OSCON: Wednesday

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

I spent the day in the Mozilla booth in the Expo hall. I talked to 30 or 40 people, I think--after lunch it was kind of a blur; after dinner it was definitely a blur since the expo hall was serving free beer (or "free beer as in beer" as I said a couple of times which I thought was pretty funny, but went over like a lead balloon). There are a lot of Miro users at OSCON, a handful of people who have never heard of it, one or two people that thought it was still named Democracy Player, and I met Michael Frank who contributed code to Miro at some point before I was with the project!

I also talked with a lot of Mozilla people who came and went over the course of the day. Listening to Ben and Taras talk about static code analysis was really exciting. I talked to Stephen, Peter and Rob from Songbird. We spent some time talking about where Songbird and Miro overlap and what kinds of things we can work together on. The immediate result of this is that I'm going to start hanging out on their IRC channel and probably start looking over their code base. Additionally, Peter is working on a system of identifying media from RSS/Atom data. I'm hoping to help out since this is a problem Miro has, too, for some feeds.

I also go to see Asheesh and Nathan from Creative Commons and we had time to catch up on life and projects.

I went to the BoF session on addons for XUL-based applications. We talked about pain points in the extension-development process. Overall it was really educational both from the standpoint of how to write XUL-based application extensions as well as what kinds of things we need to focus on when we create a Miro plugin system. Songbird has an extension system--we should definitely look at what they've done given that they're very close to us in application space. I also went to the BoF session on the static analysis project Ben and Taras are working on. Less because it's applicable to anything I'm probably ever going to do, but more because it's just mind-bogglingly interesting. They call it Dehydra.

That's it for today. Tomorrow should be interesting, too.

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