, which is a good thing.
- Looking at the charts as they stand, it is tough to extract any particular pattern.
- It should be noted that all this does it show that the current situation isnt on a big decline. We should still try to come up with ideas on how to promote the testdays better to get even more exposure.
- The days where we had 30+ user participation were Seneca test days.
It is my hope that this will become a good initial dataset to help with deciding how to draw more people to the testdays.
I think the best line of defense is to get out to the schools more. Not just the colleges and universities either. Perhaps try to get to graduating high school students entering into this field.
As a sidebar, I have a couple ideas for Litmus and Bugzilla that I would like to air.
First off, the test cases in Litmus need to be cleaned up. Often when I run a Litmus test on a specific platform, there will be tests that say "mac only" or "linux only" when I am running windows tests (for example). This means that I either have to go run that test on the other platform so I can mark the test as "pass" just to get my 100% coverage, or I have to leave it as "not run" never achieving 100% coverage.
Secondly, Litmus should be able to recognize multiple build ids for one program. For example, every night there is a nightly of Minefield put out with a different build id. So if I want to continue my tests from last day, I have to fool Litmus into thinking I am still running the old build id. Perhaps we can program a window of build ids into Litmus?
My final idea I had was related to Bugzilla. Is there a way we can implement some kind of duplicate bug detection like Digg's duplicate story submission detection. For those that do not know, when a user submits a story to Digg, it checks to see if that story might already be submitted. I believe this is based on URL and the title and description the user gives for the story. It then returns a list of possible duplicate stories that the user can read to verify that they aren't dupes or submit their story anyway. I know the system isn't perfect, but I believe that we could learn something from this and that it would make Bugzilla better. Both from the end-user perspective and from Bugzilla's maintainers' perspective. I realize that this will not help with our current duped bugs, but it will help as a preventative measure for avoiding future duplicate bugs.
Before I leave you for today, I would like to mention an idea that tchung mentioned to me today. What if testers on Litmus could vote on whether they found a certain test useful or not? Like digg, reddit, delicious, or any of those sites. Sounds kind of interesting to me.
Anyway, that is all for today.
Stay tuned for another post later this week.
Bugs, Litmus, and a Super Fun Testday!
So another week at Mozilla, and a whole new set of interesting things to tell you about. Well, interesting if you like QA...and who doesn't?!
For the majority of the week, I triaged bugs. This was definitely interesting. I am afraid that I am still learning the ropes in bugzilla, but I am getting better. The biggest hurdle was to wrap my head around he meanings of what the different statuses meant. It is one thing to know what the statuses mean, it is another to know how and when to use them. Knowing what situation warrants a particular status comes with time and practice. Don't worry, there is quite a few people on IRC that are watching the bugs and they are fairly expedient in letting you know where you may have erred.
On the plus side, I was able to clean up all the critical and major Password Manager bugs that were sitting around unconfirmed. Quite a few of them were almost two years old! All that is left now are 15 bugs sitting unconfirmed, most of which are enhancements :)
The next major event of the week was this week's testday. I focussed my testing on Minefield 3.0a6 along with a few other participants, and others took on Thunderbird 2.0.0.4 testing. Overall, I think the testing went very well. From what I saw, there were no major problems with either programs. There were a few bugs found, but no show stoppers. Also, I was able to complete 197 tests. I do not know what got into me, but I just couldn't stop. I just kept plugging away, submitting bugs, and before I knew it, it was 5pm and I had completed the test day with 197 tests complete. I was quite surprised.
On the lighter side of life, I would like to highlight a couple items of recreational interest that happened throughout he week.
First off, I was able to get out to the driving range for the first time in a while with a couple people from the office. It was quite relaxing and felt really good to get out and swing my clubs again. Perhaps I will get out on a course sometime soon :)
Secondly, on Sunday, I decided to take myself on a quick tour of Mountain View and take some pictures along the way. I walked from the Oakwood apartments, down to the Caltrain station, around downtown Mountain View, down to the ECR, across to Shoreline, and then across Middlefield to Easy street, and finally back to the Oakwood apartments.
