Kate Glazko and I were fortunate to be able to present a session on Firefox Nightly at this year's Grace Hopper event.

My first impression was how massive an event it was! Just watching everyone stream into the venue for the keynote was magnificent. Legions of attendees from different companies were easily recognizable by their coordinated shirts. Whether it was Amazon's lime green or Facebook's blue, it was great to see (and almost like a parade!)

I thought our presentation went really well. While we had originally conceived it as a workshop, we decided to opt for a presentation followed by a few exercises instead. Part of the reasoning behind the decision was we simply did not have enough moderators to cover the session. The room held 180 people - I estimate we had about 80 attendees present at the session.

We got some really good questions during the Q&A, even one about Thunderbird. Attendees were interested in a wide range of subjects, including privacy practices, how we monitor failing tests, and information and details about Project Quantum. One attendee was interested in how she could get the Developer tools in Nightly.

I hope we succeeded in getting more people downloading and using nightly and 57 beta. At least one student approached me after the event and wants to contribute - that is what makes these types of events so great!

This past weekend's l10n/Nightly workshop reminded me about how great it is meeting Mozillians that work on various aspects of our project. I had some interesting conversations with various communities, about lots of different topics. I don't work specifically with localizers, but it was interesting to hear some of the challenges they face when they have to translate terms in Firefox.

marcia and the Mozilla Ugandan community

These face to face meetups are the best part of working at Mozilla. Although we were mostly in our own spaces in the office, during the lunches and dinners we got to explore some far ranging topics. Some of the communities also brought some "sweets" to the event, which was wonderful.

marcia and the Mozilla Persian community

Thanks to Jeff, Delphine, Flod, Axel, Peiying, Theo, Pascal, and Clara for all their hard work putting the Paris event together and coordinating the logistics. It was truly a great event!

This weekend we gathered a small group of Mozillians to work on activities related to Nightly. You can see the goals we intended to accomplish on our wiki. Our event was held along with the l10n team's Workshop, which was a great mix of different communities who were focused on improving the localization of Firefox in their respective languages. The Nightly group worked on the first floor, but we shared meals with the rest of the participants, which was a great way for all of the various communities to meet each other.

Pascal and Arnaud exploring the Mozregression tool.

Here are some of the things we accomplished during the course of the weekend:

MozActivate: Sunday we spent almost the entire day brainstorming a MozActivate activity that we could build a template around. Flore had an event in Lyon, and we used some of the feedback from her event and built that into the template design. I am happy to say that thanks to our hard work that we actually came up with a good template for an activity - we are currently getting some feedback and hope to have an activity on the site shortly. Even better, the template can be used for other events related to Nightly, especially when we need to have specific features tested as we continue work on Project Quantum.

Flore and Christophe during the Nightly Workshop in Paris

Other areas we covered during the course of the weekend:

You can find more pictures of the event here, and the entire group photo here. Overall it was a great event, with lots of interaction and lots of discussion.

I am happy to report that we are hosting an upcoming Nightly event in May, in the Mozilla Paris space.

Please read the instructions on the wiki to apply for one of the 5 spots. Please note that you must be local to the area as we cannot sponsor travel.

This should be an exciting event, and community members that participate will get to meet over 50 localizers from the EU, African and Arabic communities! Looking forward to seeing your applications.

Back in 2008 I had the pleasure of participating in the first MozillaMozCamp, which was held in the beautiful city of Barcelona. I remember that event fondly for several reasons, one of the most significant being I met Giuliano Masseroni and the rest of the Italian community. I was immediately struck by his personality and passion, which shone like a bright star. Giuliano has not been active for several years, but was instrumental in the early days of the Italian community. And as flod pointed out in his blog post, he did a lot of work helping Italian users on the Italian support forum. Giuliano was a great person, and he will be sorely missed.

This week I spent some time on the Harvard campus taking a professional development class in Strategic Leadership. It was an interesting experience, so I thought I would share some of the takeaways from the two days.

