
What can I do for Mozilla? - robin_reala
http://whatcanidoformozilla.org/
======
loso
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.

~~~
gawker
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
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.

~~~
kibwen
They do seem to be looking for those, but as paid employees rather than
volunteers.[1] Those roles are probably harder to outsource to the community.

[1] <https://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/>

~~~
wolfgke
Can somebody tell me reasons why UI designers or UX specialists are more
difficult to outsource?

I know that many open source projects have difficulties attracting them, but I
really don't know the reasons (any reason designers working in this field gave
me also should apply to programmers - thus they also couldn't answer this
question).

~~~
crystalbeasley
I started writing a response about my experience as a designer at Mozilla and
it got really long and I turned it into a blog post called "Code talks and
designers don't speak the language." Thanks for inspiring me to come out of
blog hibernation. [http://skinnywhitegirl.com/blog/code-talks-and-designers-
don...](http://skinnywhitegirl.com/blog/code-talks-and-designers-dont-speak-
the-language/930/)

~~~
wolfgke
Good blog post.

Concerning point 3:

"Probably the most daunting question for projects without any design lead that
has the trust of the team is, how do the devs know if the proposed design is
correct? Without that trust, bugs quickly devolve into nasty arguments. How
you build that trust has been the subject of entire books. But the question
remains, who and how do you approve a mockup? The code review process works
great for just that… code."

Developers also have nasty arguments about what code is correct/the better one
etc. ;-)

So this argument also should in principle apply to developers - but developers
don't seem to have any problem about that point. I don't know whether the
reason is simply that developers have less a problem with conflicts?

But nevertheless: there are well-established principles to judge which
code/software architecture is better (elegance, smallness, extendability etc.
(all of these can be judged rather objectively) - which role these play,
depends on the project). I think it would help project leaders if you
suggested a similar process for judging design decisions. Just an idea. If
this is a bad idea of me, suggest a better one.

~~~
crystalbeasley
"there are well-established principles to judge which code/software
architecture is better" There are very similar principles for judging which
design is better (affordance, natural mapping), it's just that coders don't
know those principles.

You're implying a value judgement that code is an objective discipline and
design in a subjective discipline. There are aspects of _visual_ design that
are subjective. However, UX is a testable, repeatable, objective discipline
that is informed by the work of cognitive science.

Yes coders have arguments... with coders. They have inside baseball arguments.
It's entirely different than a designer having an argument with a coder.
Often, the designer has to teach the coder the principles of design in order
to even engage in a logical, productive discussion.

The overriding point I was making is that the tools like github are designed
for code, not design. Our tooling inherently advantages code. It's a pain in
the ass to even insert an inline image into a comment. Github isn't built for
evaluating mockups and wireframes. Designers do our best to bootstrap into the
tool, yes. But it's not _our_ tool.

------
nathanb
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...

~~~
Killswitch
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.

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

------
lincolnwebs
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.

~~~
darkstalker
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.

~~~
lxt
The author of the site works on Rust ;)

~~~
neilk
It all makes sense now

------
ChrisForsythe
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
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/>

------
rurounijones
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.

~~~
tedmielczarek
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.

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

------
emilioolivares
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!

~~~
emilioolivares
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!

------
xhrpost
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
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.

------
victorneo
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
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.

------
kibwen
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.

------
tlrobinson
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.

------
unix-dude
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.

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

------
iso8859-1
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?

------
bhughes
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.

------
zapdrive
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)

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

------
ippa
I miss ruby :)

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

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

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

~~~
gcp
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).

------
donrhummy
This is a great start!

------
lettergram
Awesome filter.

------
iomike
Download Chrome. Make Mozilla as fast as Chrome.

~~~
mburns
They're working on it. <http://arewefastyet.com/>

