janvier 2011

Here is my yearly report for 2010, this is the second time I do it. This year, I think that my work in the first semester was mostly around 3.6.4 and out of process plugins as well a the work related to the Windows ballot screen, while the second part of the year was more focused on Firefox 4 beta localization as well as Firefox Mobile.

One of the big achievements is probably that we were able to propose a beta cycle for Firefox 4 that also had localized web content for almost all betas, with subtitled videos and promotions. The idea was to help growing the community around beta testing for localized versions of Firefox so as to get feedback from users all around the workd. The end of the year was marked by the redesign of mozilla.com which impacted all of our locales.

I also feel that I did more coding this year than last year and that I improved at it, which is cool :)

I tried to categorize what I worked on last year in digestable sections, but of course this is always a bit artificial.

Release work (in-product pages)

• 2 major releases: Firefox 3.6 (74 locales)  and Firefox Mobile 1.0 (18 locales)
• 26 other releases (minor versions of Firefox and Thunderbird)
• End of life pages for 3.0.19, reusable for future obsolete releases as well
• Major update messaging for 3.0.x users

Community work

• Went to 18 events (5 of them internal Mozilla events) like Fosdem, MozCamp Balkans, Ubuntu parties, Solutions Linux, OpenWorld Forum, Campus Party Valencia, Paris Web... More local events and a bit less travelling abroad this year compared to 2009, I also helped colleagues organize a few events I didn't go to.
• With Mounir Lamouri (in charge of HTML5 Forms in Firefox 4) and Vivien Nicolas (Front-end developer for the mobile version of Firefox), we did a one day hackfest in December in the Paris office called "getting involved in beta testing and mozilla code" with local volunteers that we met at other open source events. We intend to continue this in 2011 and build a new generation of  hackers  around the Mozilla project in addition to our historical community, speciffically a community focused on mozilla code and beta testing.
• Launched with Clarista (from the WoMoz community) bonjourmozilla.fr, a community site presenting every day a mozilla related picture, mostly presenting community members from the French community. This site is Claire's idea and I take  care of the web dev requirements (backend and front end).  The site is steadily growing in popularity with now more than 1000 unique visitors per day.
• Worked with Laurent Jouanneau and Vivien Nicolas on generating weekly reports stats for several of the community sites I am involved in (planet.mozfr.org, www.mozfr.org, womoz.org, bonjourmozilla.fr)
• mozilla.se now longer points to old mozilla suite 1.7 pages, now points to mozilla-europe.org/sv/
• Created a mailing-list on mozilla-europe mailing list system for the Swedish l10n community
• Kept on blogging in French about community building, QA and getting involved in Mozilla
• Worked with Delphine on doing an inventory of Women working for Mozilla, resulted in a blog post

Promotional work

• Worked on opentochoice.org localization with Stas and the marketing team
• Worked on the ballot screen localization (messages provided by Microsoft and a mini website) with Stas
• Gave several Radio and press interviews to the Spanish press (Onda Cero Euskadi, COPE Sevilla, Radio Euskadi, Netmedia Europe, IT Expresso, Cadena Ser)
• regular monthly updates to the promotional snippets on the Firefox home page hosted by Google, improved the workflow with google by setting up a production tag on svn and a testing server on our side.
• launched Student Reps website in 5 languages
• lot of work along the year to promote globally Out of Process plugins since Firefox 3.6.4, Firefox Mobile and Firefox 4 beta in the last quarter.
• Created pages for Firefox Home in 17 locales on the iPhone as well as product descriptions on the android marketplace (we created a special repo for "special projects" like the android market place since they don't fit in our repos,  https://svn.mozilla.org/projects/l10n-misc/trunk/)

Web developement

My work on web localization involves quite a lot of development work, since we have several sites and often build specific sites or new sections on our sites for marketing campaigns, I often have to add new features or find ways to be more flexible to allow faster release cycles:

• Added a simple country-level geoIP support on mozilla europe in addition to our system based on HTTP accept-lang headers (we use it only for a few specific cases)
• Improved my locale detection library, documented a demo with the source.
• added video subtitling system for Firefox 4 beta pages using the <video> tag. This is based on the Timesheets javascript library created by Fabien Cazenave, kudos to him for helping us with it. Also added a double-subtitles view (English + translated) for quick proofreading.
• Added new feature to the class  generating our download boxes on all mozilla sites, we can now easily mark a specific OS/locale couple as unavailable and it will be displayed as 'Not Yet Available' our our downloads listing page. Download boxes will be generated per platform with a fallback to English, so if Persian is not released for Mac for example, Windows and Linux visitors will still get proposed a localized version on our pages. Should give us more freedom to ship locales on partial OSes offerings.
• Improved significantly page load speed on mozilla-europe.org with a specific focus on download pages so as to improve conversion rates
• rewrote a large part of our page building system on both mozilla.com and mozilla-europe.org, documents are now easier to swap and link between the two sites, it is also much easier to use multiple templates and themes. Implemented site-wide theme switching on mozilla-europe.org but still experimental for now.
• Mozilla.com was entirely redesigned in December with a new theme (project Nova), all localized pages ever created were migrated in that new refreshed design
• lots of small code improvements on the sites

Other

• One day conference at the MIAGE conference meeting of Aix, France (annual gathering of all teachers from universities teaching computing for business). Done with Fabien Cazenave who works on a seneca-like project since 2009 at University of Evry.
• Milos Dinic, our Serbian Web localizer, is doing an internship with me on Web l10n QA and helping localizers getting involved since October
• We moved to a new bigger office in Paris and it's already full of people, Europe is growing!
• wrote my first Firefox UI patches (Linux version), one of them was approved \o/
• Created a new Mozilla theme for my blog :)