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Mozilla, Open Source

This is my first day at Mozilla

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I’m now a Senior Network Engineer at Mozilla. Today is my first day as an employee. Here’s my summary of how I got here and how the process has been so far, from my perspective.

Mozilla is an American company

OK, that’s not news to anyone and neither is it to me. I’m starting off with this because I’m not American. I’m a Swede, and I live in Sweden. When working and communicating with my fellow people at the mothership I of course get the slight cultural differences that are American versus Swedish. It’s not a problem because I’ve gotten quite used to working with Americans at work over the years but going through an entire recruiting and starting-a-new-job process entirely in English with Americans is new to me.

Interviewing

So when I was opening up to my social network to start looking for new assignments since I decided to end my previous one, I was approached by a friend who works for Mozilla. Of course I was interested to work for Mozilla!

So I had a Skype interview with a recruiter first, and then with two engineers. During evenings of course since Mozilla like many other tech companies are mainly in the west coast of the US, meaning -9 hours from me.

After those initial interviews I had to struggle with myself since I was in this luxury position of having no less than two other very interesting projects being suggested. How do you pick the best one out of three really good alternatives? I actually had to wrestle with all the details and factors involved and I decided that this lead was the best out of the three. If Mozilla wanted me, I’d go for that option.

So I took 4 days off from my current work and flew out to Mountain View California one day in November 2013. It takes some 17 hours to get there, I had a spare day to get somewhat adjusted to the time zone and then I fired off no less than five 45 minute interviews in a row that Wednesday. Then I got a ride back to SFO and I took the plane back home.

I’ve been a consultant for 16 years and I’ve done way over 30 projects during this time. I’ve been interviewed for all of them, and a bunch more that I didn’t end up getting. You can say I’m quite experienced in getting interviewed for work. What I’ve learned is to stay honest, just be me and have an as good time as possible but in the end it really isn’t possible to tell how the other end interprets me and my answers and if I match what they desire.

Getting hired

They didn’t reject me. I got the offer. I said yes. I signed the papers.

So one of the most frequent questions I’ve got when I told friends about my new job:

So you’re not gonna be a consultant anymore?

And no, I’m not. This option only came in the form of an employment or not at all, and I decided I wanted to do this rather than the alternatives. I’ve done consultant based development since 1996 and now I’m not anymore! Of course I still have tight bounds to Haxx and I certainly won’t exclude that I’ll return there one day.

My agreement also allows me to spend some time on curl development. Don’t you worry about that. I feel confident that I will only increase my commitment and efforts there.

Getting anxious

Once I had accepted the job I immediately wanted to start and by golly I got a harder time trying to motivate myself do good the period until that assignment ended.

I’ve had more phone meetings, I’ve checked out code and repeatedly rebuilt Firefox since then, I’ve read Bugzilla entries and perhaps most of all I’ve participated in Mozilla’s “onboarding program” which is a web based system that gives me tasks and asks questions and provides information, all in an effort to give them the information about me that they need and give me the proper info on Mozilla, what it is about, its background and what we’re doing ahead. (See how smoothly I used “we” there?)

Anxiously waiting for The Day. This may sound a bit melodramatic to some, but I do kind of feel like my life is changing a bit now into something it wasn’t before.

Starting a new job working remotely at day one

Today is The Day. I assume not everyone of you reading this have done it, but I start my first day at my new work for my new employer on the upper floor of my house, completely alone. I work from home, remotely and I’m also mostly isolated from a large portion of my colleagues by time zones.

So I grab my coffee and walk up the stairs to my home office. I sit down and I dive in. Source code. Lots of source code.

There’s a steep learning curve here, but I’m not afraid of some hard work and I like a challenge, I like code, I like open source and I like internet protocols. And I have good coffee.

Mozilla. I’m here. I’ve started. Today.

Mozilla dinosaur head logo

cURL and libcurl, Haxx, Network, Open Source, Web

I go Mozilla

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Mozilla dinosaur head logo

In January 2014, I start working for Mozilla

I’ve worked in open source projects for some 20 years and I’ve maintained curl and libcurl for over 15 years. I’m an internet protocol geek at heart and Mozilla seems like a perfect place for me to continue to explore this interest of mine and combine it with real open source in its purest form.

