Christian Heilmann: Erase and Rewind – a talk about open web enthusiasm at Open Web Camp |
I just flew from San Francisco to Seattle still suffering from the aftermath of the after party of Open Web Camp 7, a gathering of enthusiasts of the web that lasted for seven years and showed that you can teach, inspire and meet without having to pay a lot. The ticket prices were $10 and even those were mostly to avoid people getting tickets and not coming. All the money left over was then donated to a great cause. Thank you for everyone involved, especially John Foliot for seven years of following a dream and succeeding. And also for moving on whilst you are still happy with what you do.
My presentation at the event, “Erase and rewind – a tale of innovation and impatience” discussed the problems I found with advocating for the open web I encountered over the years. The problems we found, the gaps I see in our storytelling and the loss of focus we suffered when smartphones became a new form factor that seemed great for the web, but became its biggest problem very soon.
There’s a screencast of the presentation on YouTube
The slides are available on Slideshare
I got a bit into a rant, but I think there is a big problem that the people who advocate about great ideas of the web clash with those who want to innovate it. There are a lot of events going on right now that want to achieve the same goal, but keep violating the best practices of others. We need to rally to keep the web relevant and alive. Not define that what we do is the one true way.
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Mozilla Addons Blog: Friend of AMO: Amir Faryar Zahedi |
Our newest Friend of AMO is Amir Faryar Zahedi! Amir began contributing as an add-on reviewer over a year ago, and has since reviewed nearly 10,000 add-ons. 60-80% of add-ons on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) are reviewed by volunteer contributors, so it’s Mozillians like Amir who play a key part in keeping the community running. He says,
“In a world driven by profit, it is good to be part of a community that aspires to providing free software for everyone.”
Big thanks to Amir!
We wrapped up a productive July, and now the August contribution wiki is ready.
There is a new section that tracks how many “goodfirstbugs” were fixed in the last month. In July, volunteer contributors fixed 9 bugs!
Thanks to everyone for your continued support.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/03/friend-of-amo-amir-faryar-zahedi/
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Air Mozilla: Mozilla Weekly Project Meeting |
The Monday Project Meeting
https://air.mozilla.org/mozilla-weekly-project-meeting-20150803/
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Mozilla Reps Community: Reps Weekly Call – July 30th 2015 |
Last Thursday we had our weekly call about the Reps program, where we talk about what’s going on in the program and what Reps have been doing during the last week.
Shoutouts to Flaki, Michael, all Webmaker party organizers, Ankit, Dian Ina, and Reps Portal devs.
Rosana and Ruben talked about the Participation Team and the goals for this quarter.
Some highlights:
Check the presentation and the team’s github.
Reps portal
Currently there is a lot going on with the Participation team tooling and the Reps portal devs need help to fix bugs and add new features.
They can devote some time to mentor new people to get involved with the portal development.
Check the repository and current bugs.
QA
The new bug triage tool is now live. The idea is that users sign up to get a list of untriaged bugs to move them to the proper category and make them actionable.
Give it a try and let them know what do you think.
Don’t forget to comment about this call on Discourse and we hope to see you next week!
https://blog.mozilla.org/mozillareps/2015/08/03/reps-weekly-call-july-30th-2015/
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QMO: Firefox 41.0 Aurora Testday Results |
Hello Mozillians!
As you may already know, last Friday – July 31st – we held a new Testday event, for Firefox 41.0 Aurora.
Results:
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Bolaram Paul, Moin Shaikh, gaby2300, kenkon and the Bangladesh QA Community: Nandita Roy, Nazir Ahmed Sabbir, MD.Owes Quruny Shubho, Sadia Islam, Ashickur Rahman, Mohammad Maruf Islam, Saheda Reza Antora, Muktasib Un Nur, Rezaul Huque Nayeem, Md.Ehsanul Hassan, Eyakub, Md. Jahid Hasan Fahim, Md. Mahmudul Huq and Nahida Akter for getting involved in this event and making Firefox as best as it could be.
Also a big thank you goes to all our active moderators.
Keep an eye on QMO for upcoming events! 
https://quality.mozilla.org/2015/08/firefox-41-0-aurora-testday-results/
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L. David Baron: Tying ecosystems through browsers |
One of the principles behind HTML5, and the community building it, is that the specifications that say how the Web works should have enough detail that somebody reading them can implement the specification. This makes it easier for new Web browsers to enter the market, which in turn helps users through competitive pressure on existing and new browsers.
