Engagement/Developer Engagement/DevPulse/June2014

From MozillaWiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Welcome to the 4th edition of DevPulse: a monthly glance at stuff happening among and for developers, sourced by many. Our goal is to create greater transparency and collaboration around the various efforts at Mozilla to support mobile, web & app developers.

Developer world news

Project & event highlights

Marketplace Day: "All About Apps" on June 26 This is an all-day online event that connects staff and volunteers around common tasks. There are contribution opportunities for everyone, from rating and translating apps to editing documentation to creating apps. Join anytime on that day and pick tasks to complete, moderate a module yourself, or just be convivial Check out the agenda, which includes specific times for specific topics. This will all take place in the #marketplace IRC room.

  • If you want to jump straight to the MDN docs track, check out the etherpad.

Flame Reference Phone. The Flame is a reference phone for developers to test out various app and OS features. They are available via a retail site as well as through Apps on a Flame, a phone program for developers to port existing HTML5 apps built for other marketplaces/platforms and for Firefox App developers with proven Firefox Marketplace listings to build a new Firefox App for Firefox OS.

Developer Tools in Firefox Beta. Upcoming dev-friendly features in Firefox Beta include support for Firefox Hub APIs allowing add-on developers to add their own content to the Firefox for Android homepage; APK Factory, which allows developers to provide a more familiar way for users to manage their Web apps; and other design & workflow goodies.

MDN Learning Area. The MDN and WebMaker teams met for 2 days in London and made a plan for collaborating on the new beginner-level content on MDN. The team did a lot, including sketching out launch content, a standard page structure, a preliminary roadmap, and proposals for joint events (including MozFest).

New MDN Goodies h/t to Chris Mills

  • Introducing the MediaRecorder API, which became available in Firefox 25 and will be available in Firefox OS 2.0:
  • Learn how to add captions and subtitles to HTML5 video
  • Interested in what's happening on MDN moving forward? Check out this rundown of weekly MDN content activities.
  • The little things add up. The MDN team went through all MDN pages that had errors in the in-wiki macro scripts that are used to automatically generate certain types of content, The team fixed all the cases in which they were not working correctly and resolved hundreds of errors.

App & web developer Perspectives

JSConf Recap. Hear Soledad's thoughts on the recent JSConf. A teaser: "...some discussion about physical and mental health and better community building and other important non purely technical stuff that usually never gets discussed in tech conferences."

Feedback on Firefox Tools on UserVoice in May 2014

  • The Developer Tools team have a 100% response rate to all the ideas we've gotten!
  • New ideas: 116 (+ 36 Closed)
  • No of votes: 1939
  • No of comments: 94
  • Ideas' states updated by Mozilla: 141 (meaning we've changed the state for them, e.g. Planned, Under Review)
  • Responded to: 100% of the ideas
    • 70 Under Review
    • 40 Planned
    • 6 Started
    • 36 Closed

Stack Overflow. We sponsor and monitor a few tags on Stack Overflow, a channel where developers ask questions to solve problems. Robert Nyman put together a dashboard to see the engagement and data for those specific tags.

Guest Hacks blog post: PlayCanvas. Read how the PlayCanvas game engine went open source by Will Eastscott

"Geekery" Highlights

We have a lot of data lovers serving app devs, and data often leads to insights. This month:

Engaging with Developers Together

Working for and with developers is a hugely collaborative effort. Join us!

  • Write for Mozilla Hacks
  • Become an Evangelism Rep.
  • Attend Marketplace Day on June 26. This event supports people interested and at all levels of technical ability. Specific activities include app localization, as well as writing & localizing MDN documentation.
  • Help localize strings for your favorite open source app or key core app (including top-needed apps for our new markets). Get started here.
  • Help with web compatibility! This month Mike Taylor introduced webcompat.com, a contributor-driven initiative to fix broken bits of the web.
  • Join the conversations.
    • Take part on Mozilla discussions on Stack Overflow.
    • Ask, answer and vote on ideas on UserVoice.
    • Developer Relations has an open meeting in the #devrel IRC each Tuesday at 9am PST. Find the agendas and minutes here.