Practices

Yes, I wrote a whole blog post about bugs. Bugs are boring and managing bugs can be mind-numbing. However, all software has bugs and managing those bugs helps you understand the health and quality of your software, helps you understand the risk associated with new features, and helps you figure out if you’re ready to ship or not.

I realized a long time ago that I was not the type of person who could create, build & polish ideas all by myself. I need collaboration with others to hone and build ideas. More than not, I’m not the one who starts the idea. I pick up something from someone else - bend it, twist it, and turn it into something different.

We have decided to start running A/B Testing in Firefox for Android. These experiments are intended to optimize specific outcomes, as well as, inform our long-term design decisions. We want to create the best Firefox experience we can, and these experiments will help.

Building and shipping a successful product takes more than raw engineering. I have been posting a bit about using Telemetry to learn about how people interact with your application so you can optimize use cases. There are other types of data you should consider too. Being aware of these metrics can help provide a better focus for your work and, hopefully, have a bigger impact on the success of your product.

I’ve been an Engineering Manager for a while now, but for many years I filled a Developer role. I have done a lot of coding over the years. I still try to do a little coding every now and then. Because of my past as a developer, I could be oppressive to senior developers on my teams. When making decisions, I found myself providing both the management viewpoint and the technical viewpoint. This usually means I was keeping a perfectly qualified technical person from participating at a higher level of responsibility. This creates an unhealthy technical organization with limited career growth opportunities.

I have ended up managing people at the last three places I’ve worked, over the last 18 years. I can honestly say that only in the last few years have I really started to embrace the job of managing. Here’s a collection of thoughts and observations:

Firefox 31 for Android is the first release where we collect telemetry data on user interactions. We created a simple “event” and “session” system, built on top of the current telemetry system that has been shipping in Firefox for many releases. The existing telemetry system is focused more on the platform features and tracking how various components are behaving in the wild. The new system is really focused on how people are interacting with the application itself.