Rob Sayre's Mozilla Blog

Monday: Took a JFK-YVR flight on Air Canada. On the same plane as mrbkap, but we didn’t see each other until we arrived in Vancouver. We hit up Tim Hortons while we waited for our minibus to fill up. This took a while. I’m glad that I got to listen to Bell Biv Devoe and Rob Base with Arun and Blake and Sheppy on the bus radio. I may have enjoyed it more than they did. We eventually arrived in Whistler. Scheduled JS things on the wiki. Went to the opening reception. Sleep.

Tuesday: Started out with opening remarks from Lilly and Mitchell. If we take this mercurial thing to heart, next time we can start the summit with Welcome To The Jungle. Or maybe we should just rename the Getting Started guide. Pretty much in awe of all the localizers in the room. Had lunch with Peter Van der Beken and some other folks. Then came Andreas Gal’s session on JS tracing, and Tracing VMs in general. They invented that stuff down at UC Irvine, and it’s been great to have him at Mozilla putting the fire into SpiderMonkey. Next up was the 1.9.1 update session with Damon Sicore, which should have been more brutal, but it turns out people are getting stuff done. I hung out in the hallway some, got my butt kicked at Ping Pong, and wandered into Arun’s standards session. Roc and David see things differently than I do. It’s like I’m on one side of the see-saw, they’re both on the other, and I’m going to fly off. Went to Mike Beltzner’s Firefox 3 Post-Mortem session, which I might rename to Turned Out Good But Wow That Took Too Long Let Us Not Do That Again. For dinner, we went to restaurant called Araxi. I ended up next to Blizzard, Lilly, Damon, and Romaxa. Once again, my colleagues reminded me how much more they know about Rush than I do, and also that they are in better shape than I am. Bed.

Wednesday: You may have heard about this Schrep guy’s defection. Yes, we’ll miss him. So, the day started with Mike Shaver’s talk on the state of engineering. I am really happy for Shaver. Later on, I started to feel a bit sick, like achy and feverish. But I think it was due to a bacterium or virus, and unrelated to Shaver’s new title. I had to step out for a sec, and I got to watch Window and Dveditz evaluate a bogovuln press release. I decided to sit in on some Lightning Talks, so I caught John Slater and Tara Shahian’s talk on the Firefox logo style guide. I even made a comment. Next came Blake Kaplan’s talk on XPConnect wrappers, which was great, but I was hoping to catch some more non-engineering stuff. Benjamin Smedberg’s XPCOMGC talk was worth it for Damon’s facial expressions alone. Went back up to my room, dropped some dayquil, and then played tedious testing nerd in Josh Aas’s Gecko Mac session. Then came Andreas Gal’s TraceMonkey walkthrough, but I was a little too hopped up on medicine to get a lot out of it. I think other people did better. We got to find out about the rockslide for a minute, and then I came back to Johnny Stenback’s Content Planning session. Once again, I ended up disagreeing with Roc about standards stuff. That’s OK. I skipped dinner and ordered room service.

Thursday: Decided to book a float plane seat, because I was too sick to deal with the long bus ride. This day was all breakout sessions, but there wasn’t a lot of electrical power in the hotel, because a bear hired by Microsoft started a rockslide that knocked out a transformer. I spent the morning in one-on-one discussions, and dropped by Beltzner’s UI Design Process session to politely rephrase the flames of yesteryear. I could feel Beltzner’s heart warm, and our relationship began to heal. I also saw Mark Finkle sitting under a light in a dark room, surrounded by people carrying out some sort of interrogation. I turned in a half-hearted appearance at lunch, because I didn’t feel too great. I barely remember it. Then it was time for the D-Trace talk I got to give with Alfred Peng from Sun Microsytems China. It went pretty well for a session on a detail-oriented technology with no computers available. I’ve never drawn a stack trace visualization on butcher paper before. More on D-Trace later. I had some more meetings, and wandered into Roc’s code cleanup session. I want to get nasty on our whitespace policy, by standardizing my personal preferences across the entire tree. Boris Zbarsky told me some stuff in the tree is simple, but I don’t believe him. It may well be simple for him, though. We need to file bugs on turning off CSS Errors in stdout for debug builds. Napped, then I ran the JS Planning meeting. I have a lot of bugs to file, and we have smart people working for us. Then I napped again, and it was time for the final dinner at the summit of Whistler. I rode the gondola with Fantasai, Mitchell Baker, John O’Duinn, and Kai Engert. The restaurant was great, Dan Portillo having done yet another excellent job, and I sat with Dan Mosedale, Mike Connor, Sam Sidler, Mic Berman, Myk Melez, and I can’t remember much more. Felt a little loopy. After dinner, I talked with Andreas Gal and David Anderson some, listened to a speech by Schrep, and watched coworkers dance. The band was pretty good, but they kept making moderately offensive sexual jokes. Still better than that time we went to City Beach for team building, though. On the upside, they rickrolled us. Beltzner and I hugged. After that, I knew that our relationship was going to be OK. I rode the gondola down and went out with people in the Whistler village. I was supposed to call Brad Lassey about the last bar we went to, but we took forever to find it, and then we left after like 5 minutes. You didn’t miss much, Brad.

Friday: Went to the float plane, but the float plane never came. So I ended up on a boat with Alexander Sack and a bunch of Canadian people. Now I’m in Vancouver and I’ll be out of here soon.

The worst part about the summit had nothing to do with Canada’s attempts to get me. There were some people I definitely wanted to meet, but I just didn’t get a chance with all of the other stuff going on.