Coffee on the Keyboard

I’m not ashamed of it: I like Windows. I think the user experience is light-years ahead of Gnome and KDE. There’s nothing ostensibly wrong with OS X, but there are little usability differences and frankly switching isn’t worth the annoyance to me. That’s why I run Windows 7 on all three computers I use daily.

This is only a problem when I try to work on LAMP web applications. Sure, I could install XAMPP, but running Apache/PHP on Windows is really not close enough to a production environment. So I have two choices: I can dual-boot Linux and work in an OS—well, a window manager—I don’t like, or I can turn to virtual machines. Continue reading

A common theme we heard in responses to our web developer survey was: “I wish I could help Mozilla, but I’m just a web developer.”

Well, fellow web ninjas, you can put your skills to work with Mozilla and help make the web a better place. Our web projects are open, just like Firefox, and we’d love your help!

If you’re a web developer and want to help Mozilla and Firefox users while working on sites that see millions of visitors every day, follow me through the jump and I’ll show you around our shop and introduce you to the tools we use. Continue reading

At Mozilla, our web development projects are open source, publicly available, and interested in community contributions.

This is one of those things that makes absolute sense when you hear it, but you may have never heard, or thought, of it before.

It’s not terribly well-publicized—that’s something Mike Morgan and I are going to start working on this week—but there are ways you can get involved:

• There’s info about most, if not all, our current projects on the Mozilla Wiki.
• An advanced search in Bugzilla can tell you a lot about what’s going on.
• You can find web dev people on IRC in #webdev, #sumodev, and a few others. (I’m jsocol on irc.mozilla.org.)

Why would you want to contribute to Mozilla web development projects?

• You care about the web, and making it better.
• Our websites are used by millions of people.
• Because of that, we work at scales most developers don’t usually get to see.

Hopefully I’ll have something to add by the end of the week, but in the meantime, come on over and say “hi” on IRC!