Day Five

After a week of practically partying and a couple days of setting up my development environment, I got a commit ("to add code") into Mozilla's Marketplace (app store). I am working on the statistics and graphs that include installation, usage, and financial data for individual applications. This allows developers to see how their app is doing and, if made public, allows users to also see how well an app is faring. My current lifestyle consists of reading the codebase and playing with code, eating and drinking unlimited free Clif Bars and Vitamin Water Zeros, walking back and forth between my desk and "collaboration station" (a puny desk that encourages close-quarters hacking), and going home to play basketball. It's quite luxurious.

Day Four

Alas, I must get back to reality and return to the dreary sunny city of Mountain View and the mundane most-awesome-office-in-the-world Mozilla office. Today was the last day of the offsite work week in Santa Cruz. Upon return, I was asked to present my hacakthon app, Draw Nothing on video during lunch. But before that I met with my team. Mozilla held a cantina for Cinco de Mayo Eve with the most delicious Mexican food ever. At night, I played basketball and returned to the Mozilla office to eat, drink, and play Rock Band and pool.

Mozilla Marketplace Statistics and Graphs

Earlier in the week, I learned that I would be working on the Marketplace/Add-Ons team. The Marketplace is Mozilla's new cross-platform webapp store, and Add-Ons is the site where people go to install Firefox extensions. I had a small meeting with my manager and new mentor to assign me a project and get me into the workflow. For the beginning of my internship, I will be working on statistics and graphs for the Mozilla Marketplace. This means taking data about app purchases and turning it ... more

Day Two

w3bd3v h@ck d4y! Yet another day in Santa Cruz, and we started`off writing open web apps with Boot2Gecko and the Mozilla Marketplace in mind. On a side note, I will be working on mostly the Mozilla Marketplace and Addons site for my internship, for which I am excited. For the hackathon, I churned out a doodle app which I named DrawNothing. In the afternoon, we all presented our 'finished' products. Afterwards, I worked on processing some images, sprinted to the amusement park, rode a rollercoaster, spent some time at the arcade, played laser tag and minigolf, and then got a bit tipsy.

pre-script: congratulations to my little brother for winning the district spelling bee, and good luck to him competing at the county state fair next Tuesday!

DrawNothing

Try it out!

For the hackathon, I built a doodle app called DrawNothing. I chose something that I could feasibly do within a few hours yet wouldn't be too bad as an initial Marketplace submission. Doodle applications are a dime-a-dozen, ... more

Day One

Day two was sort of like a webdev BarCamp filled with some cool keynotes and lightning talks. I dodged a bullet by waking up on time despite alarms being off and got Ubuntu installed with the desktop environment all set up on my new laptop. I am liking the laptop. This week is working out well; I'm learning what's currently up with webdev and I'm meeting the whole webdev team at once (and remembering names!).

Keynotes

morgamic - past/present/future of webdev

morgamic, boss, talked about what was going on with webdev. He talked about some recent achievements, what teams were currently working on, and how quickly the webdev team was growing (literally exponentially, currently at 60). He presented a pretty cool infographic about stability v. innovation. Some apps were under stability (SUMO, addons, socorro) whereas some were under innovation (boot2gecko).

kumar - apps

kumar, future teammate for Mozilla Marketplace, talked about what apps meant and how prevalent they are today. He noted how iOS/Android/FB all had closed-down app stores distributing apps with signed blobs, also ... more

Today, I began my internship at Mozilla. I am not quite sure if today is representative of a normal day at the Mozilla offices. Because somehow I have ended up in a large hotel room to myself overlooking the beaches of Santa Cruz for a week. And I remember along the way, I was in some sort of limousine-school bus hybrid with neon-lighted alcohol racks and a flat-screen TV in the back. Oh, I also met the creators of django-debug-toolbar and jsFiddle. Uh, where am I?

For USENIX NSDI'12, I volunteered to take notes on and summarize talks for the USENIX;login: magazine. After a long weekend and replaying the talks over and over to understand what the speakers were saying, I was able to barf out 12 thick paragraphs (4 for each talk). Just when I thought I could escape writing essays. As celebration, we had a barbeque of the most delicious burgers ever (Uber-burgers) and drank in the hot tub.

Since I spent so much effort writing these, I'll put the summaries down below for my own satisfaction.