I thought it would be a good idea to briefly highlight a few things about myself and my interest in Mozpad, XULRunner application development, and how I feel I can contribute.

First, where am I coming from? What is my experience to-date with software development? I have over five years experience in multimedia and web development. A while back I did a small amount of work with Macromedia Director, but mainly I have worked with HTML/JavaScript, Flash/Flex, and PHP/MySQL. I started Flash development with Flash 5, and have been working with the Flash Platform all the way through today with ActionScript 3 and Flex 2. For the past year and a half I have been working with XULRunner in addition as well. So I’m relatively new to this whole Mozilla community, so forgive me If I make some missteps or mistakes. (Like mentioning the F (irefox) word in a Mozpad IRC meeting? )

How can I contribute? Being able to provide a viewpoint of someone from the “outside” who is more familiar with JavaScript and ActionScript than C++ or make. Focusing on application development, not the actual platform development of XULRunner itself. Determining what are hurdles for me (and hopefully by extension others in a similar area), and helping to find a way to lower those hurdles, if not help eliminate them.

What do I expect to get in return? To start with, better firsthand experience with the technology and the community to help guide some of the decisions I need to make at my day job, and personal work. I’m especially interested in the general subject of cross-platform desktop applications that use web technologies, and work with the web. I also would like to get some more experience working with an open source community, something which I think seems to be getting more and more important. Last, I do have some selfish interests in making myself and my skills more marketable, and establishing some networking
for future opportunities.

Just a heads up too. I am not Mozilla-exclusive, and will continue working with Flex and Adobe AIR.

So thats my agenda.

We’ll see how this goes. I’ll regularly do some checkpoints and try and evaluate whether it seems I’m contributing anything of value, or making any progress.

To start, some brief Mozpad action item champion posts will follow.