What can I do for Mozilla?

by robin_reala • 14 years ago

290 82 14 years ago

kibwen5• 14 years ago

Some of the questions are misleadingly worded (e.g. "what's your favorite language?" should probably read "is this your favorite language?"), but something along these lines has the potential to be brilliantly useful for any sprawling open source project that depends on engaging volunteers.

cleverjake• 14 years ago

I would love if more large projects had pages like this.

rurounijones• 14 years ago

would be nice to have a "none of the above" option for people who A) Do not use those languages or B) are not programmers who would like to help

Every project can do with documentation help etc.

tedmielczarek2• 14 years ago

The existing "Bugs Ahoy" site (created by the same person) has lots of choices: http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/

...but it gets you right to bugs, which may be a harder place to start for some contributors.

celer• 14 years ago

I would like to toss in that I am a beginning programmer: Not nearly good enough to fix the bugs, but I can read code and help comment it, change it to make it stylistically compliant, etc.

navs• 14 years ago

Any specific reason why the Design Specs are hosted on Dropbox?

ChrisForsythe• 14 years ago

Good work, with one issue. I don't know if the author would like to address it, but if he would then I think he'd be able to capture more folks along the way.

The page assumes that they only need programmers. If you don't know any languages and are not interested in learning, you can help in other ways like on mozillazine and irc. Artwork, etc etc. It may be good to work through how the buttons/layout should work for this, but overall I think you'd get more involvement in that fashion.

Other than that, I think this is pretty neat. I may copy it.

cygal• 14 years ago

The "Get Involved" page [0] mentions that already : "You don’t have to be a C++ guru (or even know what that means!) to get involved. You just have to love the Web". I guess this page is specifically for programmers.

[0] http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/

loso3• 14 years ago

I actually really like the idea of this type of site. More open source projects should have one. The entry point into getting a project that you want to help with can be a little tricky. On a personal note, this probably was the wrong time for me to see this site and want to help since the latest Firefox update this morning was a serious dud on my computer.

darkpark• 14 years ago

What went wrong with the update? Maybe it's actually a perfect time because maybe you can figure out why it was a "dud" and fix it :). Assuming your an engineer.

loso3• 14 years ago

When I type in the address bar I can't see the URL's pop up like I used to. All I see are the favicons. When I have a window open and try to open another one Firefox freezes and crash. There are a few more things but those are the major problems. I never had a problem with a Firefox update before until this morning.

moystard3• 14 years ago

Everything went smoothly on every machine I own, you were unlucky. What's the dud?

I like the idea as well, it allows every developer out there to find a project related to Mozilla they can help with. Too bad it ends up very quickly on a hard to read Wiki page (I have never liked those).

gawker2• 14 years ago

I agree. I definitely the guidance it provides - it helps me to align my interests with open source. Kinda like online dating with an open source project. I was enthusiastic to contribute to the Django project but had no clue what to do.

tangue• 14 years ago

Yes that's the problem. The landing page is pretty good, but when you click you're send in the usual Mozilla's maze. What makes me sad is that they're not looking for content strategists, UI designers or UX specialists.

lincolnwebs• 14 years ago

If you select PHP, you get "So you like your variable names to include dollar signs? That's cool, everyone misses Perl once in a while." Making smartass remarks about their language of choice is not a great way to initiate a relationship with a developer.

mjb• 14 years ago

It says some similarly smartass remark about every language you choose. I like it, and think it fits in well with the tone of the rest of the site.

km3k• 14 years ago

It makes remarks for all the languages. I think it is part of the appeal of the website.

mhurron• 14 years ago

Ya, not everywhere tries to pretend that no one has a sense of humour the way HN does.

Permit• 14 years ago

It sounds to me like it acts as a filter for people who can't take a joke.

moystard3• 14 years ago

"Fanboy Trap", it seems to work.

kibwen5• 14 years ago

Notice that selecting any language gives you a dismissive remark, not just PHP. But you're right in that it's probably not the best way to cast a wide net (unless they're intentionally selecting for contributors with a good sense of humor).

