Short one video per concept Firefox development videos

Posted on November 18, 2013

I’d like to introduce a new site I’m working on named Code Firefox.


Elevator pitch

Becoming a Mozilla contributor can be intimidating. There’s a lot of information to consume, and that information can be dispersed in a variety of different places. This site aim to outline the process of becoming a Mozilla contributor, from the start, with gentle, short, consumable 2-10 minute videos.


A long time coming

In July 2012 I blogged about my first year at Mozilla, and where I’d like to go in the future.

I’m starting work on a project to bring videos for code contributors. The plan is to have short 5-10 minute videos that each cover a single topic. This would be similar to Khan Academy videos in the 1 video per concept way, but will be more like a tutorial and will be focused on contributing to Mozilla.

It took me a while to actually start on that goal, partly because I kept making excuses for why it wasn’t a good time to start yet.

Maybe I was just scared of presenting something in a way that wasn’t the best way. But when it comes down to it, I know a lot of people can benefit from the content of the videos I’m creating. And because of that, I’m no longer afraid to be corrected.

A couple month ago, sitting in the airport coming home from the Mozilla 2013 Summit, I registered codefirefox.com. I also created a github project and started coding the site that would be used for those videos.


The future of Code Firefox

Code Firefox aims to focus on Desktop Firefox videos from the ground up. I’d love to also do videos on Firefox for Android, Firefox for Windows 8 style UI, and especially for Firefox OS.

I’d like to eventually get to a place where the videos can be used for onramping new hires, and perhaps also used by some schools as the basis of a class.


Status and focus

Since I began posting videos, I’ve been posting an average of over 1 video per day, I’m close to 20 videos so far.

These videos are not focused on perfection, partly because I’m far from it, and partly because I have so much content to go out, that there is more of a benefit to do new videos instead of focusing on old ones.

One statistic I found interesting is that the average visit duration on my blog is under 1 minute; whereas, the average visit duration of the Code Firefox site is over 5 minutes.


The process

I’m using ScreenFlow on OS X to make the videos in a Windows 8 VMware Fusion VM, and a Blue Yeti microphone.

As each video is posted, I post a message about it on this twitter account.

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