One of the awesomest new features in the revamped Rypple system is the ability for anyone to send kudos to anyone else. Kudos are a very simple, fun way to thank people for being amazing, doing a great job, going above and beyond the call of duty, etc.

It might sound sort of silly or contrived, but it turns out that a simple note of appreciation really can have a huge impact. Since I’ve started using Rypple to send out kudos, I’ve received a few notes from folks telling me that I’ve basically made their day. It’s a little thing, and doesn’t really take more than a couple of minutes out of your day, but it can really make a difference. We don’t often get genuine, heartfelt, positive feedback, so it’s really incredibly energizing when we do.

Everyone with a Rypple account (which is anyone, since everyone can sign up) can log in and send kudos to anyone with an email address. It’s totally wide open and anyone can do it — so if you have a few minutes sometime today, think of someone who’s done something awesome, head over to Rypple, and send them a kudos. The more you do it, the more fun it becomes.

Last week, I asked for suggestions about possible screencast/video introductions we should produce to help people learn about Mozilla, our tools, our methods, and how to get involved with the project. It was pointed out (and rightfully so) that we already have quite a few resources along these lines, they’re just scattered and hard to find.

So, in addition to getting new content produced to help people, I’m going to start collecting existing materials together and figuring out how to make those easier to find and use.

I’ve created a new page on wiki.mo called Learning Mozilla, listing on it some of the useful things I already know about. Now I need your help: if you know of other resources that would be useful for someone who wants to learn more about Mozilla, please take a few moments to add it to the page or leave a note (with a URL) in the comments here.

Anything and everything is great — I’ll dig for more content as I can, and I’ll take it upon myself keep the page cleaned up and organized, so don’t worry too much about where to list things or how to format stuff. Just add the links and we’ll sort out the rest as we go.

Feedback is an interesting thing. Critical feedback, while incredibly valuable and vital to improving and learning, can also sort of gut you. And working out in the open — in this crazy transparent fishbowl that is the Mozilla project — critical feedback can often come fast and furious. It’s great, of course, and absolutely fundamental to how we do things, but it does require a thick skin, and it can be profoundly exhausting at times.

On the other hand, positive feedback is absolutely energizing. Those moments where someone goes out of their way to say “thanks” or “awesome job” or “you rock” really does make it all worthwhile. Feeling appreciated — knowing that someone genuinely cares about and values the work you do — can often make the difference between something being a burden or a joy. For me, receiving positive feedback is the most powerful motivator out there — more so than money, fame, or anything else.

Rypple (which we use at Mozilla) recently built a new feedback mechanism into their service called “kudos” that you can use to send someone a quick “thanks”, “you’re awesome”, or “you rock” sort of message. The message you send is visible to everyone in the organization, so serves as a public note of appreciation. Other people can comment on the kudos as well, so there’s a way to quickly add a “+1″ or otherwise pile on the love. You can read more about the Rypple kudos feature (and an ongoing contest they’ve launched to promote it) over at WorkplaceHero.com.

The Rypple kudos system really is fantastic. We don’t often go out of our way to publicly acknowledge the awesome things our coworkers do, but Rypple has given us a fun, fast, simple, lightweight, and unintimidating way to do so. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you should — take a minute to send a kudos and make someone’s day :)

Johnathan Nightingale and Rob Campbell recently put together fantastically useful screencast introductions to Bugzilla (Johnath) and Firebug (Rob). The response to these has been phenomenal, so I’ve been gathering suggestions for other screencasts we could put together to help people learn about our tools, code, culture, community, and so on.

So far, people have suggested the following:

• Lifecycle of a Bug – introduction to the stages involved in fixing a bug from start to end
• Building Firefox – introduction to getting the Firefox source code and compiling it, while going over the basics of hg
• Test Frameworks – introduction to the different test frameworks we use, and how to write a basic test in each of them
• Drinking from the Firehose – how to stay on top of the news, difference between “stream of development and ideas” and “announcments”, how to understand things like what the next milestone is
• Bugzilla for Developers: Getting your patch into the product – how to nom for review; how to determine if you need to nom for approval, blocking, etc.; writing tests; checkin wrangling; watching the tree.
• Gaining Traction – how to publish that wicked cool idea you have; how to rally people around it to see if there’s interest; moving from idea to implementation
• How to navigate the code using MXR/DXR
• How to use and contribute to MDC
• Writing your first automated test
• How to do your own screencasts/videos
• Mozilla Developer Tools & Workflow
• How to optimize edit/compile/test loops
• Presentation tips & tricks

What other screencasts or video introductions do you think would be useful for learning Mozilla and getting involved with the project and community?

Just jumping on the adblocking yea/nay blogging train: I don’t block ads. I could but I don’t bother. Most of the time they don’t bother me unless I’m trying to read a long article, at which point I use Readability, which is infinitely better than an adblocker for that situation.

Before Readability

After Readability

Note: Readability runs fine on Minefield if you use Nightly Tester Tools to force-install. There’s also a bookmarklet version if you don’t want to install an add-on.

One of the most important parts of my week is my one-on-one (1:1) meeting with Dan, my manager. These meetings generally only last around half an hour, and it’s time extraordinarily well spent. In that half hour we catch up, discuss projects and status, review priorities, troubleshoot blockers, checkpoint against our quarterly goals, and use the time to give each other feedback. It might sound like a pretty dense 30 minutes, and that’s because it is. Our 1:1 meeting is a tightly packed conversation that establishes and reinforces my direction, priorities, and motivation. As a remotie*, I would be lost without it.