I plan to use my experiences from all my years of protocol fiddling and making stuff work on different platforms against random server implementations into the networking team at Mozilla and work on improving Firefox and more.

I’m putting my current embedded Linux focus to the side and I plunge into a worldwide known company with worldwide known brands to do open source within the internet protocols I enjoy so much. I’ll be working out of my home, just outside Stockholm Sweden. Mozilla has no office in my country and I have no immediate plans of moving anywhere (with a family, kids and all established here).

I intend to bring my mindset on protocols and how to do things well into the Mozilla networking stack and world and I hope and expect that I will get inspiration and input from Mozilla and take that back and further improve curl over time. My agreement with Mozilla also gives me a perfect opportunity to increase my commitment to curl and curl development. I want to maintain and possibly increase my involvement in IETF and the httpbis work with http2 and related stuff. With one foot in Firefox and one in curl going forward, I think I may have a somewhat unique position and attitude toward especially HTTP.

I’ve not yet met another Swedish Mozillian but I know I’m not the only one located in Sweden. I guess I now have a reason to look them up and say hello when suitable.

Björn and Linus will continue to drive and run Haxx with me taking a step back into the shadows (Haxx-wise). I’ll still be part of the collective Haxx just as I was for many years before I started working full-time for Haxx in 2009. My email address, my sites etc will remain on haxx.se.

I’m looking forward to 2014!

Haxx, Open Source

Parallel Spaghetti Decode Challenge

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At the embedded hacking event in GBG yesterday I organized a small contest for the attendees. I’ve done something similar several times before, so I wanted to make it a bit different this time to spice things up a bit. A straight-forward N questions in a row and then a puzzle to get the final question was too easy. I wanted to create a maze or a play-field that you would need to traverse somehow in order to reach the final goal. But it is hard to create a maze that you don’t immediately spot the way through or that you can somehow “cheat” and find the way in other means rather than to actually answer the questions and do right by using your skills… Then I realized that with just a couple of things added, I could fulfill my goals and still get a fun contest. So, let me start by taking you through the first slide that details the rules:

The contest rules

Ok, so to make the rules be a bit clearer we take a look at a simplified example play field so that we understand what we’re about to play on:

A small example play-field

A short summary:

  1. start on a green box
  2. follow the arrow in the direction that your answer to the question of the box leads you. There’s a compass rose there to help you remember the directions! 🙂
  3. each box you visit has a word associated with it, collect the words along the path
  4. when you reach the red box you’ve read the goal and you’re done
  5. then you re-arrange all the box words you’ve collected and create a final question
  6. answer that questions, the fastest to answer wins!

Everything clear? To help the participants, we had both the playfield and the associated questions printed out on two sheets of paper that we handed out together with a pen. The amount of data is just a bit too much to be able to show on a single screen and it may help to use a pen etc to remember the track you take and which words to remember etc. If you want to repeat the exact same situation, you do the same! I did a special black-and-white version of the playfield to make it more printer-friendly. You may want to fire this up in full resolution to get the best experience:

full-spaghetti-playfield-maze

The question sheet looks like this, but click it for the full PDF:

All questions for the challenge

I posted the answers and everything in a separate post!

Haxx

Haxx turns 0x10

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On October 17th 1997 we registered Haxx as a company. Today we’re 0x10 years old. We like hexadecimal numbers.

BirthdaycakeHaxx was founded before the first curl version was released.

It was before Google.

It was long before Firefox and Chrome and even before the Mozilla browser appeared.

Heck, a lot of things of today didn’t exist those 16 long years ago.

It was a different and in many ways simpler world back then, but I would say that we’ve manage quite good to keep with the times and we’ve progressed fine as a company and as individuals all since then.

Me, Björn and Linus are still going strong with more contacts, more customers and possibly more fun than ever.

Happy birthday to us!

