Flock Blog

Friday was my final day at Flock. It also brings to a close my eleven years as a software test engineer.

In January, I'd just completed my graduate school entrance tests and essays -- but school didn't start until September. So, after meeting Lloyd, I joined my friends at Flock.

Although I'd worked at two start-ups before, I had never worked at a startup at such an early phase. In the early days of Flock, we worked (and slept) in a converted garage. Our server closet could be found in the bathroom. Janitorial service? Roomba.

As I leave Flock, I am proud to see the same exuberance and scrappiness. But, I see it in the context of a larger, well-oiled team. Everyone understands exactly what product we're making, and we know how we're going to get there.

You're invited by the Flock testing team to participate in our first-ever Flock Bug Day this coming Friday (May 19th), from 1:00-5:00 PM (PDT).

What's a Bug Day?

Bug Days are a Mozilla tradition going back many years. You're invited to join our IRC channel, try a new build, and play around with software testing by filing new bugs, and verifying existing bugs. Imagine if Flock QA held an open house.

If you haven't been part of an open source software testing team before, this is an ideal opportunity to learn the ropes. You'll learn how to test software directly from Flock's core testing team.

We're looking for a third software test engineer at Flock. Does this sound like anyone you know? We'd love to hear from him or her.

LOCATION: Mountain View, CA
POSITION TITLE: QA Engineer
DURATION: Full Time

JOB DESCRIPTION:

We don't use the Internet like we did in 1995. The web is no longer about Pets.com and your home page. Today, it's increasingly about collaborating, sharing and socializing. It's about MySpace and Blogger. And yet, the web browser experience remains virtually unchanged since Netscape 1.0.

What if a web browser could understand your interests and social network to offer a personalized browsing experience? By joining our team of Netscape alumni and Firefox contributors, you'll take a pivotal role in transforming the conventional web browser into a two-way social experience.

Flock has used TinyMCE as its blog editor since the 0.5 release. Anthony and other Flock developers appreciated its clean and usually error-free HTML output. But, it also brought its share of bugs and usability quirks.

We think we can do better.

Erwan has replaced TinyMCE with the Midas rich text editor from Mozilla.org in the current continuous testing builds of Flock. Midas loads faster than TinyMCE, is more easily localizable, and has a simpler user interface.

So far, it looks pretty good. But you, the Flock users, are the ultimate experts and arbiters on whether it makes your blogging better or not.