Author: Shawn Wilsher

Mozilla had a bit of an outing today at Bay to Breakers. By today I do of course mean this morning; very early this morning. We started out by hopping on the Caltrain that departed at 6:19 AM (ug). That had to be the most crowded train ride ever (note: picture doesn’t do it justice)! It was like a bus after a football game on campus. We had to stand on it for over an hour until we arrived in San Francisco.

The city was pretty cool, and there are some massive buildings and some really neat architecture. We walked under the Bay Bridge (I think that is the correct name) and got to the meeting place. Eventually we got to the start line, and we ended up only making it about 3 miles in (I know – lame) where we went and got lunch. I thought about running it, but nobody else wanted to, and I really didn’t feel like waiting forever for everyone to get to the finish line. No, we never continued (they were opening the streets back up – we would have never made it in time).

I have to say, it was a pretty crazy experience. Apparently, there are no open intoxicant laws in California as there are in Michigan (or they clearly were not being enforced). Also, walking around in the nude seems to be a popular thing (No, I’m not going to get into numbers here). It was crazy, but fun, and if I’m around next year, I think I’ll do it again (but I think I’ll run the race regardless).

Justin has been kind enough to host an album of some of the pictures he took so you can enjoy the experience too (these are safe for work).

So this post was supposed to be written some time during the weekend, but I never got to it. We’ve got this important deadline for major code changes tomorrow, and I’ve been frantically working to get my bit of code done. The bug in question is Bug 380250, and really it hasn’t been too bad. I’ve learned a bit about two new technologies (new to me, not so much to the code base), mozStorage and RDF. RDF is technically what I have ripped out of the current code, but I had to develop some migration code to port a users download history to our new storage system, mozStorage. That was fun and consisted of most of my day today (at least two hours of which was me staring at the api’s wonder what I was supposed to use).

Anyway, that’s not what this is about and I’m getting into way too many technical details for most people to care about. I had every intention last week of writing a post every day and keeping people up to date about what it’s like to be a Mozilla intern. It’s funny how deadlines push that sort of thing to the side. Here’s the executive summary.

Tuesday I finished up my research for this bug, did some research on another bug, and just barely started working on ripping out RDF. After work, a bunch of us went out to see Hot Fuzz. It’s a British humor film, and it was hilarious. At first, I thought it was somewhat boring, but that ended up being buildup for a real cool ending. If you haven’t seen it, I strongly suggest you go out and see it.

Wednesday was the first day that I really got working and had the whole day to work (meetings and such on the two previous days). I think I was at work until about Midnight that night. It was a long day considering that I came in around 10 AM. I also made a ton of progress on the bug.

Thursday was about the same, except that a bunch of us from the office went out to eat at some place way out in the middle of nowhere. The food was good though, despite us getting a bit lost on the way there (I wasn’t the navigator, honest!). We were out fairly late, but we had fun. It was my boss’s send off dinner (I quote, “the first annual mconnor meets portola valley extravaganza”) since he’ll be gone for about three weeks (He lives in Canada).

Friday essentially a repeat of Wednesday, and I got a very large amount of work done. Nothing exciting (from your viewpoint) really happened.

Saturday I slept in then went out to meet Alex Vincent. I’ve known him for about a year now online (he is a contributor to the Mozilla code base). He showed me his project, Verbosio, which is looking pretty darn powerful/useful, and it’s not even in alpha one yet. I hope he can release an alpha soon (he says he’s close, but I won’t hold him to a date) so he can get some more people to help him out. I am fairly certain that once people see what it is capable of, it’ll start to attract more contributors.

Sunday was essentially a day of relaxing. One of my friends who works at Apple got into the Halo 3 Friends and Family Beta. I have to say that Halo 3 is pretty fun, and the game looks like it will be well worth the money. Graphics are nice, and the new items and weapons make for an interesting game.

Anywho, that’s it for now. California is nice. There’s lot’s of trees.

I started work at Mozilla today, and it was quite an interesting day. The day started off getting our paperwork inline, which was taken care of by Karen Prescott (who also showed us her intern deterrent – a spray bottle of water!). That was all in building K, and I work in building S, so I then hiked it across the campus to get there. I then got to meet my mentor in person, Dan Mosedale (I’ve talked with him online a bit before coming out here). A bit later, I met Mike Connor, my boss (even though he’ll be in Toronto most of the time) and the head Firefox guy.

It’s really cool finally being able to meet all these people that I’ve met and talked with online in person. Of course, it has a downside too as I’ve learned that I seem to have mispronounced a lot of names. Reed has been getting them correct, so my guessing at names must suck (plus, he’s been around for a while).

I’ll talk about what bugs I’ll be working on tomorrow, since now I’m too tired and going to bed.