Development, Haxx, Linux, Open Source

Another embedded hacking day

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enea We started off this second embedded hacking day (the first one being the one we had in October) when I sent out the invitation email on April 22nd asking people to sign up. We limited the number of participants to 40, and within two hours all seats had been taken! Later on I handed out more tickets so we ended up with 49 people on the list and interestingly enough only 13 of these were signed up for the previous event as well so there were quite a lot of newcomers.Daniel Stenberg, a penguin

Arrival

At 10 in the morning on Saturday June 1st, the first people had already arrived and more visitors were dropping in one by one. They would get a goodie-bag from our gracious host with t-shirt (it is the black one you can see me wearing on the penguin picture on the left), some information and a giveaway thing. This time we unfortunately did not have a single female among the attendees, but the all-male crowd would spread out in the room and find seating, power and switches to use. People brought their laptops and we soon could see a very wide range of different devices, development boards and early design ideas showing up on the tables. Blinking leds and cables everywhere. Exactly the way we like it!

A table full of hackers and equipment!

Giveaway

A USB wifi thing

We decided pretty early on the planning for this event that we wouldn’t give away a Raspberry Pi again like we did last time. Not that it was a bad thing to give away, it was actually just a perfect gift, but simply because we had already done that and wanted to do something else and we reasoned that by now a lot of this audience already have a Raspberry pi or similar device.

So, we then came up with a little device that could improve your Raspberry Pi or similar board: a USB wifi thing with Linux drivers so that you easily can add wifi capabilities to your toy projects!

And in order to provide something that you can actually hack on during the event, we decided to give away an Arduino Nano version. Unfortunately, the delivery gods were not with us or perhaps we had forgot to sacrifice the correct animal or something, so this second piece didn’t arrive in time. Instead we gathered people’s postal addresseAns and once the package arrives in a couple of days we will send it out to all attendees. Sort of a little bonus present afterwards. Not the ideal situation, but hey, we did our best and I think this is at least a decent work-around.

So the fun begun

In the big conference room next to the large common room, I said welcome to everyone at 11:00 before I handed over to Magnus from Xilinx to talk about Xilinx Zynq and combining ARM and FPGAs. Magnus Lindblad, Xilinx The crowd proved itself from the first minute and Magnus got a flood of questions immediately. Possibly it was also due to the lovely combo that Magnus is primarily a HW-guy while the audience perhaps was mostly SW-persons but with an interest in lowlevel stuff and HW and how to optimize embedded systems etc.

Audience listening to Magnus

After this initial talk, lunch was served.

Contest

I got lots of positive feedback the last time on the contest I made then, so I made one this time around as well and it was fun again. See my separate post on the contest details.

Flying

After the dust had settled and everyones’ pulses had started to go back to normal again after the contest, Björn Stenberg “took the stage” at 14:00 and educated us all in how you can use 7 Arduinos when flying an R/C plane.

Björn talks about open source flying

Björn Stenberg, a penguin

It seemed as if Björn’s talk really hit home among many people in the audience and there was much talking and extra interest in Björn’s large pile of electronics and “stuff” that he had brought with him to show off. The final video Björn showed during his talk can be found here.

Stuff to eat

Buns for the masses!People actually want to get something done too during a day like this so we can’t make it all filled up with talks. Enea provided candy, drinks and buns. And of course coffee and water during the entire day.

Even with buns and several coffee refills, I think people were slowly getting soft in their brains when the afternoon struck and to really make people wake up, we hit them with Erik Alapää’s excellent talk…

Aliasing in C and C++

Or as Erik specified the full title: “Aliasing in C99/C++11 and data transfer between hard real-time systems on modern RISC processors”…

Erik helped put the light on some sides of the C programming language that perhaps aren’t the most used or understood. How aliasing can be used and what pitfalls it can send us down into!

Erik Alapää on C aliasing

Kjell Ericson's blinking ledsPersonally I don’t really had a lot of time or comfort to get much done this day other than making sure everything ran smooth and that everyone was happy and the schedule was kept. My original hopes was to get some time to do some debugging on a few of my projects during the day but I failed that ambition…

We made sure to videofilm all the talks so we should hopefully be able to provide online versions of them later on.

Real-time Linux

I took the last speaker slot for the day. I think lots of brains were soft by then, and a few people had already started to drop off. I talked for a while generically about how the real-time problem (or perhaps low-latency) is being handled with Linux these days and explained a bit about PREEMPT_RT and full dynamic ticks and what the differences of the methods are.