I worry that the Web standards community is in danger of losing this principle, quite quickly, and at a cost to competition on the Web.
Some of the recent threats to the ability to implement competitive browsers are non-technical:
Many parts of the technology industry today are dominated by a small group of large companies (effectively an oligopoly) that have an ecosystem of separate products that work better together than with their competitors' products. Apple has Mac OS (software and hardware), iOS (again, software and hardware), Apple TV, Apple Pay, etc. Google has its search engine and other Web products, Android (software only), Chrome OS, Chromecast and Google Cast, Android Pay, etc. Microsoft has Windows, Bing, Windows Phone, etc. These products don't line up precisely, but they cover many of the same areas while varying based on the companies strengths and business models. Many of these products are tied together in ways that both help users and, since these ties aren't standardized and interoperable, strongly encourage users to use other products from the same company.
There are some Web technologies in development that deal with connections between parts of these ecosystems. For example:
In both cases, specifying the system fully is more work. But it's work that needs to happen to keep the Web open and competitive. That's why we've had the principle of complete specification, and it still applies here.
I'm worried that the ties that connect the parts of these ecosystems together will start running through unspecified parts of Web technologies. This would, through the loss of the principle of specification for competition, makes it harder for new browsers (or existing browsers made by smaller companies) to compete, and would make the Web as a whole a less competitive place.
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This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 90 |
Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust or send us an email! Want to get involved? We love contributions.
This Week in Rust is openly developed on GitHub. If you find any errors in this week's issue, please submit a PR.
RustCamp was on Saturday, August 1st. It was lovely event populated by lovely people. If you couldn't make it here are the slides from some of the talks. Hopefully the remainder of slides will become available this week. Video recordings will be available at an indeterminate future date.
130 pull requests were merged in the last week.
VecMap. This
little-used unstable collection has been moved to the vec_map
crate.Clone for Box where T:
Clone AtomicPtr SendRc and Arc mem::forget
safe. This closes
some corner-case soundness holes in reference counting.--cap-lints flag to the
compiler. This flag
will be used by Cargo to avoid breaking dependencies when lints
change.Clone for
Box.Changes to Rust follow the Rust RFC (request for comments) process. These are the RFCs that were approved for implementation this week:
Every week the team announces the 'final comment period' for RFCs and key PRs which are reaching a decision. Express your opinions now. This week's FCPs are:
ty tokens.cargo install.read_exact to Read trait.#[must_use] on functions, rather than just types..place <-
expr). Another
attempt at coming up with a pleasing 'placement new' syntax.Box::leak to leak Box to a &'static mut
T.CoerceUnsized should ignore PhantomData
fields.If you are running a Rust event please add it to the calendar to get it mentioned here. Email Erick Tryzelaar or Brian Anderson for access.
There are some jobs writing Rust! This week's listings:
It should be noted that the authentic Rust learning experience involves writing code, having the compiler scream at you, and trying to figure out what the heck that means. I will be carefully ensuring that this occurs as frequently as possible.
From @Gankro's Learning Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists.
Thanks to @carols10cents for the tip. Submit your quotes for next week!.
http://this-week-in-rust.org/staging/blog/2015/08/03/this-week-in-rust-90/
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Cameron Kaiser: TenFourFox 38 beta 2 available |
The most important bug this fixes is, of course, our new IonPower JavaScript JIT compiler backend wreaking havoc with Faceblech and Farceboink-derived sites such as Instacrap. Near as I am able to determine, as a conscientious objector to the Zuckerbrat Amalgamated Evil Empire, this fixes all outstanding issues with these sites. Oddly, the edge case responsible for this was not detected by Mozilla's JIT tests, which is probably why most sites were unaffected; the actual problem was diagnosed only by a couple of weird failures while running the strict ECMA conformance suite. Also, as mentioned, the engine has been tuned a bit more for improved overall throughput, and is approximately 4-5% faster than beta 1.
