This is discussed very briefly on my about page, but I figured it could use a
bit of a longer discussion. I generally consider myself to have joined the
Mozilla community in ~2006. I know that I was using Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla
Thunderbird, and Mozilla Sunbird way before that (probably since ~2004, which
is when I built my own computer). But I was just an enthusiast then, running
beta builds, then alpha and eventually nightly builds. (This was way back when
things were more dangerous to run: Minefield and Shredder.)
Anyway, back to 2006…I initially got involved in a more technical fashion by
writing extensions (or maybe it was GreaseMonkey scripts). I don’t really have
anyway to prove this though — I don’t seem to have any of that code. (This was
before widespread distributed version control.) Anyway, let’s just assume this
2006 date is correct.
My first patch was in 2008 to move a function from the Provider for Google
Calendar to the calendar core so that I could use it in Thundershows: a
calendar provider for TV shows . (As far as I know, I’m one of a
handful of people to actually implement a calendar provider.) I found the
calendar project much easier to get involved in than other aspects of Mozilla
since it was so much smaller. (I also toyed with adding an entire new protocol
to Thunderbird, which R Kent James has now done successfully! )
I then came across Instantbird in ~2008 (sometime in the Instantbird 0.1 era).
I thought this was great — Mozilla was finally making an instant messaging
client! Well, I was kind of right…Instantbird is not an official Mozilla
project, but it was exactly what I wanted! The guys (mostly Florian Quèze) in
the #instantbird IRC channel were awesome: kind, patient, helpful, and
welcoming. They were the ones that really introduced me into the Mozilla way of
doing things. I fixed my first bug for Instantbird in 2010 and haven’t stopped
since! I’ve since added IRC support via JavaScript (instead of libpurple) and
am now one of the lead developers. I’ve mentored Google Summer of Code students
twice (2013 and 2014), contribute to Thunderbird and am a peer of the chat
code shared between Instantbird and Thunderbird. (I do also occasionally
contribute to other projects. )