The actual meeting is only part of the story, however — while the meeting only lasts for half an hour, I do some prep work the day before. This prep work mostly involves reviewing my projects and goals, writing out what I want to talk about, and sending those notes to Dan so he can review them before we meet. I find this process extremely useful.

Over the months I’ve established a more-or-less standard format for my 1:1 prep notes that includes five fairly straightforward sections:

• Accomplishments & status
• Blocked/Waiting on
• To do over the next week
• Areas to develop
• Quarterly goal tracking

Accomplishments & status: This is where I do a quick rundown of my current projects, with one or two sentences covering what I’ve managed to get done in the last week and what the current status looks like.

Blocked/Waiting on: This is where I list the projects I’m stuck on and why, or other things that are blocking progress — either waiting on resources, people, feedback, or whatever else. Having this section is absolutely vital — if I’m blocked on something, we can usually talk it through so I get unstuck, or Dan can figure out what he can do to help.

To do over the next week: By writing out a short list of specific things I plan to work on over the next week, Dan and I can make sure that I’m working on the right things and am prioritizing things properly. This doesn’t take a lot of time to go over, and since we checkpoint on this every week there usually aren’t any changes, but sometimes my task list gets rejigged slightly if other things have come up elsewhere in the organization.

Areas to develop: Usually this is a one or two sentence “big picture” sort of thing. Dan and I talk about longer-term career development once every month or two, discussing what I need to do or develop in order to progress, become more effective, and have more impact. In this part of my prep notes I take a few minutes to review how I think I’m doing in relation to what we discussed and jot down what I believe I need to focus on improving the most.

This section gives Dan a chance to do some career development coaching. While we normally deal with this part of the meeting in a matter of minutes, it’s profoundly useful — this is an incredibly quick and easy way for me to get ongoing lightweight feedback from Dan on a regular basis.

Quarterly goal tracking: We establish a set of goals each quarter, and every week Dan and I review progress on the ones I own and am driving. I find this useful because regularly checkpointing against my goals helps me make sure I’m focusing on the right things. By reviewing these weekly, we can also make ongoing course corrections where needed. Life rarely happens exactly according to plan, and priorities and projects can shift. It’s far better to review and adjust things weekly than to do a single review late in the quarter just to realize that things got off track (at which point the panic sets in).

Video chat: Another thing I should mention is that Dan and I have our meetings using Skype video. We used to just use the phone, but Dan talked me into using video chat and it’s really much, much better. As a remotie, being able to get “face time” like this is way more important than I thought — not only is the communication much higher bandwidth, there’s a psychological impact I can’t really explain. I just feel more connected to the rest of the company, which is both surprising and fantastic. If you’re remote, you should really try using video chat for your 1:1 meetings…I can almost guarantee that it’s more useful than you expect.

And that’s about it. Having developed the habit of prepping for my 1:1 meetings this way, it only takes me about 15-20 minutes to write up my notes to send to Dan, and it makes our meetings incredibly focused and useful. If you’re not sure you’re getting the most out of your 1:1s, you might try something like this — a half hour of prep work on your part for a half hour meeting can have a huge impact.

Do you have particularly awesome 1:1 meetings? What makes them awesome? What tips would you give to people who would like their meetings to be more useful?

• remotie: noun, a person who works in a different geographic location than his/her manager.

Matt Gertner posted some of his Thoughts about Planet Mozilla earlier today, and I agree completely that auto-filtered and individually-subscribable Planet topic channels would be awesome.

This is something the Planet team was discussing prior to the holidays, but we hadn’t picked it up again until prompted by Matt’s post. It turns out that we should be able to rig the existing Planet software to do more or less what Matt suggests, we’re just not currently sure how well the software will deal with a large number of channels.

I figure we may as well start by defining the ideal and work backwards from it if we run into technical limitations. I’ve expanded upon Matt’s proposed category list, and started defining a set of keywords and keyphrases that the Planet software would use to filter posts into each category.

I’ve posted that list on the Mozilla wiki, and would like your feedback and help. What categories are missing? Which could be safely consolidated? What other keywords should we filter on for each? Etc. You can edit that page directly if you like, or leave a comment on this post. Thanks!

Planet Mozilla is a long-standing and incredibly important source for news and information about the Mozilla Project and community. For years, Planet has operated under a slowly evolving set of unwritten-but-generally-understood policies. In an effort to avoid potential misunderstandings and issues, however, The Planet Mozilla team has finally taken the time to write up and post these policies to the Mozilla Wiki:

Planet Mozilla policies

The policies are minimal and relatively straightforward, but if you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment here or to email any/all of the Planet Mozilla team (listed on the wiki page).

I’m going to be closing the Planet Mozilla Survey this afternoon, so if you haven’t had a chance to respond to it yet, please do so ASAP! You can find the survey here:

Planet Mozilla survey.

Thanks!

We’re still hoping for a few more responses on the Planet Mozilla Survey, linked below. The survey will be closing on Friday afternoon, so please take a few minutes to give us your thoughts before then. We’ve had a lot of fantastic input so far, but would like to make sure everyone who wants to respond has an opportunity to do so. Thanks!

The Planet Mozilla team would like your help. Planet Mozilla is a central and vital part of the Mozilla Community, but we think it could be better. We’re looking for your input on what you think Planet is (or should be) for, how well it’s fulfilling that purpose, and how it could be improved or augmented to better serve our community.

Please take a few minutes of your time to answer our three short questions about Planet Mozilla. We really want as much feedback as possible, so you can also leave comments on this blog post if you have other questions, comments or insights about Planet or other Planet-related things. Thanks!

Planet Mozilla survey.