Some of you complained of a quit bug where memory usage would skyrocket while exiting the browser, causing it to crash after exhausting its addressing space instead. I cannot confirm this specific manifestation on any of my test systems. However, I did find another bug in the webfont cache that may be possibly related: if you close a window with webfonts loaded in it that are slated for cleanup, the browser can get stuck in an infinite call loop while freeing those resources, which will exhaust the processor stack. This issue is specific to our Apple Type Services font code. On TenFourFox the stack allocation is an entire gigabyte in size because of ABI stack frame requirements, so completely using it up may well freak out systems with less memory (all of my test machines have at least 1.25GB of RAM). In any case, that bug is fixed. Hopefully that's actually what you're seeing, because I still can't reproduce any problems with exiting.
A Leopard-only crash observed on the New York Times is now fixed by implementing a formal webfont URL blocklist; Tiger users don't crash, but get various weird and annoying font errors. This is caused by yet another underlying ATS bug. Safari on 10.5 is subject to this also, but it (and Leopard WebKit) get around the problem by turning the ATSFontRef into a CGFontRef and seeing if it validates that way (see issue 261). This is clearly a much better general solution, but while these functions exist as undocumented entry points on 10.4 they all call into ATS, so 10.4 users still get the weird messages. The only way to solve this fully on both operating systems is to just block the font entirely. Previously we did this by blocking on the PostScript name, but the New York Times, because it is old and senile, uses webfonts with the supremely unhelpful PostScript name of - and blocking that blocked everything. Fortunately, various reorganizations of the Gecko font system make it easy to wedge in a URL blocker that looks at the source URL and, if it is a known bad font, tells Gecko the font is not supported. The font never loads, Gecko selects the fallback, and the problem is solved. This problem also affects 31.8, but the solution is much different for that older codebase and there won't be another 31 anyway.
In the non-showstopper category, the issues with saved passwords not appearing in preferences and checkmarks not appearing on context or pull-down menus are both corrected. In addition, I reduced window and tab undo limits to hold onto less memory (back to what they were in 31), forced tenured objects to be finalized on the foreground thread to get around various SMP problems (again, as in 31 and in 17 and previous), tweaked media buffering a bit more, fixed a nasty assertion in private browsing mode with saved logins, and turned on colour management for all the things as politely requested by Dan DeVoto. The blank saved passwords list is actually due to the fact we can't yet compile ICU internationalization support into XUL because of issue 266, which also appears to be why Zotero started failing, since it also depends on it. For 38.2 final, both of these issues are worked around using trivial stubs and some minor code changes. Hopefully we can get it to make a shared dylib for a future release of 38.x and remove these hacks.
There are two changes left for final: put the update interval back to every 24 hours, and possibly remove the Marketplace icon from the Start page since we don't really support the webapp runtime. (The Apps option was already removed from the drop-down menus.) No one has complained about the faster/lower quality downscaler, so that will remain as is; about the only place it annoys me personally is favicons. Full MP3 support is being deferred to a feature beta after 38.2.
Builders will want the new versions of strip7 and gdb7. In fact, you'll need the new strip7 to build 38.1.1, because it fixes a crash with setting section flags. Although the gdb7 update to patchlevel 3 is optional, it is much faster than patchlevel 2, and will cause you to go less crazy single-stepping through code. Now that all the known build problems are dealt with, I am hopeful our builder in the land of the Rising Sun can make the jump to Tenfourbird 38 along with us.
Finally, many thanks to our localizers; the current list is English (natch), Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, German, Finnish and now Swedish. We still might need some help with Polish, and I cannot find an old copy of the Japanese language pack, so it is possible that localization will have to be dropped. Please help us with Polish, Japanese, or your own language if you can! Localizations must be complete by midnight August 5 so that I have enough time to upload and write the new page copy ahead of the formal general release of 38.2 on the evening of August 10. See issue 42 if you'd like to assist.
Once 38 launches, we will transition from Google Code to Github (leaving downloads on SourceForge). All of our project activity on Google Code will be frozen on August 5 after the last localization is uploaded. More about that shortly.
http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2015/08/tenfourfox-38-beta-2-available.html
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Mozilla Addons Blog: August 2015 Featured Add-ons |
by Oleksandr
Get international weather forecasts from AccuWeather.com and display them in any toolbar or statusbar with this highly customizable and unobtrusive extension.
“After trying the other weather add-ons when this one went obsolete, I give them up, they were simply inadequate. This was the only add-on that we need in a browser. THANK-YOU for bringing it back it is the only one to have PERIOD…..”
by Adam Judson
Use tamperdata to view and modify HTTP/HTTPS headers and post parameters.
by Zulkarnain K.
