Hockey Night in Toronto 2015 Thank You Speech

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Lawrence Mandel

Hockey Night in TorontoThis past Saturday (Jan. 31, 2015), I chaired and played in Hockey Night in Toronto as part of the Slice the ICE fundraising series for Shaare Zedek Medical Centre in Jerusalem. This charity hockey game, hosted at the historic Maple Leaf Gardens (Mattamy Athletic Centre), featured Maple Leaf alumni Darcy Tucker and Shayne Corson along with charity fundraisers who raised a minimum of $1500 to play in the game. The following is my thank you speech from the event.

For those of you I haven’t had a chance to meet tonight, I’m Lawrence Mandel and along with my co-chairs Jordan Black and Daniel Lindzon am proud to be chairing our 3rd annual Hockey Night in Toronto, as part of the Slice the ICE for Neonatal Care event series.

This afternoon I was thinking back to Jordan and my conversations three years ago about what we wanted this event to be. We talked about having two star players battling opposite one another, we talked about having a great venue and supporting party to compliment the on ice experience, and we talked about filling the teams for an active game and, most importantly, an active roster of fundraisers who can truly help Shaare Zedek Medical Centre and its patients. How far we’ve come in three short years. What you see here tonight is due to the dedication, effort, and perseverance of an awful lot of people.

Let me start with a special thank you to former Maple Leafs Darcy Tucker and Shayne Corson for joining us here tonight to play hockey with our online fundraisers. Those of us who were on the ice can all tell you what a thrill it is to play hockey alongside two guys who, aside from being excellent players on and off the ice, know what it takes to take the Leafs deep into the playoffs.

To our hockey players – you have my heartfelt appreciation for all of your hard work in meeting your $1,500 fundraising goal. It is a real pleasure to report that together we’ve raised over $110,000 for the neonatal intensive care unit at Shaare Zedek in Jerusalem.

I’d like to single out a few hockey players who, along with myself, did an excellent job in raising over $3,000 each to earn their autographed Tucker and Corson jerseys – thank you to Richard Goldstein, Ron Lindzon and Jordan Black.

As well, I’d like to give a special shout out to those hockey players who raised $1,000 by January 20th and earned Corson and Tucker autographed photos. They are: Jordan Black, Jordan Glaser, Richard Goldstein, Ben Gordon, Lee Hodgkinson, Danny Holland, Daniel Lindzon, Jared Lindzon, Ron Lindzon, Efram Kazam, Jordan Klimitz, Lawrence Mandel, Saul Mandelbaum, Michael Melnick, Brad Premate, Ron Somogyi and Adam Wainstock.

I’d now like to thank you, our generous sponsors, donors, families, and friends for all your support. Your generosity in donating both your money and your time is a huge reason why Slice the ICE is a success this year.

I also need to thank our dedicated and enthusiastic committee of volunteers. Look around. Take it in. This is what we can accomplish when work together as we have over the past 6 months. Outstanding work.

Now, Philip Black. Philip, I’ve called you out in the past and will continue to as long as you keep blowing us all away with your tireless dedication to this event series and Shaare Zedek Medical Centre. What can I say? You’re a tremendous role model. A real mensch. Thank you.

A special thank you to our Presenting Sponsor, Fabricland, to our Hockey Night in Toronto Sponsor, BMO, Hockey Rink Sponsor, Minden Gross, Entertainment Sponsor, Bounce Entertainment and our official Beer Sponsor Molson’s courtesy of Mattamy Athletic Centre. We genuinely appreciate your support of Shaare Zedek and tonight’s event.

Thank you once again for coming out to support us tonight and I look forward to seeing you on Thursday, February 26, in Collingwood for the 18th annual On the Slopes for Candy ski event and part two of Slice the ICE for Neonatal Care! This is the last day to purchase tickets at the early bird price of $165. Buy your tickets here tonight at the registration desk.

Before I wrap up, I’ll remind you again to bid on the auction items before the silent auction closes at 10:45.

Up next, we’ll have an autograph and photo session with Darcy and Shayne. For those interested, please line up on the left hand side of the banner.

On behalf of the entire Shaare Zedek family, thank you for participating in Hockey Night in Toronto and I look forward to having you join us again next year.

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Stepping Down as Chair of the Engineering Meeting

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Lawrence Mandel

MozillaEngineeringSuperAs I previously shared, I have accepted a new role at Mozilla. As my responsibilities have changed, I am stepping down as the chair of the Engineering Meeting.

