Skip to main content

All Hands 2016: MozLondon, A recount

#MozLondon : Mozilla All Hands 2016

I recently had the opportunity to take part in Mozilla All Hands 2016 (a.k.a #MozLondon). Mozilla All hands. All Hands are bi-yearly events of Mozilla where all the paid staff from different teams around the globe meet with each other along with a handful of invited volunteers to disscuss about future projects and get some work done!
This year it was in London and just immediately before Brexit (I actually didn't even know about it before I went there). It was a work week, so essentially the event spanned from Monday to Friday. I arrived at LHR on Monday morning, and then there was the awesome Heathrow Express which took me to Paddington, just a 7 mins walk away from Hilton Metropole where I was staying with a bunch of other people. The event started with all of us having an evening orientation familiarizing us with rules and regulations along with Code of Conduct(that turned out to be really important later on...). 
Tuesday started with a Planery. Which you can see if you are logged in. Talking about planery, our new Dr. Who


And in short this is what a All Hands look like



We also had a short video about what our achievements were. Which you can see the here in it's full glory or just a snippet


The real fun started from next day. As you could see from the schedule it was pretty packed up. And my invitation was from Mozilla Connected Devices - WebVR team. So we all had our plates full. I started with attending a design thinking process and straight took a dive into a connected devices hackathon.

But before we get into it, we had a lovely meet with our Mozilla TechSpeakers team and ended up taking a lunch selfie!


Now diving back to Connected Devices and WebVR. Where people were busy making Steampunk hats and virtual computers...



I though was working on something much less...flashy. But I managed to finish up mixing javascript face detection with WebVR and voile! You could now interact with WebVR objects floating in the sky with your hands. Interactive Augmented Reality a-la-carte. I was so happy that I literally bounced a couple of times. If you want a demo head over here!

Do note, you will need Firefox Nightly installed in an android device to actually play with it. Theoretically it should work fine in Chrome too but Chrome now does not allow getUserMedia (the api I am using to access camera) to work from no https domain. And my test server is....http.

Also if you want to poke around. Head over to my github repo (index3 is your friend).

With that in hand we headed over to our end SteamPunk party!
Oh and before that a Connected Devices selfie...


The steam punk arty was awesome and I got to hangout with some of my very dear friends whom i don't get to meet very often.

Of Course you need Captain Rogers to rock a party
Of Course we have Rosana!

Nothing would have worked out properly without Havi!

the best team ever! 
And of course

Don't mess with us!
And did I forget

Thats Thunderbird and Foxylady in our hand if you are wondering...

And how can it end without our Foxy!
Overall it was a great experience. And I am glad I got some work done. even though it's very half baked, it works!

I enjoyed every bit of the week. It is amazing to see how much you can accomplish just by sitting in the same table with others and working compared to working remotely and clarifying doubts over irc/email.

Meet the new Dr.

And nothing ends when you don't come out of a TARDIS!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

FirefoxOS, A keyboard and prediction: Story of my first contribution

Returning to my cubical holding a hot cup of coffee and with a head loaded with frustration and panic over a system codebase that I managed to break with no sufficient time to fix it before the next morning.  This was at IBM, New York where I was interning and working on the TJ Watson project. I returned back to my desk, turned on my dual monitors, started reading some blogs and engaging on Mozilla IRC (a new found and pretty short lived hobby). Just a few days before that, FirefoxOS was launched in India in the form of an Intex phone with a $35 price tag. It was making waves all around, because of its hefty price and poor performance . The OS struggle was showing up in the super low cost hardware. I was personally furious about some of the shortcomings, primarily the keyboard which at that time didn’t support prediction in any language other than English and also did not learn new words. Coincidentally, I came upon Dietrich Ayala in the FirefoxOS IRC channel, who at

April Fool and Google Part 2: A Round Up of ALL of Google’s April Fools Jokes

Ok....this post I think will contain all of the pranks I could find  for today. After my last post here http://rkrants.blogspot.com/2012/04/april-fool-and-google-my-favorite.html Last Time I reported Only a handful of the pranks.. Understandable, as it was only the morning. After that I stumbled upon more of them Which I am gonna round up here. Now staring with the list. The very first one is obviously our favourite Google Maps Quest The above is their official video. In a post in Google Plus they say about it as follows  Today  + Google Maps  announced Google Maps 8-bit for NES. With #8bitmaps , you can do everything you'd normally do in Maps—search for famous landmarks and sites around the world, get directions and even use Street View. Just in time for April Fool's Day, Google has introduced Google Maps Quest, a retro 8-bit version of its mapping tool that is... totally awesome. In a characteristically whimsical video, available above, Google emplo

Curious case of Cisco AnyConnect and WSL2

One thing Covid has taught me is the importance of VPN. Also one other thing COVID has taught me while I work from home  is that your Windows Machine can be brilliant  as long as you have WSL2 configured in it. So imagine my dismay when I realized I cannot access my University resources while being inside the University provided VPN client. Both of the institutions I have affiliation with, requires me to use VPN software which messes up WSL2 configuration (which of course I realized at 1:30 AM). Don't get me wrong, I have faced this multiple times last two years (when I was stuck in India), and mostly I have been lazy and bypassed the actual problem by side-stepping with my not-so-noble  alternatives, which mostly include one of the following: Connect to a physical machine exposed to the internet and do an ssh tunnel from there (not so reliable since this is my actual box sitting at lab desk, also not secure enough) Create a poor man's socks proxy in that same box to have my ow