Add more items to Add-ons Manager context menu.
Featured add-ons are selected by a community board made up of add-on developers, users, and fans. Board members change every six months, so there’s always an opportunity to participate. Stayed tuned to this blog for the next call for applications.
If you’d like to nominate an add-on for featuring, please send it to amo-featured@mozilla.org for the board’s consideration. We welcome you to submit your own add-on!
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/01/august-2015-featured-add-ons/
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Chris Cooper: RelEng & RelOps Weekly highlights - July 31, 2015 |
Welcome back to the weekly releng Friday update! Here’s what we’ve been up to this week.
Modernize infrastructure: Rob checked in code to integrate Windows with our AWS cloud-tools software so that we now have userdata for deploying spot instances (https://bugzil/la/1166448) as well as creating the golden AMI for those instances.
Mark checked in code to update our puppet-managed Windows machines with a newer version of mecurial, working around some installation oddities (https://bugzil.li/1170588).
Now that Windows 10 has been officially released, Q can more easily tackle the GPOs that configure our test machines, verifying which don’t need changes, and which will need an overhaul (https://bugzil.la/1185844). Callek is working to get buildbot setup on Windows 10 so we can start figuring out which suites are failing and engage developers for help.
Improve CI pipeline: With the last security blockers resolved and a few weeks of testing under his belt, Rail is planning to enable Funsize on mozilla-central next Tuesday (https://bugzil.la/1173452)
Release: Uplift starts next week, followed by the official go-to-build for Firefox 40. Beta 9 is out now.
Operational: Buildduty contractors started this week! Alin (aselagea) and Vlad (vladC) from Softvision are helping releng with buildduty tasks. Kim and Coop are trying to get them up-to-speed as quickly as possible. They’re finding lots of undocumented assumptions built into our existing release engineering documentation.
Dustin has migrated our celery backend for relengapi to mysql since we were seeing reliability issues on the rabbit cluster we had been using (https://bugzil.la/1185507).
Our intern, Anthony Miyaguchi, added database upgrade/downgrade ability to relengapi via alembic, making future schema changes painless. (https://github.com/mozilla/build-relengapi/pull/300)
Amy has finished replacing the two DeployStudio servers with newer hardware, OS, and deployment software, and we are now performing local Timemachine backups of the their data (https://bugzil.la/1186197). Offsite backups will follow once Bacula releases a new version of their software that correctly supports TLS 1.2.
The new Windows machines we setup last week are now in production, increasing capacity by 10 machines each in the Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8 test pools (https://bugzil.la/1151591).
See you next week!
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L. David Baron: Payments on the Web |
Lately I've been involved in discussions in the W3C's Web Payments Interest Group about chartering a new working group to work on payment APIs for the Web. I certainly don't have the resources to implement this work in Firefox by myself, but I'm hoping to at least help the standardization activity get started in an effective way, and, if it does, to help others from Mozilla get involved.
From a high-level perspective, I'd like to see the working group produce a technology that allows payments in the browser, involving some trusted UI in the browser (like for in-app payments on mobile operating systems) that says what payment is going to happen, and involving tokenization in the browser or on a server or application with which the browser communicates, with only the tokens being sent from the browser to the website.
I think this has two big benefits. First, it improves security by avoiding sending the user's credit card details to every site that the user wants to pay. It sends tokens that contain the information needed to make a single payment of a particular amount, instead of information that can be reused to make additional payments in the future. This makes payments on the Web more secure.
Second, if we can design the user interface in a way that users understand these improvements in security, we can hopefully make users more comfortable making small payments on the Web, in some cases to parties that they don't know very well. This could make business models other than advertizing more realistic for some providers of Web content or applications.
There are certainly risks here. One is that the effort might fail, as other efforts to do payments have failed in the past. There are also others, some of which I want to discuss in a future blog post.
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Support.Mozilla.Org: What’s up with SUMO – 31st July |
Hey there, planet SUMO! Are you ready for another round of updates and reminders from the world of SUMO? You’d better be, cause here they come!