Looking back over the last year or so of running this meeting, I am pleased by the positive reaction to the meeting reboot in June 2013, where we refocused on the needs of engineering, and by the successful follow on changes, such as including additional engineering teams and broadcasting and archiving the meeting on Air Mozilla.

I would like to thank everyone who took the time to provide feedback about the meeting. The changes to the meeting were a direct result of our conversations. I would also like to thank Richard Milewski and the Air Mozilla team for working out how to broadcast the meeting to our global audience each week.

I chaired my last meeting on Mar 5, 2014. You can watch my swan song on Air Mozilla.

Chris Peterson takes over as the chair of the Engineering Meeting effective this week.

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Lawrence Mandel Joins Mozilla Release Management

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Lawrence Mandel

I’m excited to share that I am stepping into a new role with Mozilla as manager of the Release Management team. Below is an e-mail that my friend and manager Sheila Mooney sent to Mozilla employees last week announcing this change.

Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 11:19:07 -0800 (PST)
From: Sheila Mooney
To: team Mozilla
Subject: Changes in Release Management

All,

I am happy to share some changes I am making to my team. Effective immediately, Lawrence Mandel will be moving into the role of Manager of the Release Management team. With the Release Managers in tight collaboration with the Project/Program Managers, we can think beyond just keeping the trains running on time and tighten our focus on quality, metrics and process to ensure we are shipping the best possible products to our users. Lawrence's experience inside and outside Mozilla aligns closely with these goals and I am very excited to see what he does with this role!

Lawrence will be transitioning many of his current project management responsibilities to others in my team in order to focus fully on this new challenge. The Web Compatibility Engineers will continue to report to him and Chris Peterson will report to me 
directly.

Please join me in congratulating Lawrence on his new opportunity!

Cheers,
Sheila
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Manager Hacking presents: A Year In the Financial Life of an Average Mozillian

Posted on February 7, 2014 by Lawrence Mandel

Mozilla Manager Hacking is proud to announce an exciting discussion with our CFO, Jim Cook, on “A Year in the Financial Life of an Average Mozillian”. This interactive discussion is designed to map the daily, monthly, and yearly activities of an average employee to our financial statements. The goal of Jim’s compelling and creative presentation is more on his continuing financial series of bringing an awareness and open dialogue to how we think about Mozilla’s finances. Please come prepared to know more, do more and do better!

Event: Open Financial Discussion: A Year In the Financial Life of an Average Mozillian
Presenters: Jim Cook and Winnie Aoeiong
Date/Time: 11 February 2014 @ 10 – 11a.m. PDT
Location: 10FWD MTV / SF Floor 1 Commons / Tor Commons / YVR Commons / PDX Commons / Lon Commons / Par Salle des Fetes / Air Mozilla
Open to employees and vouched Mozillians

https://air.mozilla.org/manager-hacking-presents-an-open-financial-discussion-a-year-in-the-financial-life-of-an-average-mozillian/

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Introducing webcompat.com

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Lawrence Mandel

Web compatibility, that a site serve consistent and functional content to all Web clients, is an issue that affects the Web and with it the many companies that make products of and for the Web. The Web was founded and thrives as an open platform. Locking out select clients, deliberately or accidentally, is a losing strategy for the Web.

There are a number of Web client companies, that is browser and device makers like Mozilla, Microsoft, and Blackberry, that invest time and resource in their own Web compatibility efforts. Web compatibility is table stakes for any Web client and is an area in which I think we should all collaborate for the betterment of our products and the Web.

At Mozilla, the Web compatibility team spends a portion of our time designing ways in which to collaborate with our volunteers and, more broadly, with the Web community. While there are many communities for Web developers, the people who work on Web compatibility are a different group who currently do not have a place to gather online.

webcompat.comI am pleased to introduce webcompat.com as a gathering place for the Web compatibility community. To be clear, this site is not yet complete. It needs to be built out. However, it did not seem right to build out the site without providing the opportunity for input and collaboration from the Web compatibility community. Our initial thoughts for the site are:

  • planet blog roll (already live at planet.webcompat.com – add your blog/feed or contribute to the site via the github repo)
  • compatibility specific documentation, such as known good frameworks, tools, and best practices
  • tools and resources to assist with Web compatibility work, like a site scraper that includes tools to identify broken user agent detection, vendor specific CSS property usage, and non standard DOM property usage

If you work on or care about Web compatibility, webcompat.com is being built for you. Moreover, we want to hear about what you want from this site. The Mozilla Web compatibility team is available to talk:

Join us! Let’s work together to ensure the mobile Web remains realizes its potential as an open platform.

