Good read: The value of Ignite

Recently I got a shout-out from Tricia Broderick in her blog post, “The value of Ignite“. The post was a great reminder of what someone can accomplish when they step out of their comfort zone and try something they’ve never done before.

We held multiple of these “Ignite” events at TechSmith. At each event we had about eight presenters who covered various work and non-work related topics. The twist to the presentations is that each slide can only be on-screen for 15 seconds (auto-advancing) and you only get 20 slides.

These turned out to be great activities for people to learn more about their coworkers as well as get practice presenting. See Tricia’s blog post for her take on the event.

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.

Firefox OS – The Web is the Platform

This past Monday I gave a presentation at the Mobile Monday Detroit meeting about Firefox OS. Thanks to some great screen recording software by TechSmith, I also recorded it 🙂

I’ve also made the slides available online for those who just want to read (press ‘s’ on your keyboard to see my speaker notes, you may have to allow pop-ups).

Mobile Monday Detroit is a monthly meetup that gets people together to talk about activity in the mobile space. Many topics cover Android and iOS, so it was really cool to snag a spot on the podium and give a talk about one of the ‘alternative’ operating systems. Also presenting this week was Randy Nunez from Ford who gave a talk about the various open source mobile operating systems and Chris Peplin from Ford who talked about the Open XC API for cars that Ford is working on.

If you live in southeast Michigan you should try to make it out to one of the meetings. More information can be found at the Mobile Monday Detroit Meetup page.

Firefox OS at Mobile Monday Detroit

If you haven’t heard about Firefox OS before, or would like to learn more about it, you should come to this month’s Mobile Monday Detroit. I’ll be presenting at the meeting about Mozilla’s motivations for Firefox OS, how we’re opening up mobile hardware, and roadmap for the future.

It has been estimated that in the next 10 years, five billion people will gain access to the internet. Many of these people will be accessing the internet using mobile connection exclusively.

One of the main goals of Firefox OS is to provide a device to people that brings with it the full web as compared to the limited subset of the web that is currently accessible on more basic feature phones. This also means providing web applications better access to hardware, so application developers can provide rich environments comparable to that of other mobile phone operating systems.

As we build these hardware APIs, we have been working very hard to standardize them and push for other browsers to adopt them. You can follow along with the progress of the WebAPI project by visiting our wiki. All of the FirefoxOS roadmaps, feature lists, etc can all be viewed online. This project really defines openness 🙂

Mobile Monday Detroit is hosted at Compuware’s headquarters in downtown Detroit, at One Campus Martius. The event will start at 5:30pm and run until 8pm. Food and drinks will be provided. Please RSVP (it’s free!) if you plan on attending so the organizers will have a good idea of how much food to order.

Randy Nunez from Ford will also provide information on a variety of additional open source mobile OS platforms that are catching the attention of the developer community.

Monday, May 13, 2013
5:30 PM to 8:00 PM
Compuware Building
One Campus Martius, Detroit, MI (map)

Come learn about FirefoxOS at MobiDevDay Detroit

I’m excited to announce that I will be presenting at MobiDevDay Detroit on May 4th on the topic of Firefox OS.

FirefoxOS is Mozilla’s new mobile operating system, based entirely on web technology. FirefoxOS will bring full device capabilities to the web stack, allowing web developers to create immersive experiences in a cross-platform and device agnostic manner.

This talk will briefly cover the motivations of FirefoxOS and then dive in to the new technology and APIs that are being opened up to developers who are looking to create apps for FirefoxOS.

MobiDevDay Detroit was the first conference of its kind. Now in its third year, MobiDevDay is dedicated to bringing the world of Mobile to Michigan’s Software Developer Community. We hope to grow MobiDevDay Detroit into the most important polyglot Mobile Developer conference in the world.

MobiDevDay Detroit 2013 will be held at the Cobo Conference Center on May 4th.

Breakfast, Lunch and Free Parking will be provided.

Register today for the conference before it sells out. I’ll share more details about my talk as the date gets closer.