Want to help? Encouraging community contributions

In a timely confluence with Mozilla’s new Steward initiative, I’m preparing to get some community contributors engaged with some of the projects we work on in Release Engineering. A fair amount of our production infrastructure has to be locked behind VPN and sekrit passwords (we have 400+ million users to protect) but there are more and more RelEng side projects. We provide tools to the larger developer community and solve interesting scalability challenges with our unique (and massive) automation systems that can be worked on by any interested person in their own local test environment and then integrated into our /build repos. My personal goal is to try and get 2 or 3 regular community contributors to come work with us on tackling these.

In order to solicit contributions I have been working with David Boswell. We added Release Engineering to the mozilla.org/contribute ‘areas of interest’ page and I have created the beginnings of a RelEng-specific contribution page. The first two areas that I think would be a great introduction to working with RelEng code & tools are the TryChooser and our upcoming Autoland system. For the latter, our intern Marc Jessome is sticking around this fall as a contributor to carry on the amazing work he put into this system over the summer. He’ll be continuing to debug the code and improve the portability of it so that we can get it into a beta testing stage by the end of October. As that work is being done we also need someone to help us write the API functionality that will allow sheriffs and developers to write tools that utilize this new hands-off landing queue. We’d also be happy to have people work on the issues that come up when we take Autoland to the next level – auto-landing on a production branch. To do this we’ll want some automated backing out, bisection, and the ability to wait on getting patches reviewed before continuing.

Another great area for someone interested in helping out Firefox developers is working on the TryChooser syntax and features. There is a whole tracking bug dedicated to try_enhancements and most of those bugs are ones that can be worked on in a local staging environment. It’s a chance to get your feet wet with buildbot and our custom scheduling setup. Some of these smaller bugs would be short on time commitment and high on developer appreciation if you fix them. That can be a winning combination for a new contributor, I speak from experience on that 🙂

So, if you’re reading this post and you or someone you know is interested in dipping their toes into becoming a Mozilla contributor and these projects make you curious then come find me and we’ll get you set up with a staging environment so that you can start fixing real world tools and automation bugs in no time.

Mozilla Seeks Program Manager for Open Web Innovation Incubator

Ok, I’m a little biased – full disclosure: I work for Mozilla. But even if I didn’t I suspect I’d be impressed with the amount of amazing innovation and hustle that Mozilla’s community puts out towards making the open web more accessible to everyone. Recent projects like Popcorn and Butter are changing the way we work with video on the web. Hackasaurus is reaching out to kids, getting them to move beyond consuming the web (read-only mode) to being able to build and design their own web experience (read/write). Addons SDK, Open Web Apps, Browser ID, the list goes on and on and I’d better stop now or I’ll lose you before getting to the good stuff.

Mozilla may be a huge brand but we’re actually a relatively small group of people doing this work all around the world. Which is why we now have WebFWD, a program to help innovators of the open web get a chance to hook in to the resources of Mozilla (space, mentors, public reach, food and housing, and more) to help bring their products to the world. With this rolling program of projects Mozilla can be a driving force in getting more open web to the people who need them.

Right now we need a visionary and hard working Program Manager to become the leader of this movement. I’m attaching the posting below, get in touch with p at mozilla dot com with your resume for consideration.

/// WebFWD - Program Manager

Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox Web browser, is looking for 
an all-star to join our new accelerator/incubator program WebFWD 
(http://webfwd.org) which aims to do for the open Web what organizations 
such as Y Combinator, TechStars and Seedcamp have done for startups.

As the Program Manager of WebFWD you are charged with leading the 
overall program - from designing and managing the curriculum, supporting 
the selected teams locally as well as globally, working with our 
ever-growing list of mentors and partners to organizing events.

If you're passionate about the Web, want to help people build amazing 
products and are willing to roll-up your sleeves, then this position is 
for you.

Primary responsibilities:
* Design and manage the curriculum for both the Fellow program as well 
as the Bootcamp
* Work with and support teams in the program (both locally and remote)
* Work with our mentors and partners
* Coordinate community and press outreach on a worldwide basis
* Create and run events (locally and remote)

Requirements:
* Excellent written and verbal communication skills
* Experience with organizing and running events
* Experience working with startups, entrepreneurs, venture capital and 
incubators / accelerators a huge plus
* Proven ability to work independently and in cross-functional teams
* Familiarity with Web technologies
* Passionate about helping people and solving problems
* Enjoys learning and teaching others
* Works effectively in a fast-paced, start-up environment
* 3-5 years of relevant job experience
* BA/BS, or equivalent experience