Australis-Styled Widgets Presentation

I’ve been pretty quiet this semester about the work that a team of students have been focused on. However, don’t let my quietness be a representation of how hard they have worked.

We’re now reaching the end of the semester and the students have put together a video of their work throughout the semester. The students were tasked with creating three add-ons for the upcoming Australis version of Firefox.

The goal of the project was to get feedback on the new Australis add-on APIs before it became too late to make significant changes. Through the process some bugs were filed, but none that caused us to have to go back and rethink our initial direction.

The three add-ons that the students were asked to create were a weather add-on, music add-on, and Bugzilla add-on. Please watch the video below to get an overview of their capabilities.

You can view the source code for the Weather widget and the Bugzilla widget online.

This Friday: Computer Science as a Profession

This Friday I’ll be giving a talk to 250 primarily first-year students majoring in Computer Science at Michigan State University. This presentation is part of their CSE 100: Computer Science as a Profession course that students are required to take.

I’m planning on starting with an overview of Mozilla and some of the unique technical challenges that I’ve had to solve. One of the really cool things about working at Mozilla is getting to see and experience up front the wide spectrum of computing problems that are being tackled.

Within the Mozilla community, there are people working on the forefront of research by implementing a new memory-safe and concurrent programming language (Rust) and parallel browser engine (Servo) to finding innovative ways to get people more involved with producing web content (Webmaker).

I will try to record the presentation, but I can’t make any guarantees.

I feel very honored to receive an invitation to give this talk, and I’m greatly looking forward to it. If you have some helpful tips for college freshman, please do share in the comments below.

Interview with Ray Heldt about contributing to Firefox (Part 3/3)

I sat down a couple days ago with Ray Heldt. Ray is one of the MSU students working on multitouch gestures for Firefox. I asked Ray about his experience and what he thought about contributing to open-source software.

Check out the video below for the interview (1m 38s):

I also got a chance to interview the other two students working on the project, Bill de Araujo and Brandon Waterloo. I posted Bill’s interview a couple days ago and Brandon’s interview yesterday.

Interview with Brandon Waterloo about contributing to Firefox (Part 2/3)

I sat down yesterday with Brandon Waterloo. Brandon is one of the MSU students working on multitouch gestures for Firefox. I asked Brandon about his experience and what he thought about contributing to open-source software.

Check out the video below for the interview (3m 13s):

I also got a chance to interview the other two students working on the project, Bill de Araujo and Ray Heldt. I posted Bill’s interview previously and will be posting Ray’s interview shortly.

Interview with Bill de Araujo about contributing to Firefox (Part 1/3)

I sat down today with Bill de Araujo. Bill is one of the MSU students working on multitouch gestures for Firefox. I asked Bill about his experience and what he thought about contributing to open-source software.

Check out the video below for the interview (1m 31s):

I also got a chance to interview the other two students working on the project, Brandon Waterloo and Ray Heldt. I’ll be posting their interviews in the coming days.