My Mountain View Walking Route - Click to Enlarge
For your viewing pleasure, I have created a slideshow of the 77 photos I captured. You can find a link to it in the media section of this page, above this post.
I want to go into more details about Litmus and the testday, but I want to reserve that for it's own post. Stay tuned...
For the majority of the week, I triaged bugs. This was definitely interesting. I am afraid that I am still learning the ropes in bugzilla, but I am getting better. The biggest hurdle was to wrap my head around he meanings of what the different statuses meant. It is one thing to know what the statuses mean, it is another to know how and when to use them. Knowing what situation warrants a particular status comes with time and practice. Don't worry, there is quite a few people on IRC that are watching the bugs and they are fairly expedient in letting you know where you may have erred.
On the plus side, I was able to clean up all the critical and major Password Manager bugs that were sitting around unconfirmed. Quite a few of them were almost two years old! All that is left now are 15 bugs sitting unconfirmed, most of which are enhancements :)
The next major event of the week was this week's testday. I focussed my testing on Minefield 3.0a6 along with a few other participants, and others took on Thunderbird 2.0.0.4 testing. Overall, I think the testing went very well. From what I saw, there were no major problems with either programs. There were a few bugs found, but no show stoppers. Also, I was able to complete 197 tests. I do not know what got into me, but I just couldn't stop. I just kept plugging away, submitting bugs, and before I knew it, it was 5pm and I had completed the test day with 197 tests complete. I was quite surprised.
On the lighter side of life, I would like to highlight a couple items of recreational interest that happened throughout he week.
First off, I was able to get out to the driving range for the first time in a while with a couple people from the office. It was quite relaxing and felt really good to get out and swing my clubs again. Perhaps I will get out on a course sometime soon :)
Secondly, on Sunday, I decided to take myself on a quick tour of Mountain View and take some pictures along the way. I walked from the Oakwood apartments, down to the Caltrain station, around downtown Mountain View, down to the ECR, across to Shoreline, and then across Middlefield to Easy street, and finally back to the Oakwood apartments.
My Mountain View Walking Route - Click to Enlarge
For your viewing pleasure, I have created a slideshow of the 77 photos I captured. You can find a link to it in the media section of this page, above this post.
I want to go into more details about Litmus and the testday, but I want to reserve that for it's own post. Stay tuned...
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Asus $189 Laptop runs Firefox
Asus unveiled their $189 laptop this week at Computex which they say will be available all over the world, not just developing nations. It is running "something that looks like Windows" *cough* linux, "an office system compatible to Microsoft Office"; Open Office anyone? and uses Firefox.
Dubbed the 3ePC, it uses a more conventional interface than the OLPC, comes with a 2GB flash drive and 512MB of ram.
Read the full article here:
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/114773/asus-stuns-computex-with-100-laptop.html
Dubbed the 3ePC, it uses a more conventional interface than the OLPC, comes with a 2GB flash drive and 512MB of ram.
Read the full article here:
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/114773/asus-stuns-computex-with-100-laptop.html
Monday, June 4, 2007
I choose you AUS2
Last week made for a very interesting and busy week. The high point of the week was getting the next update to Firefox 1.5/2 and Thunderbird 1.5 out the door. There was a lot of testing to be done to make sure that there would be as little negative user impact as possible. A few of us had to work into the night, but the hard work paid off. Ultimately, we were able to get Firefox 1.5.0.12 and Firefox 2.0.0.4 out to the user.
Everything didn't go completely smoothly, as things rarely do in the real world. Once users started getting their updates, we saw a 3-fold increase in bandwidth. We were able to work our way through the bandwidth issues however, and everything turned out pretty well. Once we got over that hurdle it was just a waiting game to see if there were any major problems reported by users. I think we can safely say that the minor update launch was a success.
What is involved in testing Firefox to ensure smooth updates? It is a fairly straight forward process. I will not go into all the details, but it generally involves downloading an older version of Firefox. Then, changing a config file so that when Firefox checks for updates from a test server. Once the update is installed, we ensure the browser is not "broken" by running a few checks.