The 32 participants in the class represented many different countries and cultures - we had participants from the U.S., Europe, Asia , Africa and Latin America. They spanned many different industries - the Military, Education, BioTech, and Government. The networking event the first evening afforded us an opportunity to meet the diverse array of people from all different countries and industries (there was also another class being held with another 25 students from all over the world). I let many of the participants know that we had community members in their respective areas and described what Mozilla was all about. Some of the participants were quite excited about the fact they got to meet someone that works for a company that makes the browser they use on a daily basis. They were also interested to learn about how community contributions help drive the Mozilla project.

In addition to reviewing some case studies, the content on the first day explored the realms of leadership - including the psychological dimensions and emotional dimensions and styles. Day 2 we took a deep dive into decision making - using emotional intelligence as a foundation and exploring the challenges of decision making.

The great thing about these types of courses is they leave ample time for reflection. You actually get to think about your style, and learn about yourself and your leadership styles and how you apply them to different situations in your life. And since the case studies are taken from real life situations, taking the time to think about how you would have handled the situation is definitely a good process to go through.

Both the recent TRIBE class I took and this one helped me gather some tools that I should be able to use when I working with both my co-workers and community members. The important thing to remember is that it is a process - although you won't see changes overnight, if you employ some of the tools they outline, you may be able to hone your leadership skills as time passes.

My co-mentor Kate Glazko wrote a great blog post the other day about her work mentoring Manel Rhaiem on Project Haiku.

I am no longer working in Connected Devices, so my experience as a mentor has been a bit different than Kate's. But I will say that we were fortunate to all be able to be together in London at the Mozilla Work Week to sync up and spend some time together.

Since the Work Week, I have tried to be in daily communication with Manel to find out how she is doing on her project. The Outreachy experience is unique in that the intern is remote, so I think communication is critical (just as it is in many Mozilla teams that are geographically distributed). We can talk about her project, but we can also take opportunities to explore professional development and prep her for her eventual entrance into the tech workforce.

The ability to listen is also important - and I am always keen to hear what she thinks about her internship experience, as well as the larger scope of what Mozilla is doing.

So far from my perspective this has been a great experience - I feel the same way I did about the Outreachy mentorship as I did last year when I was a co-mentor for TechWomen. I look forward to working with both Kate and Manel until the internship concludes at the end of August.

Today marks the first day I will co-mentoring Outreachy internManel Rhaiem. I will be teaming up with Kate Glazko who is part of the Project SmartHome team. I am excited to see what Manel will accomplish as part of this project - it should be an exciting few months! I plan on blogging about our experience and sharing everything that all of us are learning.

One of the things we discussed the other day was StrengthsFinder 2.0 - and how all of compared as far as our strengths. I find this to be very useful when working as a part of team.

After some time working on Firefox OS and Connected Devices, I am moving back to Desktop land. Going forward I will be working with the Release Management Team as the Nightly Program Manager. That means I would love to work with all of you all to identify any potential issues in Nightly and help bring them to resolution.

To that end, I have done a few things. First, we now have a Telegram Group for Nightly Testers. Feel free to join that group if you want to keep up with issues we are investigating or talk about things going in Desktop/Mobile Nightly. I will also post on discourse when there are things we would like help with.

I am also working on trying to put together a few hackathons where will focus on activities related to Nightly - stay tuned!

The Vaani QA team has started working with the Raspberry Pi, and to that end we thought it would be fun to create a few One and Done tasks so that the community can become more familiar with using the RPi. To that end, we had a few of our community members create some tasks you can try out. Note that at least one of them doesn't require a RPi, so you can actually become more familiar with openHAB just be installing it on your Android or IOS device.

Please try out these tasks and let us know what you think! Even better, if you have suggestions for additional tasks please let us know.

