My first couple of days at Mozilla Messaging.

A few weeks ago I started a new full-time contract at Mozilla Messaging (a.k.a. the people who brought you Thunderbird). I meant to post this on the Wednesday after I started, but didn’t get around to it until now. So, here you go, my notes from just after I started a new job.

It has been a pretty crazy couple of days, both because I’m not that used to working for a full 8 hours on one thing, and because I’m at the point where there’s still so much to learn that I could spend all my time researching stuff, and never get anything done.

But even with all the stuff for me to learn, I feel like I’ve made a fair bit of progress. There were a few bugs assigned to me, based on a previous patch, as well as a couple of things left to do to get the feature working, so I jumped right in to those. After I had new patches up for review on all of those bugs, I talked with Bryan Clark about what bugs I should tackle next. He and David Ascher both suggested that the new automatic mail server config dialog could use a bit of love.

This morning, I did some investigation on group email addresses for one of the bugs I’m working on, and took a look at how the autoconfig dialog was put together so that I wouldn’t sound like I was completely lost in the meeting. (XUL, CSS, and Javascript. No surprises there. :) Then, after the Status Meeting, Bryan and I chatted a bit about what the various bugs were that he had assigned to me, and what sort of things I might look into to try and fix them. A few hours later, I had a fix for one of them, and applied a similar fix to another. (As an aside, you’ve got to love the 3 hour investigation which ends up being a 9-character change. At least while investigating the bug, I learned a lot about hboxes, vboxes, flexes, grids, and descriptions, which will hopefully come in handy in future bugs. :) Finally, I ended the day by reading a review of a patch I submitted on Monday morning, making some tweaks to my code, and resubmitting it.

The final thing that amazes me is that each day is taking up pretty much a full page of my log book, which is way more than usual. Most of the days last month got a line or two. Really full days would maybe get half a page. But yesterday and today were a solid page, chock full of information, each. I wonder how long this trend will continue. I hope it keeps on going like this for a long time.