Recent Articles

Changing Jobs

Luis Villa
January 07, 2011 04:01

Today was my last day as an employee of the Mozilla Corporation. I’m leaving to work at the law firm of Greenberg, Traurig. This was not an easy decision for me to make, but I’m pretty sure that it is the right one, both for me and for Mozilla. Why? Mozilla has been terrific for...

offline no-keyboard rss reader?

Luis Villa
December 08, 2010 04:59

So… I’m in the market for a way to read RSS feeds offline, with no keyboard; i.e., some sort of tablet or kindle-like device. Ideally it should be cheap and reliable (reliable in the sense that I can pick it up every morning while still groggy, take it to a concrete bunker with no wifi,...

do “open UIs suck”? or do “UIs without vision suck”?

Luis Villa
November 16, 2010 05:32

Tim Lee is quite close to something very smart here, I think, and related to something I’ve been pondering for a while: why are so many open source software UIs typically bad? Tim’s primary  answer, I think, not wrong: good design generally results from having a strong vision of what...

Wikipedia hiring for Bugmaster! (only 24 hours left!)

Luis Villa
October 21, 2010 23:05

Because I know a fair number of QA-oriented people (for some reason) still read this blog, I thought it might be worth pointing out that you still have 24 hours to apply for the bugmaster position at Wikipedia. Sounds like a cool gig for the right person, in a growing organization.Because I know a...

reading recommendation on American political multilingualism?

Luis Villa
September 07, 2010 04:13

I’m trying to find a book on the political history of multilingualism in the US; in other words, of why/when it started becoming acceptable (and in some cases required) for government works, electoral ballots, etc., to be written and printed in multiple languages. This is related to some of...

publicly thanking dwdiff

Luis Villa
August 25, 2010 18:21

High on the list of things I really enjoy doing is thanking people who contribute to free software. Also high on the list is using software that works well. So I just wanted to combine the two and say a public thanks to GP Halkes, for writing and maintaing dwdiff. I’ve been using dwdiff since...

Why I love (and hate) Panorama

Luis Villa
August 25, 2010 05:03

I’ve been trying to get back to living my life in a task-centric manner, and Firefox Panorama, without necessarily being designed for those goals, is perfect for it. Someone else put the words in my mouth: when you’re trying to do task-centric computing, what you need is not just a...

Notes on Diaspora Talk

Luis Villa
August 20, 2010 20:24

Diaspora came to lunch at Mozilla today. Some notes. They gave me a nice shoutout. ;) They’re doing pair-programming and test-driven development this summer, which I think is great. Sounds like they’re getting some great guidance from Pivotal Labs. Very explicitly trying to focus on...

A must-read on google

Luis Villa
August 12, 2010 19:26

In the same vein as my earlier commentaries on Google comes this piece by James Grimmelman. He doesn’t comment on the actual substance of the net neutrality announcement. Instead he focuses on process, and his description of how google does things seem so dead on to me into how google that I...

The Libre Web Application Stack (A Code Story)

Luis Villa
August 09, 2010 13:00

[This was originally published at autonomo.us- comments over there.] [Disclaimer: since my last post at autonomo.us, I have become an employee of the Mozilla Corporation. I don't feel this has tainted my views, but feel free to weigh that information as part of your analysis of this article....