Are you following us on Twitter? Not yet? Get to it! ;-) See you on Monday… Until then… take it easy!
https://blog.mozilla.org/sumo/2015/07/31/whats-up-with-sumo-31st-july/
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Vaibhav Agrawal: First Month of Mozilla Internship |
It has been a month since I started my Mozilla internship in San Francisco, but it feels like I had just started yesterday. I have been interning with the Automation and Tools team this summer and it has been a wonderful experience. As an intern in Mozilla, one gets goodies, new laptop, free food, and there are various intern events in which one gets to take part in. My mentor @chmanchester also gave me the freedom to decide what I wanted to work on which is quite unlike some other companies.
I chose to work on tools to improve developer productivity and making libraries that I have worked on in the past, more relevant. In the past month, I have been working on getting various triggering options inside Treeherder, which is a reporting dashboard for checkins to Mozilla projects. This involved writing AngularJS code for the front-end UI and python code for the backend. The process involved publishing the “triggering actions” to pulse, listening to those actions and then use the mozci library on the backend to trigger jobs. Currently if developers, particularly the sheriffs, want to trigger a lot of jobs, they have to do it via command line, and it involves context switching plus typing out the syntax. To improve that, this week we have deployed three new options in Treeherder that will hopefully save time and make the process easier. They are:
* Trigger_Missing_Jobs: This button is to ensure that there is one job for every build in a push. The problem is that on integration branches we coalesce jobs to minimize load during peak hours, but many times there is a regression and sheriffs need to trigger all jobs for the push. That is when this button will come in handy, and one will be able to trigger jobs easily.
* Trigger_All_Talos_Jobs: As the name suggests, this button is to trigger all the talos jobs on a particular push. Being a perf sheriff, I need to trigger all talos jobs a certain number of times for a regressing push to get more data, and this button will aid me and others in doing that.
Fig: shows “Trigger Missing Jobs” and “Trigger All Talos Jobs” buttons in the Treeherder UI
* Backfill_Job: This button is to trigger a particular type of job till the last known push on which that job was run. Due to coalescing certain jobs are not run on a series of pushes, and when an intermittent or bustage is detected, sheriffs need to find the root cause and thus manually trigger those jobs for the pushes. This button should aid them in narrowing down the root regressing revision for a job that they are investigating.
Fig: shows “Backfill this job” button in the Treeherder UI
All of the above features right now only work for jobs that are on buildapi, but when mozci will have the ability to trigger tasks on taskcluster, they will be able to work on those jobs too. Also, right now all these buttons trigger the jobs which have a completed build, in future I plan to make these buttons to also trigger jobs which don’t have an existing build. These features are in beta and have been released for sheriffs, I would love to hear your feedback! A big shout out to all the people who have reviewed, tested and given feedback on these features.
https://vaibhavag.wordpress.com/2015/07/31/first-month-of-mozilla-internship/
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Daniel Stenberg: The last HTTP Workshop day |
This workshop has been really intense days so far and this last and forth Workshop day did not turn out differently. We started out the morning with the presentation: Caching, Intermediation and the Modern Web by Martin Thomson (Mozilla) describing his idea of a “blind cache” and how it could help to offer caching in a HTTPS world. It of course brought a lot of discussions and further brainstorming on the ideas and how various people in the room thought the idea could be improved or changed.
Immediately following that, Martin continued with a second presentation describing for us a suggested new encryption format for HTTP based on the JWE format and how it could possible be used.
The room then debated connection coalescing (with HTTP/2) for a while and some shared their experiences and thoughts on the topic. It is an area where over-sharing based on the wrong assumptions certainly can lead to tears and unhappiness but it seems the few in the room who actually have implemented this seemed to have considered most of the problems people could foresee.
Support of Trailers in HTTP was brought up and we discussed its virtues for a while vs the possible problems with supporting it and what possible caveats could be, and we also explored the idea of using HTTP/2 push instead of trailers to allow servers to send meta-data that way, and that then also doesn’t necessarily have to follow after the transfer but can in fact be sent during transfer!
Resumed uploads is a topic that comes back every now and then and that has some interest. (It is probably one of the most frequently requested protocol features I get asked about.) It was brought up as something we should probably discuss further, and especially when discussing the next generation HTTP.
At some point in the future we will start talking about HTTP/3. We had a long discussion with the whole team here on what HTTP/3 could entail and we also explored general future HTTP and HTTP/2 extensions and more. A massive list of possible future work was created. The list ended up with something like 70 different things to discuss or work on, but of course most of those things will never actually become reality.
