The Madrid Mozilla Technologies Course is a three-months course on Mozilla technologies, organized by the Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla Europe and the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. It started July 2009 and will finish September 2009 and had an on-site part in Madrid last week.

The course is divided in two parts:

  • on-site courses: overview of the Mozilla project (13th to 18th July)
  • team projects (end of September)

If everything goes well, the students will receive a Diploma at the end.

On-site

28 students from Europe (60% from Spain) joined us at the University for 5 intense working days about Mozilla technologies.

teachers

The teachers were:

  • Pascal Chevrel - Mozilla Employee: Web localization, community building
  • Paul Rouget - Mozilla Employee: Technology Evangelist
  • Gregorio Robles - OpenSource teacher at the Juan Carlos University
  • Vivien Nicolas - Mozilla Europe intern: Fennec developer

The program

The main topics were:

  • How do the Mozilla project and the Mozilla community work
  • extensions & XulRunner
  • How to write code for Mozilla (Bugzilla, code workflow)
  • Layout engine (HTML5)
  • Fennec

Details:

  • Monday:
    • Welcome: "How the course is organized"
    • Introduction about the Mozilla project: "What is Mozilla"
  • Tuesday
    • community, overview of the project organization: "How we work together"
    • bugzilla: "How to write code for Mozilla"
    • HTML5: "What is HTML5"
    • Chrome: "Gecko renders web pages, but the Firefox UI, too"
    • XUL & extension template: "Playing with code"
  • Wednesday
    • extension: "How to write an extension from scratch"
    • XUL & JS & CSS: "The Mozilla languages"
  • Thursday
    • Fennec: "What is Fennec, how is it different from Firefox"
    • Gecko: "How does the layout engine work"
    • XulRunner: "How to write a XulRunner application"
  • Friday
    • XPCom: "How to use XPCom"
    • XBL: "What is XBL"

Students

The on-site part was an introduction on Mozilla technologies. We taught them all the things they need in order to be able to work on a Mozilla project.

That means:

  • overview of the technologies
  • how to contribute
  • how to work with the Mozilla community
  • where to find documentation
  • where to find help

Now, they have everything to start a project.

The projects

All the students have to work on a Mozilla-related project. Pascal, Vivien and I will be responsible for different students. Here is a short and unsorted list of some projects students want to work on:

  • Fennec UX
  • Fixing Fennec bugs
  • Contributing to Ubiquity
  • Geolocation-related extensions
  • Firefox l10n for es_BO
  • Implementation of HTML5 elements
  • MDC Documentation
  • BugTrack extension (Bugzilla & Trac)
  • Improving the password manager
  • Todo List manager for Fennec & Firefox through Weave
  • ... and more.

Conclusion of this week

Gregorio was in charge of the organization of the week. He did such a great job. 5 days of courses are exhausting, for both students and teachers. On Wednesday, we took the afternoon off visiting Madrid, playing games and continuing the fun until late at night. A very useful break.

Students

The audience was heterogeneous: some students with very advanced technical skills, some with design skills, ... In order to engage everybody, it was important to:

  • have different topics, some very technical (like the layout engine), some less technical (like the Fennec User Experience, documentation or l10n)
  • give courses to the entire audience, but be available for small groups (thank you so much Vivien for this)

Courses can be boring. Especially long talks (7 hours of courses for a full day). So making students active is important. Let them write code. Mix workshops and courses.

We couldn't know what would the learning rhythm be. During the preparation, don't be too exhaustive. As days went by, we understood who the students are, what they can do and how to work with them. The planned schedule was really different from the actual one.

The students were really excited about Mozilla. They were interactive and receptive. They have so many great ideas about what we can do with Firefox and the Mozilla platform. We've learned a lot from them.

For short: it was efficient and fun.

This is just the beginning: Pascal Vivien and I will be working for the next 2 months with the students, and, hopefully, some awesome projects will emerge.