A Product Journal: As A Building Block
I’m blogging about the development of a new product in Mozilla, look here for my other posts in this series I teeter between thinking big about PageShot and thinking small. The benefit of thinking...
View ArticleA Product Journal: As We May Discuss
I’m blogging about the development of a new product in Mozilla, look here for my other posts in this series In a presentation The Revolution Will Be Annotated, Dan Whaley begins with a very...
View ArticleA Product Journal: Community Participation
I’m blogging about the development of a new product in Mozilla, look here for my other posts in this series Generally at Mozilla we want to engage and activate our community to further what we do....
View ArticleA Product Journal: Objects
I’m blogging about the development of a new product in Mozilla, look here for my other posts in this series I’ve been reading the Early History Of Smalltalk, notes by Alan Kay, and this small note...
View ArticleConway’s Corollary
Conway’s Law states: organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations I’ve always read this as an...
View ArticleDon’t Invest More Emotion Than You Are Willing To Sacrifice
At some point in a podcast series by Seth Godin he advises that you never give your house for collateral on a loan for your business. Of course you don’t want to lose your house, but that wasn’t his...
View ArticleA Product Journal: CSS Object Model
I’m blogging about the development of a new product in Mozilla, look here for my other posts in this series And now for something entirely technical! We’ve had a contributor from Outernet exploring...
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A Product Journal: Data Up and Data Down
I’m blogging about the development of a new product in Mozilla, look here for my other posts in this series We’re in the process of reviewing the KPI (Key Performance Indicators) for Firefox Hello...
View ArticleTo All The Mothers
When we were expecting our first, when we couldn’t actually do anything but wait while Emily’s body did all the parenting that could be done, when we spent a lot of time on idle research, I looked up...
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A Product Journal: Oops We Made A Scraper
I’m blogging about the development of a new product in Mozilla, look here for my other posts in this series A while back we got our first contributor to PageShot, who contributed a feature he wanted...
View ArticleImproving the web with small, composable tools
Firefox Screenshots is the first Test Pilot experiment to graduate into Firefox, and it’s been surprisingly successful. You won’t see many people talking about it: it does what you expect, and it...
View ArticleMy Lunch With A White Supremacist
About ten years ago I got a call out of the blue from Soren. I’d always published my phone number on my website, and it’s only been used a handful of times. Hardly anyone wants to actually call another...
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Thoughts on the Firefox Email Tabs experiment
We recently released Email Tabs in Firefox Test Pilot. This was a project I championed, and I wanted to offer some context on it. Email Tabs is a browser add-on that makes it easier to compose an email...
View ArticleViewing Python execution with source code rewriting
A while back I experimented with a Jupyter Notebook-like interface. Ultimately I hit some roadblocks and knew that I couldn’t keep working on it indefinitely, as I had no personal purpose for the...
View ArticleWe Need Open Hosting Platforms
In Bringing people back to the open web Chris states: But most users don’t care about the principles or implementation of an open web, at least not in those terms. Most people don’t see themselves as...
View ArticleThe Over-engaged Knowledge Worker
I recently listened to a discussion of knowledge work in the browser. Along the way people imagined idealized workflows and the tools that could enable them. This result felt familiar from concept...
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The Firefox Experiments I Would Have Liked To Try
I have been part of the Firefox Test Pilot team for several years. I had a long list of things I wanted to build. Some I didn’t personally want to build, but I thought they were interesting ideas. I...
View ArticleOpen Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed To Make Money
Or: The Best Way To Do Something Is To At Least Try We all know the story: you can’t make money on open source. Is it really true? I’m thinking about this now because Mozilla would like to diversify...
View Article“Users want control” is a shoulder shrug
Making the claim “users want control” is the same as saying you don’t know what users want, you don’t know what is good, and you don’t know what their goals are. I first started thinking about this...
View ArticleKling’s Axes of Politics, and the Technocrats
In Arnold Kling’s The Three Languages Of Politics he argues that we don’t all exist along some set of objective political axes, left and right, or even the classic two-dimensional spectrum (or even...
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