I hate writing GUIs

Honestly, I hate it. Every time, I come across it, I end up getting to a point where I want to shoot myself. I had this moment today yet again. This time in the context with trying to write a very simple extension for Firefox. I mentioned before that I am an open-source contributor for the Mozilla Foundation, so for those one or two people who read this blog, it may come as no surprise that I also try to write other stuff for them, as well.

The Graphical User Interface (GUI) for Mozilla is created using a specific type of XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) called XUL (XML User Interface Language) and the logic is done using JavaScript. Maybe it is, because I am not interested in design and have no mind for, but everytime I try to do a GUI, I get bored and so disinterested, it is not even funny anymore. I am so much more interested in writing the actual logic. The stuff that does things.

GUI writing is repetitive and because there is so much of it, it takes ages to get into it. I get frustrated, because I know what I want to achieve and then about an hour or two later, I finally manage to get something implemented that somehow resembles what I want. I say "somehow resembles", but it is never in the exact right place or is somehow "off". It is a source of constant aggravation to me.

That's where WYSIWG Editors come in handy. Unfortunately, in this case, there aren't many decent and well maintained XUL Editors out there. I found that XUL Gear did not work on my PC, so I settled for XULExplorer. It's decent, but obvious that it is a one man effort.

Ok, enough whingeing about it. Back to it. If I ever get this finishes, I will write about it.

Contributing to Mozilla

I guess, it's time now to talk about an activity that I have been doing for quite some time. Since almost a year, I am a contributor to Mozilla's Automated Testing Team. I've been learning all this stuff about Python programming, but I didn't find a real way to use it properly. Anyone who followed my blog (I doubt there is such a person as I am not actively promoting it) will know that I had a couple of semi-useless projects on the go, but these all died down for one reason or another.

In the end, I became aware that Mozilla is an Open Source project and aside from the core developers who are employed full-time, anyone is invited to join. I was quite sceptical at first, but once I figured out how to use IRC, I was ready to go (Now it feels odd to think that at one point I didn't know how to ;) ).

For anyone who is willing to improve his skills and is not afraid to be thrown in at the deep end, it is a truly awesome experience! From day one, I was welcomed and everyone had a lot of patience. There are a lot of online resources and when you're completely stuck, you can always go and speak to someone on the IRC channels. I first made my way through Bugs Ahoy! until I figured out how to use Bugzilla and at some point, I was shoved towards various sites on Github to help out on there.

Because it is such a big project not only entailing Firefox and Thunderbird, but several other aspects, as well, there is quite a variety of programming languages being used such as JavaScript, Python, HTML/CSS, Java, or C++. So if you really want to learn something new, there is a lot of opportunities to practice it within the community, as well.

All in all, I am glad I took the step and got involved. There is no pressure and everyone can contribute as much or as little as they want. I am quite proud to say that I have contributed quite a few lines of code to mozdownload and I had a blast doing it!