OBM at Mozilla's Mozcamp EU 2012

Last weekend two members of the OBM team had the chance to visit Mozilla's Mozcamp EU in Warsaw, as well as the Thunderbird Summit that preceded it. We had a great time and were able to help shape the future of Thunderbird.

Friday, September 7th: The Thunderbird Summit
As you might have read, Mozilla has decided to reduce the amount of paid staff working on the Thunderbird team. They will continue to provide security and stability updates and the release machinery, but new innovations will have to come from the community. For just this reason, the most active community members were invited to discuss how to best take command.

Various topics were discussed, for example the release cycle, QA, support and business development. A finalized roadmap has not yet been posted, but from our impression there will not be any apparent disadvantages coming up, especially for enterprise users. In contrary, this is an opportunity for the community to step up and drive Thunderbird into the direction they have always wanted to.

Saturday, September 8th: Mozcamp, Day 1
The mission for this Mozcamp is "Mobilize Mozilla". Mozilla is working on their newest project, a cell phone powered by the new and exciting Firefox OS. The project is still in the works, but already looks very exciting and is based on open technology like HTML5 and CSS3. The opening keynote had some very impressive demonstrations, that make us want to see more. Afterwards there were quite a few sessions to visit. Unfortunately it was impossible to go to all of them, so here some select impressions:

In "How to Debug Memory Leaks in Addons and Websites" Kyle Huey from the MemShrink team showed us some common patterns on what causes memory leaks and cleaned up with the common myth that Javascript cannot leak memory. He also gave us a guided tour of about:memory and what to look out for.

Next up, Henrik Skupin and Rob Wood from the Mozilla Automation and Tools team did a workshop on how to craft automated tests for the Firefox OS. We were provided a VM with all required testing tools already set up and focused on creating a test using the marionette framework that tested if holding two or more calls simultaneously works successfully.

After a quick coffee break, Jb Piacentino from the Thunderbird team gave a quick wrapup of the results of the Thunderbird summit, aimed at those only attending the Mozcamp. Afterwards, Mitchell Baker, Chairperson of Mozilla, was around for a Q&A session regarding Mozilla's standpoint on Thunderbird.

In a session held by Benjamin Smedberg and Robert Kaiser, we learned more about Mozilla's crash reporting architecture, how certain trends can be detected and how to better read the crash reports sent to crash-stats.mozilla.org.

The even ended in a fun-filled event near the hotel. One of the highlights was Massive Multiplayer Thumb wrestling, where one of our team members even made it to the championship! We also had the possibility to hold a Firefox OS phone in our hands, and there was beer.

Sunday, September 9th: Mozcamp, Day 2
This day started out with a leadership panel, where some of the most important people at Mozilla were ready to answer questions previously collected from participants. There were a few questions about Chrome and how to regain users, Firefox OS and its future, and Mozilla's engagement around communities and the open web.

Afterwards in the sessions we heard a little bit about SUMO, which is short for support.mozilla.org, the session was aimed more to encourage attendees to write support article. Afterwards John Hopkins gave us a short overview of Mozilla's Build system, looking for ideas on how to engage more community contributors in this area.

Michal Budzynski then gave us an interesting presentation on Firefox OS game development. He demonstrated some CSS-only games (yes, really, no Javascript!) and showed us what makes a good mobile game. On a related note, during the keynote we also got an impressive demo on Bananabread, a 3D first person shooter based on WebGL. Give it a try right away! You can also watch the keynote presentation.

On the technical side, there was also a session about Javascript Optimizations. Nicolas Pierron showed us what kind of Javascript should be avoided to improve performance. Some of them were obvious (Doing something with eval() ? That is bound to be evil!), others not quite so much.

Mozilla provided a session about Communications Training. This was a session on how to empower contributors (mostly localizers) to represent Mozilla in their country. Some tools were shown that helped to channel commonly available statistics to aid in writing blog posts to further spread the Mozilla mission. Later on there was also a session about Mozilla Reps, which falls in the same category. Mozilla is helping individuals improving on speaking to groups in hopes of finding new talented speakers that are willing to present Mozilla technologies on conferences around the world. In addition there was a workshop in the evening to improve on those skills by watching live examples and analyzing their problems and tricks.

All in all it was a very delightful Mozcamp with a lot of energy. We are very happy that we had the chance to participate and learn more about Mozilla's goals and future prospect.
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