Friday and Saturday, I and a few others were at the BlogHer ’10 conference in New York to promote Firefox Add-ons to more than a thousand bloggers in attendance. I had a great time and think our presence there was very effective.
This is the second event I’ve been to where we’ve focused on getting the word out about add-ons to consumers, the first being last year’s Renegade Craft Fair in San Francisco. Almost all of my time is spent talking with developers and other technical people, so getting the chance to talk to real people who use Firefox and add-ons is fun and educational. I get to learn about things that aren’t obvious to normal users and the problems they encounter.
I spent both days of the conference in our hospitality suite answering questions, telling people about Firefox, add-ons, and Personas, promoting the new BlogHer Toolbar, and showing off Firefox 4 features. Our suite was packed with bloggers all day both days; I’d estimate we saw at least 600 people come through, most of whom we had personal conversations with.
om nom nom »
This week I presented a talk called Making Add-ons People Will Love at the Mozilla Add-ons Workshop in London. The event went really well thanks to engaged attendees and excellent organization by William and Julie.
Nick and Julie suggested the topic for my talk a couple months ago and I knew I’d have fun working on it, as it’s really important to me that the add-ons people make are enjoyable. A single bad experience with an add-on can turn someone off to the idea of customizing their browser for a long time, but a great experience with an add-on can have the opposite effect.
more, please! »
Having lived in Louisiana my whole life, I never got a chance to see real snow until this summer at the Firefox Summit in Canada. That’s why it was so unexpected for my routine 6-7 hour trip from Baton Rouge to San Jose to turn into a 20 hour ordeal because of snow delays in Houston.
I can’t bear to type out all of the details, but I was supposed to arrive in San Jose at 8:12pm on Wednesday and instead arrived in San Francisco at 6:30am on Thursday, after which I immediately had to attend Add-on-Con without sleeping.
A breakdown of the trip:
- Hours waiting in airport: 6.5
- Hours waiting in airplane on ground: 6.5
- Hours actually flying: 4.75
- Hours of sleep on the plane: 2
And to top it off, the same snow that made my trip miserable on Wednesday brought fun and joy to everyone back home in Baton Rouge.
This week I’m in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada for the Mozilla Firefox Summit – a gathering of 300-400 of the contributors to Firefox 3. Whistler is outside of Vancouver and the trip is about 3 hours on the Sea to Sky Highway, a winding mountain road with beautiful sites and lots of construction in preparation for the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver and Whistler.
Last night around 11:00pm there was a rockslide on this road that left boulders the size of houses that will have to be cleared by dynamite and will take days. The only other way out of Whistler, besides helicopter and floatplane, is a 6-8 hour trip the other way around the mountain. I leave at 11pm Friday night, so not sure what the plan is for getting 400 people out yet.
Having lots of fun and will post a more detailed update on that later.
Friday, Mark Finkle and I participated in the Carolina Open Source Initiative’s Software Freedom Day celebration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was able to change flights late Wednesday night to avoid some potential problems getting there.
The event had a lot of traffic of people coming in and out throughout the day (especially when there was free pizza). The event leaders did a great job of promoting the event in the newspaper, signs, and word of mouth. Everyone we met seemed to already know about and love Firefox, but our main purpose in being there was getting more people involved in the community.
Mark and I were treated to a stormy surprise when leaving UNC and heading to the airport that resulted in me having wet pets for several hours and owning a UNC umbrella that I will never be able to use again (at least not in Baton Rouge… or Louisiana).
