Brand Thunder Bolts to Add-on-Con

Well this week Mozilla and Microsoft put on their Add-on-Con (add-on conference).  The conference showcases the latest and greatest for the browser extension and addon market.  The agenda covered talks from both a business and tech side…or as I like to refer to it, Suit’s and G33ks. :) Patrick, Mike Kaply, and I all attended this event.

Mozilla Open House:

We were lucky to attend the Mozilla Open House.  I felt pretty excited myself, as it was ‘my’ first time ever visiting California…and the infamous ‘Silicon Valley’.  I went with my friend and colleague Mike Kaply (http://www.kaply.com/weblog/).

The food-spread and drinks Mozilla put out was quite impressive.  They had Mediterranean cuisine, snacks, and plenty of beverages.  I was able to finally put a face to some of the names I’ve either met online, or heard of through the community. These included: Mary Colvig, Rey Bongo, & Mark Finkle.

And of course, a special thanks to Mary and Julie Deroche for helping me arrange the 2nd North West Moz Dev Group.

We were able to discuss our own interests in the mozilla community, as well as hear and understand the possible future of AMO.

I was also able to meet with some old friends from Dance Jam & Flock.

The Conference:

So the actual conference was pretty cool. It was hosted at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.  We were able to establish some good network connections (business connections, stop thinking like a g33k ;) ), and meet some more folks.

We also met Joshua Allen and Matthew David Crowley.  They were both at the conference representing/evangelizing Internet Explorer.  It was enlightening to see how understanding and receptive these guys were towards IE development and its inherit complexity.

However, we both understood that IE still represents a very large market share, and it needs to be supported more by extension developers.

We also heard some more talks regarding AMO and other mozilla technologies.  Mark Finkle was able to talk more about various Mozilla technologies as well.

At the end of the day…

Overall, we all thought this event was quite a good investment.  We met some cool people, made some good business connections, and learned more about the Mozilla/Microsoft World.

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MozCamp: 25 Mozilla Geeks, One day… In Canada eh!

Mozcamp: aka NorthWestMozDev Meets again!

Yep it’s our 2nd meetup for our own North West Moz Dev Group.
We’ll be meeting up in Victoria this time, so it was my turn to arrange the location etc.

One thing really cool about this 2nd meeting, is that it’s going to be completely sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation!  (THANK YOU!)

We generally gather a bunch of different people involved in the Mozilla community in one way or another, and we break out in small scrums and discuss various topics related to Mozilla.  Most of the topics will be development related, but some will be more non-tech, and related to open source in general.  These sessions are geared towards the North West Mozilla community.

To learn more about this meeting, see:

http://groups.google.com/group/northwestmozdev/web/meeting-2008-11-29

Our attendees represent:

• Brand Thunder (well of course!)
• ActiveState
• Mozilla Foundation
• Mozilla Messaging
• Mozilla Corporation
• Flock
• Songbird
• Adevia Software
• Others (don’t have links to their companies)

I’ll be sure to bring the camera and snap some shots.  I’ll post to flickr.

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