Austin Mozilla All Hands – I was there

By - Mozilla, Participation, Was there

Also this December I was able to participate in an All Hands by Mozilla. What is an All Hands?

All Hands are a unique and special opportunity for all paid staff and our most impactful volunteers to come together, in person, to share experiences and interact with people they may not normally work with (or just see over Vidyo). Given our size, work weeks are a key differentiator for us (larger organizations just can’t do this sort of thing in a meaningful way). Being able to come together as a whole organization, 2x each year, exposes each of us to interactions that may spark new ideas and/or lead to new solutions. They are a core part of our annual planning process.

In a nutshell, Mozilla understand how important it is for a volunteer to attend these events, which allows us (volunteers) to meet the various teams and to take part in meetings as well as update on things done and future.

Some data
These events begin with a plenary (which includes a beautiful video that collects previous events) and this year contained many interesting data.

The various executives of the various most important teams shared many details such as:

  • After the release of Firefox Quantum, Google updated Chrome’s website (in December) after years that did not change
  • A migration campaign is scheduled for January from Chrome and Firefox
  • Rust is used by big players like Dropbox for its new DBX file system
  • Other repo on GitHub will soon be opened regarding Pocket -> https://github.com/Pocket
  • We are considering integrating external services into Firefox
  • Plans for 2018 for new technologies are: AI and Speech Recognition, Mixed Reality and Content (something referring to Pocket)

Other news concerns the Reps program in which we are working hard to adapt it to the new year and current needs.

The Addons team of Mozilla received a specific mention for the work carried out, also myself in my small by Reps Mobilizer and as a speaker as well as dev I could participate in the group photo:

I also allowed myself to do some photobombing at the cinema for the vision of Star Wars (those who do not find me are the one with the mask at the top right):

An important detail are the stickers that are starting to be more and more:

And the group photo of all the Mozillians:

https://twitter.com/briannajmark/status/941026208300650497

Plans for 2018?

  • Continue to work on performance with WebRender
  • Not only speed but also ram optimization and battery consumption
  • Best performance on GeckoView (the Android version of Gecko
  • Firefox more customizable in the next year
  • Best support for the enterprise world (60 will be the next ESR)
  • Every 3 releases a focused on performance
  • Multiple APIs for cards to implement more functionality from addons
  • Evaluations for an integrated adblock
  • Killing XUL/XBL (internal interfaces technologies and communication between the various elements of a page)
  • More attention to the mobile world
  • Work on LockBox a new end-to-end encrypted password manager
  • A presence of Tor Browser developers who have been improving Firefox for some time

This year was the demonstration that finally we can say the names of competitors without problems and tackle them on the same ground with advertising campaigns.

Another important detail is the air of renewal that is felt and that technology is undergoing.

The community

We have worked hard on the concept of Mission Driven Mozillian that has arrived at the second draft but it is already evolving for a third after this meeting.

For more details, I leave you to the Reps Council notes.

The TechSpeakers program is preparing for news for next year and in the meantime has given some of the most active of the program a backpack as a prize. I was the first to receive it so I leave the photo with my personalization (not yet finished):

Even my laptop received some new stickers:

Then I allowed myself a photo with the shirt of Zagor near the Texas flag:

In short, we see the differences from last year, now the questions are about what we expect 2018, the things we have to do as a community and that Mozilla is carrying out.

All the stuff released in this website, where the author is Daniele Scasciafratte, is under the GPL 2.0 license except when the resources have their licenses.

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