Back in December when the announcement was made that we would shift focus to Connected Devices, I started thinking about how different life would be for both myself and the QA community since we are so accustomed to testing products or services with front end UI (Firefox Desktop, Android and Firefox OS). Since this is a new area for all of us, I have started encouraging our QA community to start taking online classes to learn more about IOT and the possibilities. Now is the time to learn and explore Raspberry Pi and Arduino,

Sure enough, we have found a number of different classes that are free to take (Some of them allow you to pay if you want a certificate, or donate to support their efforts).

I just signed up (along with a community member) for an edX class coming up soon: Enabling Technologies for Data Science and Analytics: The Internet of Things. It is my hope that some of us can pair up and take these courses together - and hold information discussions following the lectures.

Someone also pointed me to https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/internet-of-things. Coursera also seems to have a specialization in the Internet of Things.

I am excited to see where this journey takes us - and I am glad we can leverage the many universities around the world that are offering us a window to their courses.

Despite the fact I have been around the Mozilla project for some time, I never did get the opportunity to attend the FOSDEM conference. This year I was fortunate enough to not only attend, but also to present along with Ioana Chiorean at FOSDEM in the Mozilla Developer Room. And I was in good company: Johan Lorenzo and Martijn Wargers of the QA team also presented a great Automation Session on Saturday - you can see the video here.

Martijn Wargers and Johan Lorenzo presenting at FOSDEM 2016

There were several things that I observed during the 2 days of the conference. First, the Mozilla Developer Room had good crowds for most every session, and I think there were several sessions where we actually filled the room. The same can be said of the Mozilla booth, as it got very good traffic due to its positioning in the area where the keynotes were being given.

I was really impressed with all of the community who rallied to help man the doors, took shifts at the Mozilla booth and coordinated the video camera in the Developer Room. Those that worked at the booth expressed boundless enthusiasm booth as they fielded all types of questions. It really is a great feeling to see so many of contributors give their heart and soul at events such as this, and I am proud to work alongside them as we continue to promote the open web.

The dinner conversations were great, and I look forward to following up on many of the ideas discussed at dinner, including planning some hackathons in the coming months.

You can see more pictures from the event here.

Photo Courtesy of https://www.flickr.com/photos/lhirlimann/

As 2015 winds down, I thought it was appropriate to post this great photo taken by Ludovic Hirlimann at our most recent Work Week (and the title of this post is the caption for the photo as well). It is people like the 2 contributors in this photo (Manel Rhaiem and Gabriela Montagu) that make the Mozilla project a unique and wonderful place to work. Getting to work with contributors all over the world to make a better Web is truly sublime.

Thanks to all of the contributors who helped the Mozilla project advance in 2015. We look forward to working with you in 2016!

It is pretty clear that when Mozillians get together that magic often ensues - and this weekend's event in Paris was no exception. I saw some participants at this event that I had not seen in over 2 years, and it was great to once again to connect with our great community members from across the EU.

For the second time this year, the QA team joined forces with the existing l10n Hackathons being held across the globe and hosted a 2 day workshop in the Mozilla Paris space focusing on Firefox OS QA.

Group photo taken on the stairs of the Mozilla Paris office. You can see more pictures of the event here.

We covered a lot of territory in the 2 days - perhaps at times it may have been almost too much information. I created a document called "Introduction to Firefox OS Testing" and I intend to continue working on refining the document as the year goes on. It can then be used as a reference for future QA training events.

Part of having these events is getting feedback on what works and what doesn't - and the five participants shared some great feedback that will work to help us improve future events. The five of us plan to continue meeting and working together going forward, using both our newly created Telegram channel as well as planning some Vidyo meetings.

Another big win was being able to flash some Flames and give them to the localizers so they can test Firefox 2.5!

Thanks to everyone that attended for making this a truly wonderful event - I look forward to doing more of these types of events next year.

