Engagement/Developer Engagement/DevPulse/July2014

Welcome to the 5th 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

Google I/O: Where was the web? Read some reflections on Google's largest developer event last month from Principal Evangelist Christian Heilmann.

OSCON is a prominent open source developer conference held each summer in Portland, Oregon and Contributor Benjamin Kerensa is one of Mozilla's key organizers at this year's event (happening next week, July 20-24). You can learn a bit more about Benjamin and his thoughts on Mozilla in his interview with the opensource.com blog, "three ways developers can contribute to Firefox OS."

Project & event highlights

Marketplace Day. Lots of testing, translation, app reviews and documentation was had by all on June 26. Check out the full run-down.

Service Workers are coming! Service Workers are, at their simplest, scripts that act as client-side proxies for web pages. As such, they open up several possibilities for the Web that were previously only available on native platforms. Read more on Hacks!

DevTools team launches WebIDE June 23. WebIDE allows you not only to debug apps inside Firefox, but also create new ones from scratch based on the mortar templates. Instead of just being a debugging suite you now have a full multi-file editor with autocompletion and a packaging system in the browser. This turns any Firefox users into a potential app creator. More on Ars Technica.

Train the Trainer in Bangalore, India. The focus of this event last month was to train volunteers to recruit more volunteers in support of launching FxOS in India. About 30 of the event's 80 attendees participated in the Developer Outreach sessions. Check out the event materials here.

New MDN Goodness.

• Canonical Developing Gaia guide.
• 4 new guides and new demos of the Web Audio API.
• A number of new articles about manipulating media.
• Details on the Media Recorder API.
• Newly-updated Add-On SDK content scripts with sample code on GitHub.

Flame Developer Phones. Last month we launched the Flame reference phone intended to support Firefox OS developers worldwide. The phone is available for retail sales, and the team also launched a targeted feedback program called Foxtrot. Details on the phone (including how to get one) are on the new Flame wiki page.

Why web literacy? While you may be familiar with Mozilla's Manifesto, sometimes it's good to take a step back and ask why it matters. Check out this great white paper looking at why Mozilla cares about web literacy.

App & web developer Perspectives

• Mozilla's Soledad Penadés recently shared at Amsterdam's GOTO conference how her experiences building an app for Android led her to instead build for the web. Don't miss Sole's full post.
• Priyanka Nag is a core MDN contributor. Recently she was featured in tech blog YourStory. Our favorite quote: "I cannot work for people, I prefer working with them.”
• A recording of the keynote of the SAPO Codebits conference in Lisbon, Portugal with Principal Evangelist Christian Heilmann addressing the hows and whys of Firefox OS.
• Mozilla's Apps Blog highlights our apps ecosystem. Examples include highlights of the World Cup content or the community components of Marketplace. There are a lot of dev-centric items as well - for example, tips on localizing apps, integrating app payments, or how developers can write compelling marketing copy for their apps. A recent post on marketing your app comes from our own Sakina Groth.

"Geekery" Highlights

• Did you know the Hacks blog gets over 200,000 unique visitors per month? If you have a story to share about a technical problem you solved, or something our developer readership would be interested in, see the Hacks wiki for details.
• This post brings the beauty of math and physics to Javascript: a double pendulum in 100 lines.
• And, while we typically focus on numbers in the Geekery section, one other item tied to other forms of geekery screamed out for attention:
• the elements of HTML: a nice overview.

Engaging with Developers Together

Evangelism tools. Janet Swisher has developed lots of new evangelism tools & ways to get involved.

• The new Community Evangelism wiki page describes all the different ways to get involved with Technical Evangelism at Mozilla (and ways to stay connected with the latest news and resources). It includes things like:
• A revived public evangelism@ mailing list.
• A new MozSpeakers group on Mozillians.org. In just the first 3 days after this group was announced, over 60 people were accepted into this group. Please check the "New Member Criteria" before you join!
• And a new speakers group on the Mozilla Exchange Yammer.

Stack Overflow is one of the de facto places for developers to go for help and answers. Start answering questions there, and pointing other people to this resource. Mozilla sponsors 5 tags here:

• Firefox-OS
• Firefox
• Firefox-developer-tools
• HTML5-apps

Help plan the next Marketplace Day by attending a Marketplace Community meeting; these happen very other Monday at 2pm PST.

Project prioritzation. Think there is something DevRel should be working on but not in the current project list? We've launched a new process to receive your ideas and prioritize them - please join us in using it!

Jobs! If you have the inkling to dive into a full-time role at Mozilla, you can see all openings on the Mozilla careers page; here, we wanted to highlight a few from our Developer Tools and Apps teams:

• Developer Tools Engineer (with commentary from Nick Fitzgerald).
• Senior Front-End Engineer, Apps