It’s been a few days since starting at Mozilla, and I’ve looked through various RFCs to find the related work and analyze the structure for writing my own for the project. I’ve been making good progress and posting my findings on the Mozilla newsgroups such as mozilla.dev.apps.firefox [groups.google.com].

I’m still matching up aliases to names and names to faces (and trying to figure out if I should call people by their IRC aliases or their names), but people have been good in introducing themselves – helping me to make the connections between them and the features they’ve worked on for Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko.

So as a little present to them for the summer, I’ve set up my Nintendo Wii with controllers and games on the first floor of building K. (As a reminder for myself, so that I don’t forget by the end of the summer: 4 controllers + 1 nunchuk, Wii Sports, Trauma Center, Zelda: Twilight Princess, Super Paper Mario, Wii Play, Super Monkey Ball.) And I just happen to conveniently move out of building K to building S this same day, so I won’t get distracted to play some games during the day. 😉

First large-scale Wii ad – Times Square, NY

After a day of traveling from Urbana-Champaign, I’m back home in the Bay Area. One day I have my cap ‘n gown, and the next day I’m at Mozilla Headquarters to begin working on my project for Google’s Summer of Code (SoC) [code.google.com].

I applied for the Link Fingerprints [gerv.net] project with Mozilla back in early April amidst the craziness of thesis writing and full-time/internship interviews. And in the end, I finished the thesis and will continue with my advisor for the Ph.D. program while turning down the other industry position offers to have fun at Mozilla for the summer.

I’m not sure how they picked me out of the 6000+ SoC applicants (was it the big Firefox poster my roommate and I put up a few years back?), but I’m glad that I can meet some Mozilla people that I’ve worked with through the internet. I’ve also had some previous experience with the Mozilla code, but that’s only in bits and pieces with minor changes to Firefox and writing some browser extensions.

Spreading Firefox in Siebel – October 2004

There was some slight confusion early on because Mozilla never had a SoC participant on-site before, and I’m not officially an intern, so I get to be the guinea pig. But soon I got my first Firefox related t-shirt (to add to my stash of Firefox goodies) and was able to settle down and dive into the huge Mozilla codebase with the help of other interns and full-time employees.

Gift from Mozilla for starting SoC

Time to begin coding and writing RFCs; and hopefully I’ll finish the project before the summer is over. 🙂