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Mozilla Engineering Meeting Update

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Lawrence Mandel

It has been roughly 6 months since the Engineering meeting reboot. As I previously wrote, I consider the Engineering Meeting a work in progress. As such, I have made a few additional changes to the meeting during this time that I wanted to mention for those people who do not regularly attend the meeting.

  1. Air Mozilla: Don’t want to install Vidyo? Can’t attend at 11am PT? No problem. In addition to our standard Vidyo feed, the Engineering meeting is now broadcast live and archived on Air Mozilla.
  2. IRC Logs: A frequent request is better minutes that capture what happened at the meeting. In response, the minutes now include the #planning irc log from the meeting to record the online discussion. For an example, see this week’s minutes.
  3. Friends of the Tree: Want to know about our volunteer contributions? Josh Matthews now updates the minutes with a list of volunteers who have made a technical contribution to Mozilla’s products in the last week. For an example, see this week’s minutes.

Have additional ideas to improve the meeting? Please post to dev-platform, comment on this post, or get in touch with me privately.

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Telemetry – Reboot, Firefox OS, Probe Expiration

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Lawrence Mandel

Portland's famous food trucks

Telemetry has seen a resurgence of development of late due in large part to the reboot of the server side component. A group of us gathered in Portland last week to hack on Telemetry concepts (and code). I would like to share three updates: Telemetry project reboot, Telemetry for Firefox OS, and Telemetry probe expiration.

Telemetry project reboot

About six months ago the performance team kicked off an effort to reboot Telemetry’s server side, which went live on Oct 1, 2013. Taras described the reboot and the needs that it addresses in his post Telemetry Reboot. Mark started the week by describing the new server side architecture, which he has described in his post The Final Countdown. My key takeaways from this discussion are:

  • The solution is easily scalable.
  • The team is working to implement data processing using Amazon Web Services (AWS) spot nodes. These are the cheapest virtual machines that AWS provides and should result in a very low cost solution.
  • The generic architecture of this solution (simply a method of storing arbitrary JSON packets) should be reusable by other projects within and outside of Mozilla

Want to learn more? Initial Telemetry server side documentation is available in the telemetry-server GitHub repo.

Telemetry for Firefox OS

Firefox and Firefox OS are different enough from a technical and usage perspective that a single Telemetry client side solution does not make sense for both. Some of the issues are:

  • Telemetry must account for the Firefox OS multi-process architecture
  • Telemetry currently reports once for each Firefox session but Firefox OS usage has a different session model (users do not reboot their phones as often as they restart their browsers)
  • Mobile devices in the Firefox OS markets have limited data access for uploading Telemetry packets
  • Many of the existing probes were designed with single browser usage in mind and are not useful in an environment with multiple Web apps running without a browser container

The general consensus is that Telemetry will be useful on Firefox OS and that these issues are worth solving. Cervantes Yu has taken the reigns of implementing a JavaScript Telemetry client that will report on Mozilla applications via a Web API. His work is tracked in bug 918444.

Telemetry probe expiration

Telemetry probes are frequently added to Firefox test a specific feature or other piece of work. In many cases these probes are useful for a specific period of time after which they are no longer tracked but still collect and report on data. As it currently stands, these unused probes are rarely removed from Firefox. This poses two problems: we have unnecessary overhead in Firefox due to Telemetry collection and reporting and we are reporting information for which we have no use.

In order to address these problems, Telemetry will be updated with the capability to mark a probe as expired. To facilitate this, the Telemetry API will be updated to include a version parameter. This parameter represents the version of Firefox in which a Telemetry probe will expire (become inactive). For example, if a probe is specified with version 30, once Firefox 30 is installed, the probe will become inactive, no longer collecting or reporting data.

In order to make this change, all existing probes will be marked with version 28 (currently on Mozilla Central), which means that the probes will expire starting on March 4, 2014. Please open a bug if you require a different expiration date for a specific probe. The work to modify the Telemetry probe API is tracked in bug 742500.

Thank you to Vladan Djeric for reviewing the content of this post.

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Mozilla Summit Toronto Hockey Game

Posted on September 20, 2013 by Lawrence Mandel

Love Air hockey, Ball hockey, Barn Hockey, Bubble Hockey, Field hockey, Floor hockey, Ice hockey, Kitchen hockey, Road hockey, Roller hockey, Table hockey, Twist hockey? (Taken form The Hockey Song by Jughead.)

Attending the Mozilla Summit in Toronto?

Think that it’s about time for another Summit Series?

Register to play or watch the Mozilla Summit hockey game at Maple Leaf Gardens. Limited space for players. Sign up today.

