History of my Mozilla involvement
Slashdot was responsible for my initial involvement in the Mozilla project. It might have been this article or it might have been a comment (such as mpt's) in another article.
The first Mozilla build I used was M13. I reported my first bug in February 2000, when I was a senior in high school.
At first, I only reported and triaged bugs. Then I started writing testcases for layout bugs, participating in user interface design, and finding security holes. Now I'm also writing patches for UI bugs.
Things that encouraged me to continue contributing when I was a newbie:
- Eli Goldberg's comment in my first bug report.
- My sixth bug report, which was about pop-up windows, getting forty votes, including at least ten due to a comment I posted on Slashdot. At the time, that was enough to put it in the top ten!
- Some of my bug reports getting fixed quickly.
- Asa's enthusiastic email to me when he gave me the ability to confirm and edit bug reports in Bugzilla.
- Communicating with other Mozilla community members not only through Bugzilla but also through IRC.
July 10th, 2004 at 4:24 pm
I think the last point you make is the main point in my opinion. The Mozilla community is wonderful, and is what makes spending time on Mozilla worthwhile for me. I know that without the Mozilla community on IRC and MozillaZine, I would never have gotten involved in Firefox QA.
July 11th, 2004 at 3:23 pm
Weird. My experience is almost exactly the same.
I remember that comment of mpt’s being one of the things which started me on the project, at almost exactly the same time (January 2000). Eli was also a great help, and being in charge of running the daily smoketests for several months gave me a sense of responsibility. I remember interacting with Asa also at that time.
July 12th, 2004 at 5:06 pm
I’d like to be a mozilla developer too, part time. But I’m waiting until I graduate and get a full time job first. Right now, a job and college (summer school right now) is enough for me. I’ll replace my hours of homework I do with hours of mozilla coding.
I don’t know how you do it Jesse.
July 16th, 2004 at 3:46 pm
Mike: When I was in college, I didn’t also have a job. During the summers, I got jobs that involved working on Mozilla. So it wasn’t hard for me to find time to work on Mozilla.
July 13th, 2004 at 11:14 pm
Some more things that encouranged me to continue contributing:
* Finding security holes and realizing I had a valuable skill.
* mpt’s comments in Bugzilla about user interface design were interesting and taught me a lot.
* The bugathon (http://www.mozillazine.org/articles/article635.html): reduce testcases to help layout developers, get an autographed t-shirt