An update to my June 15th post about the group of students working on their own Firefox OS Summer of Code - as a result of their hard work, there is now a new app in the Firefox OS Marketplace - LibriFox! LibriFox is a native Firefox OS app that brings LibriVox.org audiobooks to your device. Alex Hirschberg did a great job taking this from concept to app, and I encourage all of you to download some audiobooks and try it out! While you are at it, please take a moment to review the app - thanks!

I just finished posting my Goals for Q3. In addition to continuing work on the Bug Triage project, this quarter I want to gather a small team of testers and work on two Firefox features (TBD). I want to keep the same architectural structure of the BuddyUp Pilot, and ask that those who participate commit to helping see the feature through until it ships in a Firefox release. I also want to keep the team small, and get some QA mentors onboard to help as well.

On the event side, I will spend part of this quarter planning content for the next l10n-QA joint hackathon meetup in Barcelona. We don't yet have a date, but we have been able to secure a great location thanks to Alina Mierlus. More details on the event as they become available, but we will have an application process for QA similar to what we had for the event in Peru.

A few weeks ago many Mozillians trekked to Whistler to experience the second Mozilla Coincidental Work Week. Below is a picture of the QA team in action:

Photo courtesy of Christos Bacharakis - https://www.flickr.com/photos/christosbacharakis/

While at the Work Week I participated in two Participation Labs for QA. In the first Lab I wanted to explore the possibility of designing a set of small scale, repeatable events for QA training. During the hour allotted we had a very interesting discussion, but unfortunately I think that the discussion went in a different direction, more along the lines of exploring how QA brings strategic advantage to Mozilla. It was helpful, but I would like to follow up with this idea of leveraging the work we did with the BuddyUp Pilot and create a cohesive plan for these types of events going forward. I also think to really have achieved that goal we would have needed more time to hammer out the details of our approach.

The second Participation Lab focused on QA working better with the Mozilla Reps.

The Participation Team indicated they will be following up with us individually regarding our sessions, so I hope to have more clarity around next steps after I hear back from them.

In the meantime, I think the big win for me during the Work Week was to see the QA community in person - that was my favorite time spent during the course of the event.

Jeff Beatty and I have teamed up to work on some interesting "fusion" events in the upcoming quarters. The l10n team has already been planning a bunch of Hackathon style events, so Jeff and I decided it might be interesting to join forces and do some QA presentations at these events.

The first event will be held in July in Lima, Peru, and will be led by Juan and Gabriela of the QA team. The content focus will primarily be on the Firefox Desktop. We also hope to be able to provide the participants with an overview of the QA team and what we do at Mozilla. It was clear from my recent participation in the MozBalkans event that QA can be a misunderstood area, and we hope to be able to clear up some of the misconceptions about what types of skills you need to be involved in QA at Mozilla.

The invites for this event were handled by having those that reside in LATAM apply, and then as a team we selected 5 individuals to participate in the Peru event. I modeled this after our successful BuddyUp Pilot Program, where we followed the same pattern. Juan and Gabriela will prepare content, and we will make sure we capture lots of feedback at the conclusion of the event to be used for future events.

Stay tuned for more news as about this event, as well as future events.

Since they popped into an an IRC channel and asked for a Flame device, I have been working with a set of high school students in Virginia on various projects related to Firefox OS and the BuddyUp app. I just received an email from their IT teacher about an interesting Summer of Code project they just started.

They are also working on another great project, remixing a Firefox OS tutorial.

These students have done a great job, and should proud of all the work they have done over the course of this year.

Here are their individual blogs, where they documented the process of working on their projects over the course of the semester:

http://ahirschberg-programming.blogspot.com/http://finncakinjava.blogspot.com/http://anicholakos-webdesign.blogspot.com/

I had the privilege of being able to attend the MozBalkans Regional Community meetup last weekend in Bucharest. Prior to the event, I had formulated some explicit goals for the event.

