Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

Monday 4 August 2008

My Summit

The best part of the summit for me was spending six hours on Whistler Mountain getting sunburned and scared out of my wits by the chairlift to the peak. But the Mozilla stuff was good too. I especially enjoyed meeting a lot of people I'd never been face-to-face with. In fact, I got a chance to talk to everyone on my "must meet" list except for two who didn't make it to the summit, and Michael Monreal. I'll probably embarrass myself by forgetting face-name mappings for most of them, but that's just the way my brain is.

The sessions were mostly pretty good. A little more structure and planning ahead might have helped, but I'm not sure. I wish we'd had a chance for a more systematic overview of development directions; the content/JS/layout/gfx meetings weren't quite enough because there are efforts that don't fit into those boxes and they fell through the cracks. Possibly we spent too much time talking about what we want to do and not enough time assigning people to work on it; however, as an event for volunteer contributors, maybe the summit is less appropriate for that than a Mozilla employee event.

I like the directions our GC and JS compilation work are going.

Staying up till 3am on Tuesday night in Moz Cafe getting video landed was too much fun.

I need to work on being less self-centered, I was thinking far too much about impressing people.

I need to be disciplined and start working on Compositor as soon as possible. We should keep running with short release cycles, but that means some of us are going to have to forgo working on features for the next cycle.

Let's have the next summit in Europe. There were so many Europeans present it probably wouldn't cost much more.



Comments

Jeff Schiller
Remind me again - so the Compositor something that goes behind/as part of the SMIL implementation?
RyanVM
Jeff - http://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:Compositor
Håkan Waara
Hi roc, it was nice meeting you, although it was very briefly! It was also great to sit in at the "Code cleanup" meeting, just to get a feel for how these kind of discussions go when face-to-face.
So one thing I might've missed (maybe you had a talk about this?) and am wondering about is how "widget removal" is going. Is this the same as Compositor? A status update there would be interesting.
/Håkan
Martijn
How did you get sunburned? It was raining for almost the whole week!