Ivana Catovic
pragmatic
pragmatic
mihaelav
Hi everyone! Last Friday, September the 6th we had the first Firefox Gaming Testday. We would like to thank you all for getting involved, running the demos and filling in the reports. Also, some new bugs were logged. Many thanks … Continue reading
Petruta Rasa
Hello everyone! Thursday, August the 29th we held a Firefox 24.0 Beta 6 Testday. Thank you for helping us on running our tests on multiple platforms, doing some exploratory testing and updating some of the bugs. More details about the … Continue reading
rbillings
The WebQA team has another contributor who has been making a real impact. We’d like to thank Ana Hristova. Ana has been helping us write automation tests for a few WebQA projects. You can see more about Ana and the … Continue reading
pragmatic
Overview This is the second in a two-part series on importing vCards into your Firefox OS phone. In the first part, we looked at importing contacts through a Gmail account, Outlook account and SIM Card. In this second part, we … Continue reading
satdav
dont forget what we have the firefox for desktop meeting today at 2pm pt you can join in on the meeting on Vidyo or IRC or phone in Vidyo Details QA-Desktop IRC Irc.mozilla.org #qa or you can use the mibbit … Continue reading
tobbimoz
The following blog post was co-written by me and by Ricardo (“Ricmacas”) Maçãs. Both of us remember dearly when we started contributing to Mozilla. We were part of SUMO’s Livechat (online live one-on-one help sessions for regular users powered by volunteers) and it was easy to voice opinions and to give ideas. We had a […] Continue reading
pragmatic
Mozilla’s Quality Assurance (QA) team is happy to announce that five community contributors have submitted designs for a General QA Participation Badge. We thank the community contributors for their creativity and hard work. Now it’s time for the Mozilla community … Continue reading
Ioana Chiorean
Hello Mozillians! Last Friday, August 23rd we held a testday for Firefox for Android 24.0 Beta. We are glad that during the day, our contributors joined us and run tests, logged new issues or even verified old fixed bugs.. You … Continue reading
Al Billings
I managed to go to Boing Boing: Ingenuity this weekend. This was a one day hackathon followed by “vaudeville for geeks” set of presentations and performances yesterday. I actually missed the hackathon on the first day because I wound up having my birthday BBQ for my 42nd birthday (which is today) on Saturday and I’m kind of a crappy coder anyway. This was an invitation event but a free one (sponsored by Ford but it was a low-key sponsorship). I wasn’t sure what to expect before I arrived.
Yesterday’s event was very cool but also very odd, in a way. I kept trying to figure out the demographics of the group there (as one does…) because it was this mix of hackerspace people that I knew, makers, inventors, artists of various sorts, and happy mutants of the cacophony society sort. I ran into fellow hackerspace founders, including the BioCurious folks, embedded systems programers (who were also musicians), authors, designers, and artists.
The events included presentations by designers, musical performances, talks about SETI, a mentalist, the founding of BioCurious and a variety of other things.
I would say that I most enjoyed two particular presentations.
One was near the beginning and that was Chris Noessel presenting on user interfaces in science fiction (specifically movies) drawing from his work for Make It So, the book he co-wrote on the topic and documented on his website for it. Chris is a friend of a friend and I last saw him debating over beer after the most recent Batman movie about how certain things made no sense (!!) in the movie. I’ve heard him mention his work on science fiction but hadn’t actually seen any of it so it was cool (and pretty amusing) to see him present.
The last session of the day is the other that I really enjoyed. This was by Mythbusters’ Adam Savage (and now tested.com on being a maker. A couple of the anecdoates in it I’d heard before, probably when he spoke at Defcon, but I enjoyed his voice over of his ten rules for success. I find these rather inspirational even if I’ve never managed to follow all of them!
They are:
Get good at something.
Really good. Get good at as many things as you can. Being good at one thing makes it easier to get good at other things.
Getting good at stuff takes practice.
Lots and lots of practice.
Get OBSESSED.
Everyone at the top of their field is obsessed with what they’re doing.
Doing something well and thoroughly is its OWN reward.
Show and Tell.
If you do something well and you’re happy with it, for FSM’s sake, tell EVERYONE.
If you want something, ASK.
If something piques your interest, tell someone. If you want to learn something, ask someone, like your BOSS. As an employer, I can tell you, people who want to learn new skills are people I want to keep employed.
Have GOALS.
Make up goals. Set goals. Regularly assess where you are and where you want to be in terms of them. This is a kind of prayer that works, and works well. Allow for the fact that things will NEVER turn out like you think they will, and you must be prepared to end up miles from where you intended.
Be nice. To EVERYONE.
Life is way too short to be an asshole. If you are an asshole, apologize.
FAIL.
You will fail. It’s one of our jobs in life. Keep failing. When you fail, admit it. When you don’t, don’t get cocky. ‘Cause you’re just about to fail again.
WORK YOUR ASS OFF.
Work like your life depends on it…
As someone who spends a lot of his life at a hackerspace, thinking about hackerspaces, and actually trying to make things (and my professional life in kind of a related context), this was both useful and a lot of fun. I think younger makers, especially, could really learn a lot by following these rules.
I’m not sure if Boing Boing: Ingenuity was a one-off event or the eventual building to more events but I’m very glad that I was invited to attend and got to experience it. I think that there are only a few places in the world where you could get this particular mix of mutants together and it was cool to be a part of it.