Mountain View Developer Day Wrap-up

The Mountain View Developer Day was a blast. We covered a lot of topics. A great bunch of people showed up and the high level of crowd participation helped out a lot. The Songbird and Flock folks gave lots of good feedback regarding their development experiences. More on that later. A quick recap of the lightning topics:

• Mozilla Labs – Basil Hashem: Basil did a good job framing the Mozilla Labs mission. He also showed demos of 2 recent Lab projects – Joey and The Coop.
• Writing Reftest – David Baron: David gave a brief update on how and where Mozilla is using more automated testing. He then gave us a short how-to on creating a reftest, which can be used to verify behavior of visual layouts. For info on reftests check out this MDC article.
• UI Heuristics – Alex Faaborg: Alex presented some guidelines for making a good UI and related the guidelines to parts of the Firefox UI. Yes, he showed good and not so good examples. We talked after and I am hoping we can get a set of UI guidelines for extension developers.
• 3D extensions to – Vlad Vukićević: Vlad showed a quick demo of an extension that adds 3D capabilities to . Using JavaScript, he loaded a 3D model into the enhanced and was able to pan, rotate and zoom around. It was pretty cool and refresh speed was fairly crisp. I hope to see more from Vlad on this extension and demo.
• Buildbot Patch Server – Rob Helmer: Rob showed off some features of the buildbot “try” system, modified for use with Mozilla (part of Ben Hearsum’s buildbot work). The system takes patches and start builds. This allows developers to test patches on various OSes and hardware, increasing the quality of the patch.
• Mozilla Community Program – Seth Bindernagel: Seth talked about how Mozilla’s community program is working to help dedicated community contributors. He gave some examples and talked about the evaluation process. Check out the Community Wiki page for more information.

After the lightning sessions, we planned a few breakout sessions. We ended up doing sessions on XULRunner development, 3D graphics in the Browser, Extension development tools and The Coop. I have notes on the XULRunner and Development tools sessions. I’ll get some blog posts on those sessions soon. I also have some pictures I’ll upload shortly. Lastly, I’ll check with the other presenters to see if they have notes or information they can post about their sessions.

Thanks again to everyone who came out.