TomasSedovic• 14 years ago

Except for Rust which takes you directly to rust-lang.org. I actually like the idea though. No language is perfect and people do seem to be a bit too sensitive of their favourite languages.

iso8859-12• 14 years ago

This happens for every language :)

pdw• 14 years ago

Except for Rust :)

darkstalker• 14 years ago

The remaining quotes:

C++: "So you like long compile times and incomprehensible error messages? That's cool, we do too"

Java: "So you're a believer in AbstractMethodFactoryBeans? That's cool, we all have our vices"

Python: "So you enjoy the paradigm of backtrace-driven development? That's cool, everyone gets a bit tired of static typing once in a while"

C: "So you think OOP is for hipsters? That's cool, we all get nostalgic sometimes"

Javascript: "So you're a dynamic individual who thinks that, underneath, everything is an object? That's cool, we like to dream as well"

For Rust, it just sends you directly to it's site.

shreeshga• 14 years ago

only the famous get mocked.

lxt• 14 years ago

The author of the site works on Rust ;)

smegel• 14 years ago

While this is obviously intended to be humorous, I don't really care for the way it attacks the users of the language in such a mocking, patronising manner.

Criticizing languages/paradigms is fine (the resulting flame-wars add a great deal of humour and interest to the world of programming) - but to caricaturize users of different languages as people suffering from certain negative traits is just ugly and leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth reading this.

I for one would not want anything further to do with this author or site.

acheron• 14 years ago

As far as "remarks dismissive of PHP", that's pretty tame. If anything it's dismissive of Perl.

macspoofing• 14 years ago

Can't take a joke?

sneak• 14 years ago

What's the difference between a joke and two dicks?

YOU CAN'T TAKE A JOKE.

neilk2• 14 years ago

Amazingly, you can submit a pull request to this site, to fix it. So I did. https://github.com/jdm/asknot/pull/27

victorneo• 14 years ago

There are other ways to contribute to Mozilla (beyond coding) listed on http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/.

Some of their web projects have amazing documentation for new contributors, such as Kitsune's documentation: http://kitsune.readthedocs.org/

keithpeter• 14 years ago

Yes, as a non-programmer, I could do things like reproduce bugs on various operating systems (e.g. GNU/Linux various flavours with nvidia cards using proprietary drivers and Intel integrated graphics). I could also help with documentation.

unix-dude• 14 years ago

So, I never really thought about contributing to anything Mozilla was actively developing.

This site definetly did a good job of directing me in the right direction. Its a good idea IMO.

lettergram• 14 years ago

Awesome filter.

ippa• 14 years ago

I miss ruby :)

tedmielczarek2• 14 years ago

We don't have any projects in Ruby at Mozilla that I'm aware of. Sorry, can't be all things to all people.

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

It took me way longer than it should have to figure out what the hell this site does. Why not present a list of languages the user can pick from? Also, "Tell me more" and "Keep going" are too similar in meaning.

bhughes• 14 years ago

Is there something along these lines that has data for multiple open source projects? I think a lot of folks (myself included) would benefit from something that could provide some guidance, rather than randomly clicking around Github.

lathamcity• 14 years ago

The line at the top of the page, for me, says "Undefined". Firefox 10.0.7, Windows 7.

I debugged it for you - the outerHTML property isn't supported in Firefox < 11. Here's the solution from StackOverflow:

function outerHTML(node){ return node.outerHTML || ( function(n){ var div = document.createElement('div'), h; div.appendChild( n.cloneNode(true) ); h = div.innerHTML; div = null; return h; })(node); }

lmorchard• 14 years ago

Even more handy would be to submit a pull request! It's open source! https://github.com/jdm/asknot

emilioolivares2• 14 years ago

This is pretty cool! I'm a hobby web dev that has worked with Django on personal projects. It's cool to see how the big boys do it. I'm already on my way to installing Zamboni(https://github.com/mozilla/zamboni/) on a Vagrant Virtual Machine - in other words, this has opened my eyes in terms of workflow for large scale Python/Django projects!

emilioolivares2• 14 years ago

Best find yet while looking through Mozilla's web documentation is Playdoh, Mozilla's Web application base template: http://playdoh.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html https://github.com/mozilla/playdoh

This should be in every Django book!

nathanb2• 14 years ago

Would be cool if it went into greater detail.