For those who are curious, there are a couple terms you should be aware of when working on updates for the community. The first is a "partial" update. This is when you are updating from one version to the next version of said software. The second is a "complete" update. This is when you are updating from one version to the latest available version of said software. The third type of update check is known as a "fallback". A fallback is tested by updating to a new version of the software, but instead of accepting the update, we tell Firefox to update later. We then go into a config file and change the update status from "pending" to "failed". This makes Firefox think that an update was unsuccessful and it attempts to update to the latest version. While this process is fairly straightforward, there is a lot of work to do for update testing because Firefox has a lot of different versions, locales, and is in use on many different platforms by our users. But this hard work pays off in the end and gives you a feeling of self-satisfaction once the project is deemed a success.
As soon as we got that project out the door, we immediately switched gears and started working on the next major project. I am quickly learning that in the software business, there is a constant flow of work. As soon as one project is complete, the next project begins, if it hasn't already. This makes for a very interesting career, if you are up to the challenge. I can honestly say that my experience from other industries, mainly the automotive industry, has prepared me for this aspect of the software industry.
The next big project this week was starting some of the testing on Firefox 3, currently dubbed Minefield 3.0 Alpha 5 Pre. The extent of testing Firefox 3 this past week was running Basic Functionality Tests (BFTs) on each of the main platforms. These platforms are Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OSX and Linux. Running the BFTs themselves is again fairly straightforward, but ultimately there is a lot of work involved. The BFT series of tests consists of 196 tests ranging from installation to GUI and layout to security checks to software updates. Using a program called Litmus, we can track the progress of these tests. While running these tests, it is not uncommon to come across a bug that is unrelated to the test you are running.
While running the BFTs for Minefield on Friday, I came across five bugs. Some related to the test I was running, some completely unrelated. If you are ever in doubt, ask someone on irc to confirm what you are seeing and then file a bug.
After all of this testing is complete, we use another tool of the trade: the wiki. Using a wiki, we log what tests we ran, on what version, on what platform, who ran the tests, and any problems we noticed along the way. This allows everyone to get a snapshot of where the problems exist and where we were successful.
The third major task of the week was triaging bugs. Using, bugzilla, a tracking system used to log bugs or issues with our software, we go through and double check any bugs that are sitting as "unconfirmed". This allows us to identify any serious problems or items that were isolated incidents and have long since been fixed. This process involves finding bugs in bugzilla that need to be checked, try to reproduce the issue noted in the bug. If you want to get involved in this aspect of QA, I suggest you come to #testday on irc sometime. Be wary, some bugs in bugzilla can be pretty technical. Just seek out the ones that you think you can handle. No one is expected to know everything.
As you can see from my ever expanding post here, that Mozilla had quite a busy week. The way things are looking, there are going to be many busy weeks to come. I think I would be more worried if we weren't busy. So this is definitely a good sign.
On that note, I must bid you adieu.
See you next week!
Everything didn't go completely smoothly, as things rarely do in the real world. Once users started getting their updates, we saw a 3-fold increase in bandwidth. We were able to work our way through the bandwidth issues however, and everything turned out pretty well. Once we got over that hurdle it was just a waiting game to see if there were any major problems reported by users. I think we can safely say that the minor update launch was a success.
What is involved in testing Firefox to ensure smooth updates? It is a fairly straight forward process. I will not go into all the details, but it generally involves downloading an older version of Firefox. Then, changing a config file so that when Firefox checks for updates from a test server. Once the update is installed, we ensure the browser is not "broken" by running a few checks.
For those who are curious, there are a couple terms you should be aware of when working on updates for the community. The first is a "partial" update. This is when you are updating from one version to the next version of said software. The second is a "complete" update. This is when you are updating from one version to the latest available version of said software. The third type of update check is known as a "fallback". A fallback is tested by updating to a new version of the software, but instead of accepting the update, we tell Firefox to update later. We then go into a config file and change the update status from "pending" to "failed". This makes Firefox think that an update was unsuccessful and it attempts to update to the latest version. While this process is fairly straightforward, there is a lot of work to do for update testing because Firefox has a lot of different versions, locales, and is in use on many different platforms by our users. But this hard work pays off in the end and gives you a feeling of self-satisfaction once the project is deemed a success.
