Engagement/Developer Engagement/DevPulse/May2014

Welcome to the 3rd edition of DevPulse: a monthly glance at stuff happening among and for developers, sourced by many. Our goal is to create transparency around the various efforts at Mozilla to support mobile, web & app developers and facilitate greater collaboration.

Developer world news

• Web devs and data. When the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked web devs to build a tool to populate an open data format to help citizens contact members of Congress, they stepped up, big time. Another cool story via Janet Swisher.

Recent & upcoming projects & event highlights

• Teaching the Web: "AppDay in a Box." Do you want to produce a full or half day event on building a great Firefox OS app? You don't need to start from scratch: check out "App Days In a Box" to get guidelines, resources and materials.
• Learning the Web: MDN Learning Area. Mozilla's MDN & Webmaker teams are meeting in London May 28 & 29 to plan and develop the new MDN Learning Area. Check out the agenda and read about the Learning Area. And if you have a background in teaching web development, are in Europe (so you won't need a visa given the date), and want to help shape this initiative, let Ali Spivak know.
• Learning the Web: Firefox OS App Workshop in Prague in July. This is a full-day coding workshop for experienced HTML5 app developers in the Czech Republic. Developers must apply to attend, and share published/working app code in order to qualify. Check out the details on Hacks -- and a big thanks to the Czech FxOS launch team and the Mozilla Czech community for their support.

App & web developer Perspectives

• Launching direct feedback channels. This month we launched a channel for developers to offer constructive feedback and ideas on specific topics. This lets us be transparent about what we do, and also gives developers the opportunity to influence and inspire our priorities. In the first week, we received:
  • 99 new ideas
  • 1382 votes
  • 4080 unique users
    • Learn more about what people are telling us and how we are responding.
    • Jump in with your own feedback by joining us directly in the channel.

• User research. To better understand the App Developer Experience, the Insights team talked to 12 developers from the San Francisco Bay Area and Warsaw, Poland about their development processes throughout the app development lifecycle. Read the report to glean insights on the highs and lows of the development process, and how Mozilla can support developers at each stage. Mozilla teams are now exploring how to translate these insights into real offerings for developers. All are welcome to reach out to Cori Schauer with any comments or questions.

• Web components. These are a super hot topic right now, and they are powerful. So much they could pose a temptation to repeat mistakes from the past. Chris Heilmann explains.
• What's(an)App? Chris also gave a closing keynote at State of the Browser last month in London, UK. In it, Chris reminds us what an app is and what it should do, and how emerging web technologies very much will make that possible in the open.

Geekery Highlights

We have a lot of data lovers serving app devs, and data often leads to insights. This month our highlights come in the form of an ask. Specifically:

• Event geekery. Mozillians go to lots of developer events around the world. We speak, attend, sit at booths, train and sponsor. If you have been to an event lately be sure to fill out this survey, which we need for insights into all the amazing activity across the globe.

Working together.

• Become an MDN Topic Driver or Localization Lead. Topic Drivers coordinate and promote content creation for a particular topic, and Localization Leads guide the localization of content on MDN for a particular language or topic. Once a lead establishes themselves and demonstrates staying power, additional privileges on MDN follow. If you are interested, contact teoli (localization), sheppy (topic leads), or Ali.

** MDN localization highlight: the Italian localization team translated the entire UI of MDN - a distinguished achievement, as this consists of roughly 10,000 strings and is understandably a huge amount of work. Big kudos to Sara_t, gialloporpora and all the other contributors who assisted.

• Localize web apps. We want to make localizing apps dead simple for people. After evaluating previous approaches, we now have:
  • A new simple code repo to just clone and get started
  • A screencast to show the process (basically, how your app can go from one language to localized in a matter of minutes).
  • Updated docs on MDN
  • A pilot with the Transifex service, where people can get connected and get help to get their apps translated.
    • Details at the Hacks post.

• Recruit Czech app developers to the June 28 Prague FxOS Workshop.
  • Modify or RT this Tweet.

• And, as always....
  • Send us ideas for our upcoming events.
  • Chat with us. We have an open meeting in the #devrel IRC each Tuesday at 9am PST. Agendas and minutes on this wiki and if you can't make it, we often hang out there at other hours as well.