With so much possible or potential work ahead, we need to involve more people that want to and can consider writing specs and to show how easy it apparently can be, Martin demoed how to write a first I-D draft using the fancy Internet Draft Template Repository. Go check it out!
Poul-Henning Kamp brought up the topic of “CO2 usage of the Internet” and argued for that current and future protocol work need to consider the environmental impact and how “green” protocols are. Ilya Grigorik (Google) showed off numbers from http archive.org’s data and demoed how easy it is to use the big query feature to extract useful information and statistical info out of the vast amount of data they’ve gathered there. Brad Fitspatrick (Google) showed off his awesome tool h2i and how we can use it to poke on and test HTTP/2 server implementations in a really convenient and almost telnet-style command line using way.
Finally, Mark Nottingham (Akamai) showed off his redbot.org service that runs HTTP against a site, checks its responses and reports with details exactly what it responds and why and provide a bunch of analysis and informational based on that.
Such an eventful day really had to be rounded off with a bunch of beers and so we did. The HTTP Workshop of the summer 2015 ended. The event was great. The attendees were great. The facilities and the food were perfect. I couldn’t ask for more. Thanks for arranging such a great happening!
I’ll round off showing off my laptop lid after the two new stickers of the week were applied. (The HTTP Workshop one and an Apache one I got from Roy):
… I’ll get up early tomorrow morning and fly back home.
http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2015/07/31/the-last-http-workshop-day/
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About:Community: Meet an MDN Contributor: Heather Bloomer |
Heather Bloomer started contributing to Mozilla in November 2014, initially on SUMO. There, she saw a link to MDN, and realized she could contribute there as well. So, she is a “crossover” who contributes to helping both end-users and developers. She has been heavily involved in the Learning Area project, writing and editing Glossary entries and tutorials. She describes her contributions as “a continuing journey of enlightenment and an overall awesome experience.”
Here’s more from Heather:
I feel what I do on MDN has personally enhanced my writing skills and expanded my technical knowledge. I also feel I am making a positive impact in the MDN community and for developers that refer to MDN from beginners to advanced. That is an amazing feeling to be part of something bigger than yourself and grow and nurture not only ones self, but others as well.
My advice for new contributors is to just reach out and connect with the MDN community. Join the team and just dig in. If you need help on getting started, we are more than happy to point you in the right direction. We are friendly, supportive, encouraging and a team driven bunch of folks!
Thanks, Heather!
http://blog.mozilla.org/community/2015/07/30/meet-an-mdn-contributor-heather-bloomer/
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Air Mozilla: Intern Presentations |
6 interns will be presenting what they worked on over the summer: Spenser Bauman, SpiderMonkey: Making polymorphism fast. Tweaking the JIT for faster container operations....
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John O'Duinn: The “we are all remoties” book!?! |
I’ve been working in distributed teams, as well as talking, presenting, coaching and blogging about “remoties”‚ in one form or another for 8?9? years now. So, I’m excited to announce that I recently signed a contract with O’Reilly to write a book about how to successfully work in, and manage in, a geo-distributed world. Yes, I’m writing a “we are all remoties” book. If you’ve been in one of my ever-evolving “we are all remoties” sessions, you have an idea of what will be included.
If you’ve ever talked with me about the pros (and cons!) of working as a remote employee or of working in a distributed team, you already know how passionate I am about this topic. I care deeply about people being able to work well together, and having meaningful careers, while being physically or somehow otherwise remote from each other. Done incorrectly, this situation can be frustrating and risky to your career, as well as risky to employers. Done correctly, however, this could be a global change for good, raising the financial, technical and economic standards across all sorts of far flung places around the globe. Heady game-changing stuff indeed.
There are many “advocacy books” out there, explaining why working remote is a good / reasonable thing to do – typically written from the perspective of the solo person who is already remote. There are also many different tools becoming available to help people working in distributed teams – exciting to see. However, I found very few books, or blogposts, talking about the practical mechanics of *how* to use a combination of these tools and some human habits to allow humans to work together effectively in distributed teams, especially at any scale or over a sustained amount of time. Hence, my presentations, and now, this upcoming book.
Meanwhile,
…you can reach me on twitter (“@joduinn”) or on email (john at my-domain-name – and be sure to include “remoties” in the subject, to get past spam filters.)
