Being the Director of Desktop and Mobile products at Thunderbird means I don’t get to code a lot these days. Most of my time is spent in helping other managers keeping an alignment on expectations, defining high level product priorities, and measuring productivity.
Even tho I occasionally help with some development and code reviews, long gone are the days where I used to spend hours getting my hands dirty by fixing random bugs, implementing new features, and pushing pixels around.
I need to code for my mental sanity
I got into this industry because I love coding and designing, so not doing any of that is kinda driving me crazy. In some occasions I feel fairly disconnected from the day-to-day work and I fear that I will lose the ability to properly understand how long it takes to implement or fix something.
“I’m sure we can add this feature before the next release” — The manager everyone hates
Therefore, I decided to take on the implementation of a single feature that I always wanted to add to Thunderbird. Customizable Shortcuts!
Nothing sensational about this announcement, so here’s the twist. I will use this initiative to do everything in the open!
In the true spirit of Open Source, I will be creating, designing, and coding this feature exclusively during live streaming sessions on YouTube.
Have you ever wondered why features take as long as they take to ship into Thunderbird?
- Why things are broken, incomplete, or not reliable?
- What are the drawbacks and limitations of these kind of implementations?
- How do we decide what goes into the product and what doesn’t?
Well, here’s your chance to look at the whole process, and help along the way.
I will try to consistently stream every week, and share the notes I capture during every session as well as the tasks and objectives that I will try to accomplish in each video.
Enjoy!