"Oh, you're a C programmer? You can work on NSS".

Thanks for letting me know. I'll log that away. How about this:

"You're a C programmer? Here's an interesting bug targeted to the NSS component I've pulled from Mozilla's bug database which might catch your fancy"

Hm, that's interesting. How would I solve that? Maybe if I...no. Hm. Let me pull down the source code to see what would work here...

udp• 14 years ago

NSS is actually the only suggestion for C programmers (no matter how many times you click you're not interested).

nathanb2• 14 years ago

Presumably because NSS is the only part of Mozilla actually written in C...

Killswitch• 14 years ago

Not to mention how he talks down to certain devs because of their language preference. We get it, you don't like it, don't have to be condescending, especially when you're trying to sell an idea that ANYBODY can work for Mozilla because of their wide reliability on things.

addies• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure those are just some tongue-in-cheek jokes, all in good fun

moystard3• 14 years ago

Except Rust, all other languages have theirs. I hardly understand how people can feel offended from jokes such as these.

cpeterso• 14 years ago

"Bugs Ahoy" is a website that lets you filter Bugzilla bugs tagged "[good first bug]" or "[mentor=]" by programming language and feature area:

http://flyinformation.nfshost.com/bugsahoy/?cpp=1

xhrpost• 14 years ago

While this is a neat idea, it seems to fall to the same problem I've seen elsewhere, little to no transparency as to where a project is going. For example, I was suggested Shumway (JS flash emulator). I'm sent to the github page for it (https://github.com/mozilla/shumway). They give a small summary and a little info on getting an installation working. Nothing however I can see on where a new contributor would start with helping out. No road-map, no "we need this feature and no one has claimed to work on it yet", this bug needs to be fixed for the next release, etc.

I'll admit I've never contributed to FOSS so maybe a veteran can fill me in but I see this a lot with projects. Some have decent issue/bug tracking, but I often find it very difficult to determine how a project is supposed to progress, what features are needed for the next release, where do they stand currently, etc. I assume a lot is decided out-of-band through e-mails and IRC.

padenot• 14 years ago

To be fair, shumway has not as many people as Gecko or other big Mozilla projects to do triage and things for the newcomers, the shumway team being minuscule and the project an ongoing effort.

If you want to contribute to a Mozilla project, but can't figure out how you can help, please come on irc (irc.mozilla.org), usually on #nameoftheproject (here #shumway), or in #introduction if you want something more generic.

noelwelsh• 14 years ago

What about some more interesting applications... what could Mozilla do with some machine learning for example?

iomike• 14 years ago

Download Chrome. Make Mozilla as fast as Chrome.

mburns• 14 years ago

They're working on it. http://arewefastyet.com/

donrhummy• 14 years ago

This is a great start!

agentq• 14 years ago

they don't mention NSPR. is it dead? http://www.mozilla.org/projects/nspr/

gcp• 14 years ago

It doesn't need quite the same attention as the other stuff, nor does it have the same development pace. It's using CVS for crying out loud.

Also, it's shared with other projects (Google uses it).

zapdrive• 14 years ago

What I would really like to do for Mozilla is, fix the memory leak problem in the Mac version :( (Never used the windows version, so don't know if it exists in windows too)

iso8859-12• 14 years ago

Why does it suggest Emscripten for C++? It is written in Python/JavaScript... What is needed, IMHO, is more modularization of the JavaScript. I don't see how a C++ expert is needed. Implementing C++ wrappers for browser API's or what?

What can I do for Mozilla?

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