As soon as we got that project out the door, we immediately switched gears and started working on the next major project. I am quickly learning that in the software business, there is a constant flow of work. As soon as one project is complete, the next project begins, if it hasn't already. This makes for a very interesting career, if you are up to the challenge. I can honestly say that my experience from other industries, mainly the automotive industry, has prepared me for this aspect of the software industry.
The next big project this week was starting some of the testing on Firefox 3, currently dubbed Minefield 3.0 Alpha 5 Pre. The extent of testing Firefox 3 this past week was running Basic Functionality Tests (BFTs) on each of the main platforms. These platforms are Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OSX and Linux. Running the BFTs themselves is again fairly straightforward, but ultimately there is a lot of work involved. The BFT series of tests consists of 196 tests ranging from installation to GUI and layout to security checks to software updates. Using a program called Litmus, we can track the progress of these tests. While running these tests, it is not uncommon to come across a bug that is unrelated to the test you are running.
While running the BFTs for Minefield on Friday, I came across five bugs. Some related to the test I was running, some completely unrelated. If you are ever in doubt, ask someone on irc to confirm what you are seeing and then file a bug.
After all of this testing is complete, we use another tool of the trade: the wiki. Using a wiki, we log what tests we ran, on what version, on what platform, who ran the tests, and any problems we noticed along the way. This allows everyone to get a snapshot of where the problems exist and where we were successful.
The third major task of the week was triaging bugs. Using, bugzilla, a tracking system used to log bugs or issues with our software, we go through and double check any bugs that are sitting as "unconfirmed". This allows us to identify any serious problems or items that were isolated incidents and have long since been fixed. This process involves finding bugs in bugzilla that need to be checked, try to reproduce the issue noted in the bug. If you want to get involved in this aspect of QA, I suggest you come to #testday on irc sometime. Be wary, some bugs in bugzilla can be pretty technical. Just seek out the ones that you think you can handle. No one is expected to know everything.
As you can see from my ever expanding post here, that Mozilla had quite a busy week. The way things are looking, there are going to be many busy weeks to come. I think I would be more worried if we weren't busy. So this is definitely a good sign.
On that note, I must bid you adieu.
See you next week!
Monday, May 28, 2007
B2B 2K7
No, it isn't a postal code. B2B 2K7 refers to the Bay to Breakers 2007 race in beautiful San Francisco, California. Don't let the name confuse you though. It is only a race for the choice few (1000 people or so) who come out to race the 7 miles from the Bay to the Breakers on the west end of Golden Gate Park. For the remaining 50,000 to 90,000 people, it is a 7 mile alcohol induced haze. You can learn more about the Bay to Breakers event at the following two links:
Official Bay to Breakers website
Bay to Breakers (Wikipedia)
For your viewing pleasure, I have added some links at the top of this blog to some of the media content that came back with us from this "event". I plan on using that top section to add more media content as I experience more and more of California.
So what was my involvement in the event? Well I was part of the Mozilla group! A good crowd of us Mozilla folks pushed, pulled, and dragged a Firefox float through the thousands of people. I am quite proud to say we made it to the 3 mile mark after 2:24:50. We didn't make it much farther than this however. Overall, it was a fun time had by all.
Initially, I was very skeptical about going to this event. I really wasn't looking forward getting up at 5am to walk 7 miles on a Sunday. Boy was I wrong! This was bedlam from the get-go.
Myself and a few other Mozilla people (mainly interns) made our way to the Caltrain, half asleep. We woke up pretty quick getting on the train however. The train was full of people going to Bay to Breakers, 99% of which were already drinking or drunk. This was at 6:15am by the way.
After the Van Wilder train ride, the mob made their way to the Bay. All the Mozilla folks congregated together and we eventually made our way to the start line.
