Engagement/Developer Engagement/DevPulse/April2014

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Welcome to the 2nd edition of DevPulse: a monthly glance at stuff happening among and for developers! Our goal is to create transparency around the various efforts at Mozilla to support mobile, web & app developers and facilitate greater collaboration. Enjoy!

Developer world news

  • A window into web developers concerns. Thanks to standards and libraries, web developers are moving beyond browser compatibility issues to challenges such as APIs for new features, and mobile development. More insights from an analysis of over 500,000 questions on Stack Exchange. (hat tip to Janet Swisher for the find).

Recent event highlights

  • PyCon. Mozilla was a sponsor at PyCon, the largest annual gathering of the Python community. Several Mozillians gave talks, including Selena Deckelmann, Erik Rose, Dan Callahan, and Greg Wilson, addressing computer science advocacy in K-12 education, API design, website security, database-schema migrations, and software carpentry. The Mozilla booth was quite busy with people asking us questions about our technology (we showed off our Eideticker and power-measurement rigs), our mission, our organization, our education efforts, and of course how to contribute! Many people were interested in contributing to Mozilla projects that use Python. It was a very positive experience (and thanks to Mark Cote for this update!).
  • Chile Hackathon. The Mozilla community in Chile supported NASA's International Space Apps hackathon, which spanned two days of spreading knowledge of Mozilla and Firefox OS. Check out some fun pix and an app built using PhoneGap Cordova. If you speak Espanol, you can read the full write-up from community member Lourdes Castillo.
  • Berlin Meetup. Mozilla community members in Germany met in Berlin this month to sprint on SUMO and MDN documentation translation. Niklas Barning helped with providing German voice-overs for Developer Tools screencasts and the group localized the most important Firefox Developer Tools articles into German.

Project highlights

  • MDN contributors grew by 15% in March! Our goal for 2014 is to nearly double the active MDN contributors per month to 1000 (with "active" defined as the number of people contributing to MDN in the past 30 days). 101 more people contributed to MDN in March than in February, putting us at 665 current active monthly contributors. The increase was driven by a combination of outreach, volunteers helping on localization status pages, and better contribution/getting started content.
  • Phase 3 of Mozilla's Phones for Apps programis focused exclusively on app “porters” with currently popular and well-rated Cordova/PhoneGap apps. Cordova/PhoneGap developers are invited to apply to participate. If the app is a good fit for Firefox Marketplace, we ship a developer device (currently Keons) and one of our evangelists works with the developer on any issues/workarounds until the app lands in Marketplace.
  • Got tools? An 8-minute screencast by evangelist Jason Weathersby shows how to use Firefox developer tools to detect, analyze and correct performance issues within a running Firefox OS application.

App & web developer perspectives

  • App Developer User Research Larissa Co and Cori Schauer are in the midst of analyzing contextual interviews they conducted with app developers in the San Francisco Bay Area and Warsaw during March. They are not ready to share the results until the analysis is done, but these photos should give you a sense of how this happens :)

Supporting developers together: we want YOU!

  • VisionMobile survey. Mozilla works with VisionMobile, an industry analyst firm, to survey the developer world on trends in mobile. The current survey closes May 9.
    • Complete the survey (allot about 10 minutes) so we can get up to date information on the changing world of mobile!
    • Distribute this survey link so others can also take it.
    • Promote the survey in your blog, twitter account and other social media according to these guidelines from VisionMobile.
  • Apps & Marketplace Weekly Show & Tells. Every Friday at 12:30pm PST Mozillians show the latest greatest stuff underway to build a fantastic experience for app developers in the Mozilla Marketplace. Check out this wiki page for meeting details and agendas.