Fall 2007 Weekly Schedule

Introduction

The fall is broken into two parts. First, open source and Mozilla specific skills and ideas are taught. Students learn how to deal with the tools, techniques, and practices of the Mozilla project and its community. Second, students are taught about Mozilla’s extensibility model, and how to write Firefox Addons and Extensions.

Part I – Essential Mozilla Development Skills and Concepts

Week 1 (Sept 3) Course introduction

• Course introduction
• Intro to open source
• Intro to Mozilla project
  • Mozilla Project Overview
  • Community, Foundation, Corporation
  • The Mozilla Manifesto
  • Mozilla platform and technologies

• Readings/Resources
  • "Cathedral and Bazaar" by Eric Raymond
  • "Revolution OS" [film] (see also http://www.revolution-os.com/ or QA 76.9.A25 R68 2003)
  • Mike Shaver discusses the Mozilla Manifesto [MP3]

• TODO
  • Create an account on this wiki for yourself
  • Create a personal wiki page on this wiki, and add a link for yourself to the People page
  • Create a blog (wordpress or blogspot or whatever) and create a feed category or tag called "open source"
  • Read the Blog Guidelines for instructions on how to use your blog in the course
  • Add your blog feed and info to the Open Source@Seneca Planet List so that it appears in the OpenSource@Seneca Planet
  • Register for FSOSS 2007 -- Note: volunteers can attend for free! (Watch for instructions for volunteers on the CS homepage).

Week 2 (Sept 10) - Collaborative and Community Development Practices

• Collaborative development using on-line tools
• Intro to Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
• Using Wikis for Collaborative writing
  • Wikipedia and MediaWiki
  • Intro to course wiki
    • Guided Tour
    • "Yes, you can edit it!"
    • Common Editing tasks, History, Reverting changes
    • Watches, Recent Changes
    • Comparing selected versions (cf. diff)
    • http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Help:Editing
  • Wikis used by Mozilla
    • http://developer.mozilla.org (a.k.a., devmo, MDC)
    • http://wiki.mozilla.org (a.k.a., wmo or wiki.m.o)

• Readings/Resources
• Mozilla Community (on-line lecture) by Mozilla's Mike Beltzner
• IRC Lab

• TODO
  • Complete all TODO items from Week 1
  • Blog about your reactions to "Cathedral and Bazaar" and "Revolution OS".
  • Comment in at least one other student's blog with your feedback to what they wrote
  • Create an account on MDC
  • Look at the Project List and Potential Projects pages and pick 3 projects on which you'd like to work--next week, you'll narrow this to just one. List them here along with your name so other students can see and groups can form.