Curtis Bartley’s Blog

How do you surf the firehose?

I'm not sure that "drinking from the firehose" is the right metaphor for Mozilla.  I still claim it's more like having people constantly shooting you with water pistols from every different direction.

There's not much method to my madness, but here's how I try to keep up with the firehose:

I'm subscribed to four newsgroups in Thunderbird:

• mozilla.dev.planning
• mozilla.dev.apps.firefox
• mozilla.dev.platform
• mozilla.dev.tree-management

I don't actually read them any more, with the exception of mozilla.dev.planning which I now have set up to deliver straight to my main Mozilla email account.  (Because Mike Beltzner told me to.  "There's hardly any traffic on that list anyway" I recall him saying.)  Since conventional email is hardly used at Mozilla, this seems to work OK.

I also have bugzilla notifications going to my main email account.  I don't know what I was thinking.

I'm subscribed by email (my personal email) to the Firebug Group on Google Groups.  In hindsight this was a mistake, but I haven't fixed it yet.  I'm mostly skimming the thread subjects at this point, but I at least have some inkling of what's going on there.  I check this a couple of times a day when I check my personal email.

I read planet.mozilla.com every couple of days.  Anymore I mostly skim it, reading just the occasional post.  I really should try to check it every day, since I find it pretty useful to the extent that I do read it.

I peruse reddit and news.ycombinator.com (Hacker News) several times a day, and slashdot every now and then.  If a blog post doesn't make it to reddit or Hacker News, I probably won't see it.  I don't feel like I'm missing a lot of stuff by doing this, but on the other hand I do feel like I have to wade through a lot of crap to find the stuff I do want to read.  (Ha, Sturgeons Law: 90% of everything is crap.  Curtis's corollary to Sturgeons Law: On the Internet, 90% of the rest is crap too.)

I don't do twitter, largely because it seems to scratch an itch I don't have.

I have three hours or so of phone meetings every week, not counting the weekly Mozilla.org meeting.  I take these meetings fairly seriously since I'm working remotely.  I don't take notes, but I do attempt to actually pay attention.  I'm prone to zoning out even in meetings I'm physically in, and it's worse when I'm dialed in remotely.  My secret weapon?  I usually surf pictures on Flickr while I'm on the phone.  This works surprisingly well since it doesn't require any major effort from the verbal part of my brain.  In the future I should probably take notes at least some of the time.  Like any time Mike Beltzner is saying something important.

I don't use a feed reader.  In the past I've used Bloglines and Google Reader.  I abandoned Google Reader because I always hated its infinite scrolling model.  (I don't remember why I hated it; I like infinite scrolling in other cases) .  I do have a master list of blogs I read.  Despite the dozens of blogs on this list, I only read a few regularly these days, and none of them are technical blogs anymore.

And of course Mozilla lives and breathes IRC.  I'm using Colloquy as my IRC client.  It's not wonderful, but it works OK.

Tag, you're it.

Robcee's original post (complete with standard questions which I totally ignored) was designed to be viral.  I can't beg off this part, since I put him up to it.  Seriously, though.  I'm only asking because I think I might learn something.

• Mike Beltzner
• Johnathan Nightingale
• Dietrich Ayala
• Jan "Honza" Odvarko