What have I been working on? (2014/03)

So it's April the 11th already and here I am writing about what I did on March. Oh well! I spent a bunch of time gathering and discussing requisites/feedback for AppManager v2, which implied

  1. thinking about the new ideas we sketched while at the Portland work week in February
  2. thinking about which AppManager questions to ask my team and the Partner Engineering team when we all were at Mountain View - because you can't show up at a meeting without a set of questions ready to be asked
  3. then summarise the feedback and transmit it to Darrin, our UX guy who couldn't be at the meeting in Mountain View
  4. then discuss the new questions with Paul & team who are going to implement it

And we were at Mountain View for the quarterly Apps meeting, when us in the Apps+Marketplace section of Mozilla get to talk apps and strategy and stuff for two days or more. It's always funny when you meet UK-based workmates at another office and realise you've never spoken before, or you have, but didn't associate their faces to their irc nicknames.

It was also the last of the meetings held at the already ex-Mozilla office in Castro Street, so it was sort of sad and bitter to leave Ten Forward (the big meeting room where most of the meetings and announcements have been happening) for the very last time. Mozilla HQ is now somewhere else in Mountain View, but I'll always remember the Castro St. office with a smile because that's where my first week at Mozilla happened :-)

But before I flew to San Francisco I attended GinJS, which I had been willing to attend for ages and couldn't (because I'm never in town when it happens). I hadn't even planned to go to that one, but some folks from Telefonica Digital were going and sort of convinced me to attend too. It was funny to sign up for the meeting while walking down Old Street on the way to the pub where GinJS was held. That's what the mobile internet was designed for! Then at GinJS I met a number of cool people-some I had spoken before, some I hadn't. I recommend you attend it, if you can make it :-)

I was also on the Components panel in EdgeConf. I still haven't written about the experience and the aftermath of the conference because I basically fell ill at the end of it, and was very busy after that, but I'll do it. I promise!

I also attended the first instalment of TRIBE, a sort of internal personal development program that is run at Mozilla. The first unwritten rule of TRIBE is you don't talk about TRIBE... nah, I'm just joking! The first session is about "becoming aware of yourself", and it was quite interesting to observe myself and my reactions in a conscious way rather than in the totally reactive, subconscious led mode we tend to operate under most of the time. It was also interesting to speak to other attendees and see things from their own point of view. I know it sounds tacky but it has led me to consider treating others more compassionately, or at least try to empathise more rather than instantly judge. This kind of seminars should be mandatory, whether you work in open source or not.

This session was held in Paris, so that gave me the chance to try and find the best croissant place in the morning and have a look at some nice views in the evening when we finished. Also, I went through the most amazingly thrilling and mindblowing-scary experience in a long time: a taxi ride to the airport during rush hour. I thought we were going to die on each of the multiple and violent street turns we did. I saw the Eiffel Tower in the distance and thought "Goodbye Paris, goodbye life" as we sped past a bus, just a few centimeters apart. Or as a bike almost ran over the taxi (an the opposite, too). I'm pretty sure I left a mark on the floor of the taxi as my foot involuntarily tried to brake all the time. And I thought that traffic in Rome was crazy... hah!

In between all this I managed to update a bunch of the existing Mortar templates, help improve some Brick components, publish an article in Mozilla Hacks, and give a ton of feedback on miscellaneous things (code, sites, peers, potential screencasts, conference talks, articles). Did I say a ton? Make it a ton and a half. Oh, and I also interviewed another potential intern. I'm starting to enjoy that--I wonder if it's bad!

And I took a week of holidays.

I initially planned on hacking with WebMIDI and a KORG nanoKEY2, but my brain wasn't willing to collaborate, so I just accepted that fact, and tried not to think much about it. The weather has been really warm and sunny so far so I've been hiking and staying outside as much as possible, and that's been good after spending so much time indoors (or in planes).