What an amazing weekend! Reminisce about the last two years this one was definitely the greatest one at FOSDEM. The main reason why I joined again was Mozilla. And due to there aren’t so many choices to get the opportunity to meet Mozillians, I cannot cancel such an appointment. 😉 I met a lot of interesting and crazy people, listened to mostly all talks inside the Mozilla devroom (also known as sauna) and had pulsating and valuable conversations. Mostly I enjoyed to finally met Seth Bindernagel and David Tenser. Both guys working for the Mozilla Corporation and doing (like many others) a really great job. And that’s the reason why Mozilla gets so popular and can celebrate its 10th anniversary this year. Thanks to the organization team of Mozilla-Europe we had an incredible evening in the bowling centre. Sadly I didn’t made any pictures this year. But that’s not as bad because there are still hundreds of them available.
To be a bit more concrete about the topics I had at FOSDEM and work that I’ve taken with me, I will give a short overview:
- Some weeks ago during a QA session on IRC, Marcia Knous asked me if I would be pleased when Mozilla would support my work. I was happy to hear that because I don’t have the perfect equipment to build my own debug builds under each operating system. This is bad when triaging crasher bugs which only happen under a special OS. Now everything goes really fast. Three days later I got a message from Seth Bindernagel who leads the community-giving program. After some conversations there was made the decision that I will get a new Mac Mini and the appropriate OS licenses. Finally we met each other at FOSDEM and discussed if I would fit into the Community Loan Program. But due to I don’t have a real plan of things I want to do – QA work is really widespread – we dismissed that option. Meanwhile I got the Mac Mini from my local Apple salesman and I will start to set it up within the next days. Hopefully I’ll get some help.
- Over the last month I heard about SUMO several times. But I hadn’t the change to gain insight into this project. So I was totally uninformed on Friday evening when I was introduced to David Tenser, the smart and blond Swedish guy behind this project. To make matters worse his first question was about the German translation. I had to acknowledge my ignorance. 😉 But during his talk on Saturday I get more and more informed about the background. In co-operation with Abdulkadir Topal we will try to find some reliable localizers who are engaged to help translating the Firefox 3 help into German. We plan to do some posts to our German newsgroups and forums. Lets see if we are successful.
- On Friday I also had the chance to talk with Chris Hofmann about the translation of the Firefox privacy policy into German. Due to the legal text no-one wanted to do that in the past. Now we will give it a try and do our best to create a good first translation. But the final review will be done by a lawyer so we don’t have to know everything in detail. That’s really helpful! Thanks Chris.
- StanisÅ‚aw MaÅ‚olepszy and Seth Bindernagel did a great job in analyzing the latest community surveys. Hopefully we can get some data to be able to have a detail view onto the community in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It looked like we are really a bit behind and not so enthusiastic like the Spanish folks…
Finally I have a lot of things to do right now and will give several status updates over the next weeks.
henrik: thanks for sharing this. i’m really happy to hear you were able to meet up with seth, david tenser and everyone else from mozilla at fosdem. thanks also for your continued contributions!
Hi Henrik: It was a pleasure to meet you. Glad we were able to help you out…you’ve been contributing to Mozilla for so long and continue to work on QA-ing blocker bugs. Thanks for everything and see you next year at FOSDEM!