Mozilla

At Mozilla Japan, we’ve been doing a series of monthly events called “Gecko inside” where we discuss details of hacking on Gecko in the hope of helping each other learn and helping new contributors to get started.

Last weekend we held a special “write a patch” day where we gathered a group of long-time contributors to mentor first-time contributors through the process of setting up a build environment, writing a patch, and getting it reviewed and landed.

Fortunately Taipei’s shaved ice extravaganza Ice Monster has popped-up just around the corner from our office in Tokyo!

Now that I’ve sufficiently buried the lede, I’d like to introduce you to what our platform engineers have been up to in the land of the rising (and scorching) sun.

Since April we’ve been trying to focus our efforts around two themes: Input and Animation although we also work on other items like fonts and supporting partner projects.

Yesterday marks 10 days to the day since I posted my first patch to Bugzilla. It was a small patch to composite SVG images with their background (and not just have a white background).

Since then I’ve contributed to Firefox as a volunteer, an intern, a contractor, and, as of 3 years ago tomorrow, a Mozilla Japan employee.

It’s still a thrill and privilege to contribute to Firefox. I’m deeply humbled by the giants I work alongside who support me like I was one of their own. In the evening when I’m tired from the day I still often find myself bursting into a spontaneous prayer of thanks that I get to work on this stuff.

So here are 8 reflections from the last 10 years. It should have been 10 but I ran out of steam.

About a week ago Mozilla Japan put on a two-day event in Tokyo called Mozilla Vision 2012. It was a great weekend with several hundred people coming to talk about what it means to be Open, and, in very Japanese-style, see some cool robots (courtesy of Takahashi Tomotaka-san).