soledad penadés

Oh hey, here's another belated post from Sole! But at least it didn't take me a full whole year to write ^_^

We hosted the first ever Firefox OS Bug Squash Party at Mozilla London (also known as MozLDN) last week, thanks to the initiative of Francisco and Guillaume that mostly brainstormed it all with support from Valentin Schmitt.

Saturday

Francisco asked me on Friday to intro the event, and run through the basic security guidelines etc as I had done that before for other events that I had hosted at MozLDN (like ladieswhocode).

That was a great opportunity to show GIFs so I accepted enthusiastically!

Since this was going to be a somewhat long event we wanted to make sure no one misbehaved, so I made it VERY CLEAR what was right and what was wrong. I not only mentioned we had a code of conduct but also read it aloud (as it was reasonably short) and gave very explicit examples of "what NOT to do". Then I also added it to the top of the etherpad we were using to coordinate and share content, so that even late comers could be aware of the "house rules".

I'm particularly happy with how the code of conduct ended up looking so here is it---feel free to copy and use it in your own events:

***CODE OF CONDUCT*** Don't be a jerk

This is a safe space We're here to learn and help each other

• Feel free to ask any questions
• No question is too silly
• Respect other people's questions
• Respect other people's background
• Don't make assumptions—always ask
• If someone asks you to stop doing something... stop doing it!

NOT acceptable

• Sexist, racist, offensive comments/jokes/imagery
• Harassment of ANY kind

We're building a community together Good communities are made of diverse people

• Developers
• Designers
• Testers
• Users
• Fans!

Anyone violating these rules will be sanctioned or expelled at our discretion

Health and Safety rules and MozLDN general "don't be gross and clean after yourself" rules were a bit more boring so if you want to look at them just look at the slides! (code for the slides).

After going through the schedule it was time for Francisco's epic Setting up the development environment session which was a good challenge for the WiFi network (Gaia is a huge project) and for those of us not familiar with Windows computers. Argh! (details are left to the imagination of the reader).

https://twitter.com/supersole/status/528503048336076800

Despite that we got pretty much everyone set up and ready to go just in time for lunch, so we decided to stop for lunch and continue afterwards with Guillaume's session on how to run and debug Firefox OS apps using WebIDE.

https://twitter.com/supersole/status/528544782113837056

Wilson was also around and he brought this weird device hacked to be able to "DIY Dual SIM":

https://twitter.com/supersole/status/528512719562227712

(I think it was a Cloud FX phone?)

Also about that time Wilson got in touch with Leo, another Mozillian, who knew how to operate the A/V equipment and between my limited knowledge and Leo's remote wisdom we managed to connect to the Mozilla Paris office, who were holding a similar event at the same time!

https://twitter.com/supersole/status/528548875947487232

Our space seemed a tad busier than theirs (we had ~35 people I think), so we joked a bit about that, but despite Paris having less people they ended up submitting more patches, teeheehee! So Dietrich named this Firefox OS Co-opetition! But I'm anticipating events...

The rest of Saturday was spent getting familiar with Gaia code, squashing more bugs, etc. At some point the first patches were ready, and Francisco took to the stage again to show how the process for code reviewing a patch worked, also how to run tests, ensure the patch actually fixes what it is meant to fix, etc.

https://twitter.com/supersole/status/528575590878949376

There was pizza a bit after that, and everyone was done for the day.

Sunday

We weren't too sure as to how many people would show up on Sunday but we still got a sizeable amount of attendees! There were more patches sent and bugs squashed. And also two presentations:

Marcia Knous explained how the QA process worked:

https://twitter.com/supersole/status/528902324643979265

And Zac spoke about automated tests:

https://twitter.com/supersole/status/528903915803525120

This slide was really cool: Best practices for reporting Firefox OS bugs!

https://twitter.com/supersole/status/528905486444552192

Transcribing it for easier referencing:

Bugzilla Best Practices

Typically included in a Bug report:

• Build ID and Base version used
• ADB Logcat while issue has been reproduced
• Video of the issue if it helps illustrate the problem
• Screenshot of the issue if it helps illustrate the problem
• Is the issue 100% reproducible?

We didn't stay that late as on Saturday. At the end of the day we compared both dashboards--Paris and London:

Conclusions

For being our first Bug Squash Party, it went way smoother than we expected! It was a really nice continuation to MozFest--there were at least two attendees who joined the party because they had got a Flame at MozFest.

Setting up the dev environment was the longest part and it was a bit of a tedious bore--I wonder what can be done to simplify that--, but once that part was done, it was quite easy for people to get started since they were web developers already.

My personal opinion is that the explicitness with the Code of Conduct worked quite well, and I can say this with confidence because pretty much everyone behaved really well and respectfully, whereas some people that came afterwards and hadn't been through our house rules behaved in ways that could have been "better". From being politer with us to treating the rest of attendees with a bit more of respect.

We were also thinking that perhaps we should not let latecomers in, as they made us stop and start from the beginning to bring them up to speed, this being more of a workshop than a conference.

Finally, I'm sad to report that two of the test phones that we generously lent to attendees went missing. Maybe we'll have to be less generous and trusting and ask for a proof of ID to be left with us in exchange for testing hardware. I would like to stress the point that these phones are work tools and stealing them prevents people from doing their work, and you should feel super bad for doing so, whomever you were.