While developing an Android app for my final design project, Taedium, I came across what seemed like a trivial problem. I needed to have a text view (like that in the Android market) that can expand or collapse whenever a user presses a ‘More’ or ‘Less’ button. It turned out that the problem was more difficult than I thought and I had to make my own custom widget to accomplish the task. I based it off a partial solution by Peteris Caune over on Stack Overflow.

Before I started interning at Mozilla back in May 2010, I really didn’t know what to expect. How does a non-profit company with an open source product operate? After working at giant corporations like IBM and McAfee I couldn’t fathom what the experience would be like.

Firefox is known for its extensibility. In fact, over 2.4 billion addons have been downloaded to date, meaning there are a lot of people using a lot of addons. While having 20+ addons can undoubtedly personalize your browsing experience, it can also be a pain in the ass to manually install them every time you set up a new Firefox profile. As a developer working on Firefox related automation tools, this is twice as true since I create a separate profile for each and every project I work on, installing a constant set of addons on each one.

Back in high school and throughout most of my University career, I’ve always thought that personal blogs were dumb. Who in their right mind would care what I was up to? It wasn’t until I started interning at Mozilla that my views started to shift. I began seeing them as tools to communicate new ideas and elicit feedback from anyone interested in what you have to say. It also wasn’t until I started interning at Mozilla that I realized that I actually might have something interesting to say. So here I am, creating a blog with one month left in my second internship. Too little too late? Maybe, but I have to start at some point.