In my last post I mentioned how super satisfying it is to be part of a community working together to make Firefox better.
This morning someone new dropped into #fx-team on IRC, asking about a reproducible problem and how to submit a patch. Normally #fx-team is a fairly busy channel, but since we were all at the Mozilla All-Hands last week, people were traveling and recovering… So it was 12 hours of dead silence before anyone replied. Not great, but also pretty rare. 😦
Anyway, the awesome part was that in that time this person managed to grab the source code, diagnose the problem with gdb, fix the problem, and then blog about it — check it out. That’s pretty awesome! (Oops, I already said awesome once. Still deserving of a 2nd ‘awesome’. 🙂
The timing couldn’t have been better. At the All Hands, I went to one of the talks by Ubuntu’s Jono Bacon on Growing and Maintaining Community. It was pretty awesome (3rd time, yes I know). Obviously Ubuntu has a large community, but I was hadn’t realized just how much thoughtful effort has gone into improving it… TONS of fantastic ideas and practices that I hope Mozilla can also make use of. The one downside, though, was that I came away feeling a little bummed at how much work need to do to reach the high level of wide-ranging, effective engagement Bacon et al have developed. So it was really splendid timing to have a new community member pop out and have a good experience.
Today was a good day.
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