As pitas rained down upon me, I thought to myself, "What the hell have I got myself into?!". After about the first hour, that feeling subsided and I really got into it. There were some great sights to see along the way. Some amazing scenery and architecture, and lots of "interesting" people. The procession snaked it's way through the streets of San Francisco, played on by multiple bands along the route. Once we climbed the hill near mile 3, the mob kind of died. Us Mozilla folks worked I way farther up into the hills and eventually rested at Meister Burger.
It was a long day, but an interesting one. I have no regrets whatsoever for going to this event. In fact, I definitely would have had regrets if I had not gone. The lesson I learned that day: Do not be afraid to jump into anything, you never know what you might find. There were some real interesting floats too: Chuck Norris, Sesame Street with a Snuffleupagus, Life guards, a Fish tank, the salmon swimming upstream (aka. walking the opposite direction), and last but not least Jonas the Fox!
I look forward to many more events to San Francisco and exploring more of California as the weeks go on.
Oh, and on a closing note. As crazy as Bay to Breakers was, I thought, "OK, that was insane, but that can't be normal. That was like just a yearly thing right?" Wrong again! Reading the news this week (only 1 week later), I discovered another event unfolding that was just as crazy, if not crazier: A mob of people dressed up as zombies harassing people in the downtown area (Disney Store, Apple store, etc). I am starting to think this kind of thing is commonplace in San Francisco. I clearly have a lot to learn.
Official Bay to Breakers website
Bay to Breakers (Wikipedia)
For your viewing pleasure, I have added some links at the top of this blog to some of the media content that came back with us from this "event". I plan on using that top section to add more media content as I experience more and more of California.
So what was my involvement in the event? Well I was part of the Mozilla group! A good crowd of us Mozilla folks pushed, pulled, and dragged a Firefox float through the thousands of people. I am quite proud to say we made it to the 3 mile mark after 2:24:50. We didn't make it much farther than this however. Overall, it was a fun time had by all.
Initially, I was very skeptical about going to this event. I really wasn't looking forward getting up at 5am to walk 7 miles on a Sunday. Boy was I wrong! This was bedlam from the get-go.
Myself and a few other Mozilla people (mainly interns) made our way to the Caltrain, half asleep. We woke up pretty quick getting on the train however. The train was full of people going to Bay to Breakers, 99% of which were already drinking or drunk. This was at 6:15am by the way.
After the Van Wilder train ride, the mob made their way to the Bay. All the Mozilla folks congregated together and we eventually made our way to the start line.
As pitas rained down upon me, I thought to myself, "What the hell have I got myself into?!". After about the first hour, that feeling subsided and I really got into it. There were some great sights to see along the way. Some amazing scenery and architecture, and lots of "interesting" people. The procession snaked it's way through the streets of San Francisco, played on by multiple bands along the route. Once we climbed the hill near mile 3, the mob kind of died. Us Mozilla folks worked I way farther up into the hills and eventually rested at Meister Burger.
It was a long day, but an interesting one. I have no regrets whatsoever for going to this event. In fact, I definitely would have had regrets if I had not gone. The lesson I learned that day: Do not be afraid to jump into anything, you never know what you might find. There were some real interesting floats too: Chuck Norris, Sesame Street with a Snuffleupagus, Life guards, a Fish tank, the salmon swimming upstream (aka. walking the opposite direction), and last but not least Jonas the Fox!
I look forward to many more events to San Francisco and exploring more of California as the weeks go on.
Oh, and on a closing note. As crazy as Bay to Breakers was, I thought, "OK, that was insane, but that can't be normal. That was like just a yearly thing right?" Wrong again! Reading the news this week (only 1 week later), I discovered another event unfolding that was just as crazy, if not crazier: A mob of people dressed up as zombies harassing people in the downtown area (Disney Store, Apple store, etc). I am starting to think this kind of thing is commonplace in San Francisco. I clearly have a lot to learn.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Until the smoke clears...
Well, another week has passed, so it is about time that I give an update about how things are going. First off, I would like to say that this week has been excellent. I am learning a lot of new things, and getting better at things I learned last week. Mozilla is a very dynamic work place.
