seneca

Mozmill Workshop

Today, the first day of FSOSS, I gave a workshop about Mozmill. The intent of the workshop was to make people aware of the project and to have the attendees get their hands dirty writing a Mozmill test of their own.

The workshop started at 9am and ran for pretty much the full 3 hours. A couple folks stuck around until 12:30 as I offered to answer any questions. It was especially interesting that I was able to fill 3 hours. I really only had an hour's worth of content. This credit completely goes to the passion and interest of the people in attendance.

I was initially a bit worried about the success of the workshop as only a couple people showed up for 9am. However, this began to grow slowly and eventually peaked at an audience of about 20 people.

Ultimately, it was a gleaming success. I think everyone walked away learning something and a couple people walked away wanting to learn more. There seemed to be a lot of interest with how a project like Mozmill could be used on other platforms or projects. Two of the highest profile use cases for this which came up were:

  • Porting Mozmill to other browsers for automated website testing
  • Facilitating Mozmill for other Gecko-based projects which have little or no QA

For those of you who were unable to attend, or those of you who attended and wish to have reference to the material and links used during the workshop, here is a PDF version of my presentation.

At this point, I would like to thank everyone who attended my workshop. A thank you goes out to the Seneca staff like John Selmys, Mark Fernandes, and Chris Tyler for making it possible for me to conduct the workshop. Finally, I'd like to thank Aakash Desai and Henrik Skupin for their help with vetting the content of today's workshop and helping me with the Mozmill learning process over the last few months.

I hope to see some of my "students" on IRC either today or tomorrow for some extracurricular learning. The only thing that would make this better is if my workshop resulted in a contributor to the Mozmill project. We'll just have to see!

All in all, I really enjoyed the experience. I hope to do something similar in the future.

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If you want to contribute more to the Mozmill project or just want to learn more about Mozmill come out to the testday today and tomorrow.
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