Some of the highlights for me:

Meeting new community members from that regionIntroducing them to what QA is and how they can get involvedWatching fredy and Christos give a great presentation/demo of the BuddyUp AppLearning more about what the SUMO and l10n teams are doing

Some of the challenges I learned in various discussions:

Some attendees had some misconceptions about QA, and did not know there were so many other things to test besides FX OSChallenges for some countries getting Flames

Thanks to Ioana for all of her dedication and hard work - she really poured her heart and soul into planning the event and making sure we had a true Romanian experience. I believe the event was a great success and I am really looking forward to being able to participate in other events like this in the future. I left the event feeling very energized and inspired to work even more with contributors in the QA community.

The QA BuddyUp Team met once again prior to the Mozilla Balkans meetup in Bucharest. Thanks to Softvision, we had a great workspace to use for the day, and we had a lot of good discussion about the next steps for the project as well as our approach to automation. Pictured below are the members of the team (from left to right): Ada, Madalina, Ioana, fredy, Christos and Bebe.

You can see the notes from our discussion here. The day we met there were some challenges with working on automation, but nevertheless we were able to create some follow up action items and discuss how we can better channel any community involvement in the project going forward. Thanks to everyone that participated!

Several weeks ago, we embarked on a unique experiment in the QA realm – a Pilot project where community will actually own the testing of a Mozilla product. I came up with this idea back in the latter part of 2014 when I found out about an app called BuddyUp which is designed to be a support app on FX OS devices. It seemed to really lend itself well to community involvement, and I thought it would be interesting to try something new to get community involved in our QA functional area. It also is a great example of a project that aligns very well with the Mozilla mission - human collaboration across an open platform.

We started out the process by creating a wiki page and asking community to apply for an upcoming event that the team was having in the Paris space. I felt it was important to have the community meet and interact with the entire team working on the app: Development, UX, Project Management, Content, etc. We selected 4 individuals for the project: Christos Bacharakis, Alfredos (fredy) Damkalis and Karthikeyan Palaniswamy. We also selected another individual from the community who unfortunately was not able to make it to the event. I also asked Ioana Chiorean to join us at the event as a QA mentor, knowing that she would be an incredibly valuable asset when it came to being able to work with these 3 individuals and share her QA experience.

Prior to the beginning of the event, Ioana and I created a homework assignment for the participants to complete. The idea was to get the app installed and get them thinking about the workflows in the various parts of the app. It turned out this worked out really well, and I think it really got the week off to a good start. Karthikeyan created a really interesting mindmap to document the flow of his area – you can see it below:

As the week progressed, Ioana documented both the bugs we filed each day as well as some of the QA topics we covered. Part of the week was about working with the devs and filing bugs, and part of it was about having a few sessions that focused on the things such as:

QA Methodology and thinking like a testerExploratory TestingWriting good Bugzilla bugsHow to Write a Good Testcase in MoztrapIntroduction to Automation – Johan Lorenzo

The feedback I got from many individuals at the event was that they thought it was very successful – some really good bugs got filed during the course of the week, and because there had really not been QA “eyes” on the app yet, we were able to work through all the user flows and verify the implementation of the defined user stories. There were some challenges for sure, but I think everyone left the event energized and ready for the next step. I think the big wins during the week were:

Participants filing lots of good bugsParticipants entering a set of test cases into MoztrapSharing our QA knowledge with the participants

The second phase of this project will be working to onboard additional community members and have them work with Fredy, Christos and Karthikeyan. We hope to have a follow up event with the QA team at the end of May to see how everyone is progressing and to follow up with some additional training.

Thanks to all that participated – Fredy, Christos, and Karthikeyan were all very enthusiastic participants and all three of them put a lot of effort and energy into the daily activities. Thanks also to Ioana for her wonderful mentorship and adding so much enthusiasm to the project. Finally, thanks to the entire BuddyUp team for their patience working with the team during the course of the week.

You can find pictures of the event here.