What I mean by that is that there seems to be an endless supply of things to learn. This makes it my ideal workplace. One of the main reasons I went back to school is that I crave learning new things. It is my fuel! This is one of the main reasons that I didnt last more than 3 years in the military and why I didnt enjoy Honda. At some point, in most jobs, you get to a point where there is nothing more to learn. You get set in a routine and do the same thing day in, day out. This routine causes stagnation and you start to dislike your job, even grow to loathe going in every day. With Mozilla, there is always something new to learn. Even if you get set into a routine, you know that there is something completely new just around the corner (ie. A new program, a new feature, etc).
Mozilla is more of a community than it is a workplace. Just because you are working on one thing, it doesn't mean that you are pigeon-holed into that "area of expertise". If you have skills that can be applied to another area, you are free to have at it. Also, with any aspect of Mozilla you want to work on, there is typically a bunch of people working on that area that will help you get off the ground.
But this is not what I wanted to write about today. The first thing I wanted to write about is what you need to be prepared for re: travel when getting ready for your trip to the U.S.
Mozilla was extremely helpful in getting things set up for me so that I would have no, or as little hassle as possible, when it came try to interact with the customs officials. Before I list what you definitely will need, I would like to thank Tim, Karen, and the folks at AEISEC US for making everything as smooth as possible. The following is a list of items that I needed to get into the US:
Canadian Passport:
This one is a no-brainer. Any time you are traveling outside of Canada you need to have a passport. If you don't have one, get one.
DS-2019:
This is a two page form that certifies you for your J-1 Visa, which will be stamped on your I-94 and stapled to your passport (the J1 Visa, not the DS-2019). The DS-2019 essentially says who you are and who is sponsoring you to enter the country. It also details some of the requirements to keep you J-1 Visa valid.
SEVIS Fee:
If you are coming into the country to work for Mozilla, you will most likely get a lot of your paperwork from AEISEC US. This form will be one of them. It should already be completed by AEISEC US as they are the ones getting you into the country. This form essentially confirms you for enrollment into the Student Visitor and Exchange Program.
Job Offer Letter:
This will be from Mozilla directly. It essentially confirms that Mozilla does want you to come and work for them. It will detail the terms of your employment (ie. pay, start and end date, etc).
I-94:
This form is for customs use. It is how you declare why you are entering into the country. The information you will receive will probably say that you have to make an appointment at your local US Consolate. If you are a Canadian citizen, all you need to do is fill out this I-94 form and show it to the Customs officer at the airport. You can pick up I-94 forms at the airport check-in counter for free.
Credit Card:
I recommend you get a credit card, if you haven't already. You may run into some issues if all you have is cash and a debit card. Some businesses may down right refuse to take your debit card as the clerk does not recognize it. If you do not have a credit card, your best bet is to try to get by on cash. If you decide to go this method, I recommend taking out what you need at an ATM on a weekly basis. If your bank is anything like my bank (TD rocks!), you will get charged a small astronomical fee each time you use your bank card. TD charges me $5 on top of whatever the ATM takes off. Having a credit card will also help you secure other items of interest (ie. plane tickets, rental car, etc).
One last thing to mention about traveling in to the US, I would give yourself anywhere from 2-3 hours prior to boarding. I got through the airport in about 30 minutes, but I traveled on Mothers' Day, so their was not much people traffic.
So this is all you need to get into the country. Be prepared for an uncomfortable ride with some amazing views. By the end of the 5 hour trip, my entire body ached, but it was worth it because of the sites from the plane window.
Once you land at San Francisco International (SFO), yes you should book your flight from Pearson to SFO, just follow the signs to baggage pickup. SFO is pretty straightforward to get around. It is actually quite smaller than Pearson. Once you get out of the airport you will need to find a way to get to Mountain View.
There are two main options: Caltrain and a cab. The Caltrain will take you about 1.5 hours and drop you off about a 10 minute walk from the Oakwood apartments. It should cost you around $8 US. The taxi cab will get you to the apartment front door in about 40 minutes, but it will cost you about $92 before tip. Cabs from the airport charge "meter and a half", which means they tack on 50% of the fare. So my fare of about $61 cost me $92...$110 with tip.
