One of the things the Firefox team has been doing recently is having onboarding sessions for new hires. This onboarding currently covers:

1st day setup

Bugzilla

Building Firefox

Desktop Firefox Architecture / Product

Communication and Community

Javascript and the DOM

C++ and Gecko

Shipping Software

Telemetry

Org structure and career development

My first day consisted of some useful HR presentations and then I was given my laptop and a pointer to a wiki page on building Firefox. Needless to say, it took me a while to get started! It would have been super convenient to have an introduction to all the stuff above.

I’ve been asked to do the C++ and Gecko session three times. All of the sessions are open to whoever wants to come, not just the new hires, and I think yesterday’s session was easily the most well-attended yet: somewhere between 10 and 20 people showed up. Yesterday’s session was the first session where I made the slides available to attendees (should have been doing that from the start…) and it seemed equally useful to make the slides available to a broader audience as well. The Gecko and C++ Onboarding slides are up now!

This presentation is a “living” presentation; it will get updated for future sessions with feedback and as I think of things that should have been in the presentation or better ways to set things up (some diagrams would be nice…). If you have feedback (good, bad, or ugly) on particular things in the slides or you have suggestions on what other things should be covered, please contact me! Next time I do this I’ll try to record the presentation so folks can watch that if they prefer.

Tags: c++, mozilla, onboarding, presentations