June 22, 2011

On The Usability Of An Offline Web

Last week I spent some time working on a simple offline web app called All My Etherpads. Creating it has made me think about a lot of things, one of which has to do with how the word “offline” constantly seems at odds with the word “web”. When you’re using a web browser, it’s simply assumed that you’re online. Many argue that a resource must live in the cloud for it to be truly “of the Web”. ... Read more

March 21, 2011

Three Lessons Learned From Hack Jams

The first five Hackasaurus hack jams taught us a lot. Here are a few lessons we learned from them. Know How Much Freedom You Have. At our hack jams in the New York Public Library, we discovered that their publicly-accessible Windows XP machines were so locked-down that we were unable to run Firefox or any other programs off a USB stick. Our prototype Web X-Ray Goggles don’t currently work with the built-in Internet Explorer 8, so we weren’t able to use them. ... Read more

March 14, 2011

Enter The Hackasaurus

I've recently switched projects at Mozilla. I was previously the technical lead for the Jetpack project, but at the beginning of February 2011 I started working on a new project called Hackasaurus: a toolkit and curriculum to help kids and other "non-techies" understand the Web and how to hack it. The origins of this project go back to a blog post I wrote in 2009 called Kids And The Open Web, where I compare a Web page to " ... Read more

January 8, 2011

My Minecraft Adventure

I did not expect to enjoy this game. My friend Mike was completely obsessed with Minecraft, and Dave Humphrey blogged a bit about all the amazing things people had done with it: creating replicas of the German Reichstag, the U.S.S. Enterprise, working CPUs. All creative uses of cognitive surplus. But I still didn't think that it was for me. When visiting Washington, D.C. in the last days of December 2010, I finally sat down with Mike and he showed me how to play. ... Read more

November 8, 2010

Adventures in Code Review and Pair Programming

A key component of Mozilla’s development process is code review, which consists of a trusted expert reviewing the material comprising the changes to a piece of software in order to fix a bug or add a feature. This is a great idea for a number of reasons: It helps increase the project's bus factor, or number of people who understand how the software works and why decisions were made. If any trusted member of the community could simply push changes without requiring another person to be aware of them and understand them, then if that person were hit by a bus or truck, some amount of understanding about the software would be lost, especially rationales that could only be uncovered by the conversation that occurs during code review. ... Read more

October 13, 2010

Prelude To Barcelona

I recently wrote about a talk I gave at the Mozilla Summit on What Mozilla Can Learn From 826 National. Shortly after my presentation, Mark Surman dared me to teach a class on Web hacking for non-techies at the Peer 2 Peer University School of Webcraft, which got me thinking about how I’d teach a class in such a distance-learning environment. My favorite kind of teaching is face-to-face, one-on-one mentoring. I think it works well because teacher and student have easy access to each others’ “state”: they can see what each other are working on, and infer how they’re feeling based on body language and other non-verbal cues. ... Read more

October 4, 2010

Reviewer Dashboards

As I mentioned in my post on The Social Constraints of Bettering The Web, finding a code reviewer can be difficult in Mozilla projects. At least, it’s definitely the case with the Jetpack SDK, which I’m actively involved in as both a reviewer and contributor. Last week, on casual observation, it seemed like Myk Melez had been getting a lion’s share of code review demands placed on him. While I had some theories on why this might be the case, I also realized that I had no idea what the big picture was as far as code reviews were concerned. ... Read more

October 3, 2010

What Mozilla Can Learn From 826 National

At the Mozilla Summit in early July, I gave a short presentation on what Mozilla could learn from an awesome non-profit family of writing centers called 826 National. One of the many things that really impresses me about this organization is that their chapters ooze with a love for writing and creativity, and encourage and showcase it everywhere. For example, their San Francisco chapter, 826 Valencia, masquerades as a pirate supply store that’s filled with products like kitten and hamster planks, beard extensions, and scurvy remedies—all with hilariously-written labels and instructions for use, and whose proceeds go directly to the writing center’s many tutoring programs. ... Read more

September 30, 2010

Twitblob

Over the past few years, I’ve made a number of little Web applications that are actually just HTML pages. Building things this way is really fun and really simple. It’s easy to understand and remix because there’s no custom server-side infrastructure to complicate matters. In some ways, it’s just like writing my first Web pages in the 1990’s, only now I can use JavaScript for more than just image rollovers. ... Read more

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