One last thing about the Caltrain, you want to go to "zone 3". The Caltrain system is broken into "zones". San Francisco is Zone 1, and Mountain View is Zone 3. You pay by the zone for Caltrain, so if you travel within your zone it is actually pretty cheap. It is similar to taking the Go train in the GTA.
This brings me to my most solid piece of advice: Bring about $200 US cash!
Trust me, you may not need this money yet, but you surely will at some point. It is when you do not have the cash that you will need it, so just carry some on you for an emergency.
On a final point of interest, when you get here, the office is very easy to get to. If you are going to walk it, be prepared for about a 45 minute walk. From the apartment:
I hope this makes your trip a little easier.
Stay tuned for a post about my Bay 2 Breakers experience.
What I mean by that is that there seems to be an endless supply of things to learn. This makes it my ideal workplace. One of the main reasons I went back to school is that I crave learning new things. It is my fuel! This is one of the main reasons that I didnt last more than 3 years in the military and why I didnt enjoy Honda. At some point, in most jobs, you get to a point where there is nothing more to learn. You get set in a routine and do the same thing day in, day out. This routine causes stagnation and you start to dislike your job, even grow to loathe going in every day. With Mozilla, there is always something new to learn. Even if you get set into a routine, you know that there is something completely new just around the corner (ie. A new program, a new feature, etc).
Mozilla is more of a community than it is a workplace. Just because you are working on one thing, it doesn't mean that you are pigeon-holed into that "area of expertise". If you have skills that can be applied to another area, you are free to have at it. Also, with any aspect of Mozilla you want to work on, there is typically a bunch of people working on that area that will help you get off the ground.
But this is not what I wanted to write about today. The first thing I wanted to write about is what you need to be prepared for re: travel when getting ready for your trip to the U.S.
Mozilla was extremely helpful in getting things set up for me so that I would have no, or as little hassle as possible, when it came try to interact with the customs officials. Before I list what you definitely will need, I would like to thank Tim, Karen, and the folks at AEISEC US for making everything as smooth as possible. The following is a list of items that I needed to get into the US:
- Canadian Passport
- DS-2019
- SEVIS Fee
- Job Offer Letter
- I-94
- Driver License
- Health Card
- SIN Card
- Student Card
- Any and all paperwork received from AEISEC
- A credit card
Canadian Passport:
This one is a no-brainer. Any time you are traveling outside of Canada you need to have a passport. If you don't have one, get one.
DS-2019:
This is a two page form that certifies you for your J-1 Visa, which will be stamped on your I-94 and stapled to your passport (the J1 Visa, not the DS-2019). The DS-2019 essentially says who you are and who is sponsoring you to enter the country. It also details some of the requirements to keep you J-1 Visa valid.
SEVIS Fee:
If you are coming into the country to work for Mozilla, you will most likely get a lot of your paperwork from AEISEC US. This form will be one of them. It should already be completed by AEISEC US as they are the ones getting you into the country. This form essentially confirms you for enrollment into the Student Visitor and Exchange Program.
Job Offer Letter:
This will be from Mozilla directly. It essentially confirms that Mozilla does want you to come and work for them. It will detail the terms of your employment (ie. pay, start and end date, etc).
I-94:
This form is for customs use. It is how you declare why you are entering into the country. The information you will receive will probably say that you have to make an appointment at your local US Consolate. If you are a Canadian citizen, all you need to do is fill out this I-94 form and show it to the Customs officer at the airport. You can pick up I-94 forms at the airport check-in counter for free.
Credit Card:
I recommend you get a credit card, if you haven't already. You may run into some issues if all you have is cash and a debit card. Some businesses may down right refuse to take your debit card as the clerk does not recognize it. If you do not have a credit card, your best bet is to try to get by on cash. If you decide to go this method, I recommend taking out what you need at an ATM on a weekly basis. If your bank is anything like my bank (TD rocks!), you will get charged a small astronomical fee each time you use your bank card. TD charges me $5 on top of whatever the ATM takes off. Having a credit card will also help you secure other items of interest (ie. plane tickets, rental car, etc).
