I have an hour free this morning, so wanted to quickly write up my thoughts on Mozfest before my memory fades too much. This will be a rough, but f*** it, ship it as they say at Mozfest.
I bought a Mozfest ticket in July with next to no expectations and just a little hope that meeting some new people might trigger some new ideas. It’s fair to say that this was a massive under-prediction on my part.
A couple of months later, with about a month to go until Mozfest, my boss (@ade) mentioned some sessions that might be interesting for WWF and my work in fundraising. A couple of introductory emails and a Skype call later and I’d put my name down for a yet-to-be-confirmed session called ‘Pass the App’.
We were going to use a new tool called Appmaker to build a donation app in a three hour session. At this point in time Appmaker didn’t do a lot. It was pre the version that would be called pre-alpha. I looked at Appmaker for a few minutes and worried I’d just agreed to waste the first quarter of Mozfest.
I had some time off and a couple of weeks went by. With two weeks to go, I wanted to get setup with Appmaker in a dev environment before the day so I didn’t waste people’s time with silly questions about configuration when we could be building things. Work was a bit crazier than usual and another week went by before I finally sat down to look at some code.
It was quite astounding how much Appmaker had evolved in those few weeks. The team working on this are incredible. From thinking the morning would be wasted, it now looked like a tool with enough components that with a little imagination you could hook up all sorts of awesome apps. My goal was to add some kind of payment to that.
The components in Appmaker are built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript and looking at a few examples I was happy I could build something by copying and adapting the work that’s already been done. But getting a development environment setup to work with these technologies I know pretty well required diving into a number of technologies that were completely new to me.
The deadline and motivation drove me through some of the initial hurdles and learning, and jumping into the IRC room for Appmaker I received great help and support from the team. I was worried about hassling them for their time while they were busy getting ready for Mozfest, but I was welcomed very warmly. It was a really great experience working with new people.
I guess the lesson here is: If you try and make something new, you cannot help but learn something new. And also that deadlines are amazing, as we’ve discussed before.
There were ten tracks at Mozfest, and at any given time I wanted to be in about eight of them. After the Saturday morning Pass the App session I was planning to alternate between the Open Data and Privacy tracks for lots of interesting things, but it didn’t work out that way. I didn’t actually make it to any other sessions. I got hooked into (and hooked on) making things in our scramble to build a working Pass the App demo, which we did. Here’s a link to the write up. I won’t re-tell that story. I got to work with kind and intelligent people making something valuable and learning a tonne. You can’t ask for more than that from any conference-esque event.
My hour of free time is up now, so I’m going to ship this despite the vast amount of things I was grateful for and wanted to talk about.
And I’ll say a quick hi to the people from the pass the app session,
- @secretrobotron
- @spirals
- @muffinresearch
- @wupsbr
- @poshaughnessy
- @markuskobler
- @valiant
- @taliesan
- @james_r_murdock
And the many other lovely people I got to meet for the first time.