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

May 30, 2010

Ethnography, Usability, and Community

Context offers fodder for innovation. Hidden in the physical work space, in the users' words, and in the tools they use are the beautiful gems of knowledge that can create revolutionary, breakthrough products or simply fix existing, broken products. —Jon Kolko, Thoughts on Interaction Design I’ve been talking with my colleague Jinghua Zhang, the project lead for Mozilla’s Test Pilot program, about the usefulness of ethnography and qualitative research in user interface design, and it seems like something that could both strengthen Mozilla’s community and help make our products easier to use. ... Read more

September 4, 2009

Kids And The Open Web

Every time I think about why I like the open web, I basically think of how well it fits with the way I learned to use and program computers as a kid: my first computer, an Atari 400, came with everything I needed to do programming, and I (or my parents) didn’t have to spend hundreds of dollars or sign an NDA to get a development tool. My favorite technical book as a child was Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer, which contained plain BASIC code for games that you could play, augment, and make your own. ... Read more

April 4, 2009

Design Challenge Tutorials

Over the last two weeks, I gave two tutorials to our Design Challenge students. The first was called Engineering Prototypes, and centers on the most challenging part of working on prototypes for me, which is the balance between expediency of implementation and robustness. Prototyping involves prioritizing the former over the latter, but it’s unwise to throw engineering principles out the door: for instance, a prototype that constantly crashes or runs slowly may not be usable enough to dogfood, and one whose implementation is poorly designed can be difficult to iterate and evolve. ... Read more

January 7, 2009

Beautifully Documented Code

When searching for a documentation system to use for Ubiquity, we looked at a number of tools. None of them particularly satisfied me; all the ones I saw required a build step to convert raw source code into formatted documentation, and I wasn’t very pleased with the typography of the generated content—though obviously the aesthetics were customizable through CSS, none of the default stylesheets left me dying to read the documentation I created. ... Read more

November 17, 2008

The SF Green Festival and >play

This weekend I represented Mozilla at the >play Expo at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Green Festival. This was the first time I’d ever represented Mozilla at a public event, so it was quite a learning experience. It was also fun trying to get an idea of what an individual was interested in and connecting it with something relevant about Mozilla. The >play Expo ... Read more

October 1, 2008

President as Teacher

This year’s Presidential election has me more passionate about politics than I’ve ever been. In part, this is because Obama’s campaign is more like a social movement than a political campaign: as Henry Jenkins explains in Obama and the “We” Generation, part of the reason that Obama’s message resonates so much with me and others in my generation is because of how participatory it is. His campaign isn’t about making him president and then having him magically repair our nation; it’s about working together, with his help, to make our country a better place. ... Read more

September 17, 2008

What Mozilla Means to Me

When I talk to my friends and family about Mozilla, I notice that they all have different perceptions of what Mozilla is. Looking at Mozilla’s Wikipedia entry doesn’t shed much light on things either, as it’s largely a glorified disambiguation page that attempts to clarify the word’s many different meanings over time. This essay is about what that word means to me. It isn’t meant to be definitive, but it should contribute to the ongoing discussion of Mozilla’s identity. ... Read more

June 29, 2008

Learning How to Write Interactive Fiction

Yesterday I tried learning Inform 7. I’m not sure how I feel about the documentation for this language; on the one hand, like its predecessor, the DM4 for Inform 6, it’s extremely thorough and well-written. On the other hand, one aspect of the DM4 that made it among my favorite programming books—perhaps one of my favorite books, period—was its exercises, which made experiencing the book fairly interactive. The act of reading a relatively short amount of text and then putting one’s newly-found knowledge to use in the solving of a difficult problem not only helped reinforce the knowledge for me, but it was also fun. ... Read more

June 6, 2008

Python for JavaScript Programmers

I couldn’t find anything on the web that attempted to teach Python to readers who already knew JavaScript, so I thought I’d give it a shot, since a number of my friends at Mozilla don’t know much about Python but know JavaScript incredibly well. The languages actually aren’t that dissimilar—in fact, some of JavaScript’s latest features have been borrowed directly from Python. Aside from focusing on differences and similarities between the two languages, I also try to explain Python’s design philosophy a bit, to give readers a context for why things work the way they do. ... Read more

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