One last thing to mention about traveling in to the US, I would give yourself anywhere from 2-3 hours prior to boarding. I got through the airport in about 30 minutes, but I traveled on Mothers' Day, so their was not much people traffic.
So this is all you need to get into the country. Be prepared for an uncomfortable ride with some amazing views. By the end of the 5 hour trip, my entire body ached, but it was worth it because of the sites from the plane window.
Once you land at San Francisco International (SFO), yes you should book your flight from Pearson to SFO, just follow the signs to baggage pickup. SFO is pretty straightforward to get around. It is actually quite smaller than Pearson. Once you get out of the airport you will need to find a way to get to Mountain View.
There are two main options: Caltrain and a cab. The Caltrain will take you about 1.5 hours and drop you off about a 10 minute walk from the Oakwood apartments. It should cost you around $8 US. The taxi cab will get you to the apartment front door in about 40 minutes, but it will cost you about $92 before tip. Cabs from the airport charge "meter and a half", which means they tack on 50% of the fare. So my fare of about $61 cost me $92...$110 with tip.
One last thing about the Caltrain, you want to go to "zone 3". The Caltrain system is broken into "zones". San Francisco is Zone 1, and Mountain View is Zone 3. You pay by the zone for Caltrain, so if you travel within your zone it is actually pretty cheap. It is similar to taking the Go train in the GTA.
This brings me to my most solid piece of advice: Bring about $200 US cash!
Trust me, you may not need this money yet, but you surely will at some point. It is when you do not have the cash that you will need it, so just carry some on you for an emergency.
On a final point of interest, when you get here, the office is very easy to get to. If you are going to walk it, be prepared for about a 45 minute walk. From the apartment:
- Walk down Middlefield in the direction of the convenience store until you hit Shoreline. You will see a Shell gas station on the right.
- Make a right onto Shoreline and walk until Charleston and make a left (it is a couple lights passed the overpass.
- Follow Charleston passed Google and turn onto Landings dr, to the left.
- Mozilla occupies building K and building S (see map below)
I hope this makes your trip a little easier.
Stay tuned for a post about my Bay 2 Breakers experience.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Prelude
Let me start off by saying that my opportunity to work for Mozilla Corporation completely took me by surprise. I was just sitting around, minding my own business when a great man, one Dave Humphrey, emailed me asking if I wanted to take part in an internship at Mozilla for the summer.
Now at this point, I already had a job lined up. Not a great job, but it paid pretty good. So obviously I had to tip-toe my way into this and give some serious thought as to what I wanted to do.
Ultimately I decided to take the opportunity at Mozilla, and it is an opportunity, a HUGE opportunity. My reasoning behind this was:
The primary reason is that I want to give back to Seneca College. Since this is an opportunity that was completely unknown to myself, this will give future Seneca students the knowledge to walk down this path without flying blind (or at least let's them know the path exists).
The secondary reason is that I want to have a record of my experiences this summer for my own personal recollection.
My intention with this blog is to give weekly updates on things I have done or experienced, both at the office and extracurricular.
I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I expect to enjoy working at Mozilla this summer.
Later days,
ashughes
Now at this point, I already had a job lined up. Not a great job, but it paid pretty good. So obviously I had to tip-toe my way into this and give some serious thought as to what I wanted to do.
Ultimately I decided to take the opportunity at Mozilla, and it is an opportunity, a HUGE opportunity. My reasoning behind this was:
- I saw it as an awesome experience opportunity.
- I had done some volunteer work for Mozilla and saw this as an opportunity to dig deeper.
- Icing on the cake: I would get to spend the summer in California.
The primary reason is that I want to give back to Seneca College. Since this is an opportunity that was completely unknown to myself, this will give future Seneca students the knowledge to walk down this path without flying blind (or at least let's them know the path exists).
The secondary reason is that I want to have a record of my experiences this summer for my own personal recollection.
My intention with this blog is to give weekly updates on things I have done or experienced, both at the office and extracurricular.
I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I expect to enjoy working at Mozilla this summer.
Later days,
ashughes
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