Now, time to brew some coffee and get back to typing.
John.
=====
(updated 31jul2015 to add twitter + email address.)
http://oduinn.com/blog/2015/07/30/the-we-are-all-remoties-book/
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Air Mozilla: Intern Presentations |
Ursula Sarracini - Three Easy Steps To a Happy e10s. I'll show you how to make a project multi-process friendly by showing you how I...
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The Mozilla Blog: Safeguarding Choice and Control Online |
We are calling on Microsoft to “undo” its aggressive move to override user choice on Windows 10
Mozilla exists to bring choice, control and opportunity to everyone on the Web. We build Firefox and our other products for this reason. We build Mozilla as a non-profit organization for this reason. And we work to make the Internet experience beyond our products represent these values as much as we can.
Sometimes we see great progress, where consumer products respect individuals and their choices. However, with the launch of Windows 10 we are deeply disappointed to see Microsoft take such a dramatic step backwards. It is bewildering to see, after almost 15 years of progress bolstered by significant government intervention, that with Windows 10 user choice has now been all but removed. The upgrade process now appears to be purposefully designed to throw away the choices its customers have made about the Internet experience they want, and replace it with the Internet experience Microsoft wants them to have.
On the user choice benchmark, Microsoft’s Windows 10 falls woefully short, even when compared to its own past versions. While it is technically possible for people to preserve their previous settings and defaults, the design of the new Windows 10 upgrade experience and user interface does not make this obvious nor easy. We are deeply passionate about our mission to ensure people are front, center and squarely in the driver’s seat of their online experience, so when we first encountered development builds of Windows 10 that appeared would override millions of individual decisions people have made about their experience, we were compelled to immediately reach out to Microsoft to address this. And so we did. Unfortunately this didn’t result in any meaningful change.
Today we are sending an open letter to Microsoft’s CEO to again insist that Windows 10 make it easy, obvious and intuitive for people to maintain the choices they have already made — and make it easier for people to assert new choices and preferences.
In the meantime, we’re rolling out support materials and a tutorial video to help guide everyone through the process of preserving their choices on Windows 10.
Blog Post: Firefox for Windows 10: How to Restore or Choose Firefox as Your Default Browser
An Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/07/30/safeguarding-choice-and-control-online/
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The Mozilla Blog: An Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control |
Satya,
I am writing to you about a very disturbing aspect of Windows 10. Specifically, that the update experience appears to have been designed to throw away the choice your customers have made about the Internet experience they want, and replace it with the Internet experience Microsoft wants them to have.
When we first saw the Windows 10 upgrade experience that strips users of their choice by effectively overriding existing user preferences for the Web browser and other apps, we reached out to your team to discuss this issue. Unfortunately, it didn’t result in any meaningful progress, hence this letter.
We appreciate that it’s still technically possible to preserve people’s previous settings and defaults, but the design of the whole upgrade experience and the default settings APIs have been changed to make this less obvious and more difficult. It now takes more than twice the number of mouse clicks, scrolling through content and some technical sophistication for people to reassert the choices they had previously made in earlier versions of Windows. It’s confusing, hard to navigate and easy to get lost.
Mozilla exists to bring choice, control and opportunity to everyone. We build Firefox and our other products for this reason. We build Mozilla as a non-profit organization for this reason. And we work to make the Internet experience beyond our products represent these values as much as we can.
Sometimes we see great progress, where consumer products respect individuals and their choices. However, with the launch of Windows 10 we are deeply disappointed to see Microsoft take such a dramatic step backwards.
These changes aren’t unsettling to us because we’re the organization that makes Firefox. They are unsettling because there are millions of users who love Windows and who are having their choices ignored, and because of the increased complexity put into everyone’s way if and when they choose to make a choice different than what Microsoft prefers.
We strongly urge you to reconsider your business tactic here and again respect people’s right to choice and control of their online experience by making it easier, more obvious and intuitive for people to maintain the choices they have already made through the upgrade experience. It also should be easier for people to assert new choices and preferences, not just for other Microsoft products, through the default settings APIs and user interfaces.
Please give your users the choice and control they deserve in Windows 10.
Sincerely,
Chris Beard
CEO, Mozilla
Blog Post: Firefox for Windows 10: How to Restore or Choose Firefox as Your Default Browser
Blog Post: Safeguarding Choice and Control Online
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