Daniel Stenberg talks Real-time Linux

The end

At 20:00 we forced everyone out of the facilities. A small team of us grabbed a bite and a couple of beers to digest the day and to yap just a little bit more before we split up for the evening and took off home…

Thank you everyone who was there for making it another great event. Thank you all speakers for giving the event the extra brightness! Thank you Enea for sponsoring, hosting and providing all the goodies in such an elegant manner! It is indeed possible that we make a 3rd embedded hacking day in the future…

Haxx, Open Source

Meet Haxx at FOSDEM 2013

Keeping up with our fine tradition, we will be present at that huge open source conference called FOSDEM in Brussels Belgium at the beginning of February 2013. It will then become our… 4th (?) visit there. I don’t have any talk planned yet, but possibly I’ll suggest something later.

Fosdem is several thousand open source geeks in a massive scale conference with something like twenty different parallel tracks, where each room basically is organized and planned independently. There’s no registration and no entrance fee. I usually enjoy network and security related rooms and of course the embedded room, which unfortunately seems to be stuck in a very large room of the campus with the worst sound system and audio conditions…

I look forward to meet friends there and have a great time with open source talks and good Belgian beers at night! If you’ll be there too, let us know and we can meet up.

fosdem

Blogging, Haxx, Web

this vs that and ssh through proxy

Taken from the web stats for daniel.haxx.se during September 2012. The top-10 search phrases used to end up on a page on this site:

  1. ssh proxy (198)
  2. curl vs wget (145)
  3. ftp vs http (92)
  4. wget vs curl (91)
  5. ssh through proxy (72)
  6. http vs ftp (67)
  7. curl wget (55)
  8. wget curl (53)
  9. http ftp (46)
  10. difference between ftp and http (45)

The top-3 most visited pages on my site during the same month were:

  1. SSH Through or Over Proxy (viewed 4800 times)
  2. curl vs Wget (viewed 3000 times)
  3. FTP vs HTTP (viewed 2300 times)

I guess this tells me something. I’m not sure what…

Haxx

Three years of Haxx

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Haxx logoAt October first, another full year of work at Haxx has been spent since I last summed up the past year (my previous posts about Haxx’s first year and second year). Three years working for Haxx full-time, and it has been another great year with lots of fun, challenges and us enjoying being independent.

During this year I ended my previous engagement with that large chip company and got a new assignment for the same customer both Björn and Linus were working for at the time. It has been a big adventure for me as I dove straight into unknown territories and I’ve spent my work days since then as a product manager, making an embedded Linux distribution. In this role I’ve travelled to US, China and South Korea during the year and I’m serving as a member of an advisory board in a related organization on behalf of my customer! I recently agreed to extending this contract to at least April 2013. Partly due to this new assignment I’ve not worked very much on foss-sthlm activities recently, but after the summer I’ve really made an effort to get this back up to speed.

Birthdaycake

Later during the year, Linus changed assignment to a new customer when we signed a sort of partnership contract with a leading global embedded software company and he then continued to do a whole series of little projects for them. After the summer Linus has grabbed a couple of curl related projects, partly still in progress.

Björn stuck around at the same customer during the entire year, and he’s been working as an engineer and developer in the team that actually makes the product I am a manager for.

Haxx towelThis year we made more Haxx merchandise. Towels, stickers and jackets have now been sent out in the world to make our name more visible in a few weird corners of the universe.

We visisted FSCONS 2011 and FOSDEM 2012, two really nice conferences for FOSS fans like us and we got to meet a lot of friends and like-minded people there.

We continue to see a demand on the market for highly skilled embedded developers, including embedded Linux and open source related activities. We wouldn’t mind extending our merry team, so we decided to document a list of requirements of what to have in order to get hired by us. So far not a single person has applied…

Haxx

Snaxx 27

A pint of guinnessGoing strong after 12 years in the making. For the 27th time we’re gathering friends in the Stockholm Sweden area who are interested in technology, open source, beers, slightly inaccurate Monty Python quotes, reverse engineering electronics and similar very important topics. We might also have a beer or two and talk rubbish.

On October 31st 2012 we invite all and every of our tech oriented friends to visit

Snaxx-27

We figured the 27th time would be the perfect time to do something new, so we now host the information on the fine snaxx.se domain.