My last day at Mozilla this summer was last Thursday. I didn’t take a lot of pictures this summer, because, you know, I took a lot last time around. Also, this strategy turned out pretty well because now there are more pictures of me floating around on the tubes! After a longish trans-atlantic flight, I’m back in Amsterdam now resuming work on my Master’s (because hacking on Minix is awesome).
No other internship has been ever so satisfying: over the summer, I worked on a wide range of mini-projects which allowed me to exercise skills ranging from systems to application level programming. I even did a bit of work in the mobile space (turns out programming in limited memory and processing speed is a lot different).
One such project that I’m especially excited about is support for video recording in the browser. Yes, there is even a canvas-based live preview of your webcam feed, in addition to Ogg/Theora encoding support! Combined with the audio recording support I wrote sometime ago, some really cool applications are now possible. Skype-like dialer in the browser? Why not?! (hint anyone is free to send in a patch for multiplexing the audio and video, they’re currently two separate Vorbis and Theora streams hint).
We also had 3 major releases for Weave during the summer: 0.4, 0.5 and 0.6. The last one was especially big, given the completely new, HTML based UI (big kudos to thunder for pulling it off!) and a bunch of other performance fixes. Also, the web UI I wrote last year underwent so many great changes by the wonderful folks at Glaxstar. Now we’re putting up a community design challenge to revamp the UI so we can ship the thing! (hint if you’re good at UI design you should participate in the challenge hint).
There’s so many more cool things I worked on that I’d like to talk about, but perhaps they deserve a separate blog post. Soon… (I keep promising myself that I should blog more often, it never works).
To add the already good times, my two students in the Summer of Code this year passed with flying colors. Yay!