Sign up:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1fhE8oVSAkk5gN9-pfoQ-lCJjQEO…

More information:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Summit2013/Experiences/signups#Mozi…

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Know Thyself – Welcome to Mozilla TRIBE

Posted on July 26, 2013 by Lawrence Mandel

TRIBETRIBE is a new Mozilla leadership program currently being built by Mozilla’s People team. The purpose of TRIBE is to transform the Mozilla culture by developing leadership skills across the project. (Modest, I know.) The focus of the initial session is on you – knowing your strengths, identifying your reactive tendencies, and understanding the ways in which you listen.

I completed TRIBE session 1 this week in Toronto. I have previously taken a good chunk of the IBM leadership and soft skills training course catalog. That is to say, I have a pretty good understanding of how this type of course is typically structured and delivered. (IBM courses are delivered by a number of different vendors.) TRIBE session 1 was something different. After the last two days I am left blown away by the extremely well put together material and delivery of this newly developed course.

The initial TRIBE session is a group experience but an individual journey. What I mean by that is that all of the members of this session participate in the same discussions and exercises and all have access to the same course materials. However, as this session focuses on you, your journey will be very personal and not one that will be replicated by anyone else in the program. Your takeaway thoughts and actions will be specific to you. You will succeed by building trusted allies in your course mates, who will equally rely on you for their own success. So, while I cannot tell you exactly what you will get out of this course, judging from the reactions of the people with whom I shared the last two days, I can tell you that this time looking inward will serve you well.

I have three suggestions for anyone who has signed up for TRIBE session 1:

  1. The strength finder assessment that you will complete before the course may not make sense to you initially. Don’t judge the strength finder assessment until after you have completed the initial TRIBE session.
  2. Before attending the session spend a few minutes thinking about the where you would like your career to be in 2-5 years.
  3. Before attending the session jot down the names of a few people who you admire and think would be valuable to you as mentors.

When something is well done acknowledgement and thanks are in order. As such, I want to thank Debbie and the People team for developing a truly excellent course offering. I also want to thank Kate Roeske (Red Carrot Leadership) and Athena Katsaros (IdeaTr!be) for doing a wonderful job facilitating our session this week.

As the purpose of TRIBE is to transform the Mozilla culture, TRIBE is open to all Mozillians. Course schedule and registration details can be found on the TRIBE wiki page.

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Mozilla Engineering/Platform Meeting Reboot

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Lawrence Mandel

“congrats on drastically improving this meeting (IMHO) I am feeling greatly optimistic about mozilla all of a sudden”
– Brad Lassey (ref)

The Platform meeting has been in limbo for some time. Since taking the helm in February, I found it difficult to answer questions like: What is the purpose of this meeting? Who is the target audience? Why do we meet each week? After discussions in the meeting and on the Mozilla dev-platform mailing list, this week I made a mostly wholesale change and rebooted the meeting.

The Engineering Meeting

The name “Platform Meeting” is a holdover from the meeting’s origins. This meeting has long included updates from non platform teams such as the desktop front-end, mobile front-end, and stability teams. More recently, the meeting added updates from Firefox OS and Firefox Metro. This is really an engineering wide meeting so let’s call it the “Engineering Meeting”.

Meeting Purpose

One of my goals with this reboot was to be able to clearly articulate what this meeting was about. My working definition of the meeting’s purpose is:

The Engineering meeting is a weekly time to discuss the work of engineering teams and share information relevant to the day-to-day work of engineers.

Meeting Agenda

I restructured the meeting agenda around the meeting purpose. The meeting now focuses on engineering teams and the relevant information from engineering support teams. I have also asked each person responsible for an agenda item to update the wiki the day before the meeting so as to have a set agenda before the meeting starts.

Agenda

  1. Actions
    Action items from previous meetings.
  2. Hot Bugs
    Orange Factor, Stability, and other high priority bugs that are currently unowned or require help to make progress.
  3. The Need To Know
    Release related notices and schedule and upcoming system outages and upgrades.
  4. Key Issues
    Bigger topics and non team specific issues that are of interest to Engineering.
  5. Team Stand-ups
    A short (<2 min) update from each engineering team. No questions during the updates!
  6. Quality Programs
    An opportunity to hear about relevant updates from our Critsmash, Memshrink, Orange Factor, and Stability initiatives.
  7. Roundtable
    All other issues and any questions that come up over the course of the meeting.

Meeting Time

The meeting time remains unchanged. The Engineering Meeting is held Tuesdays, at 11am PT. Details about joining this public meeting are available on wikimo.

Meeting Notes

One of the requests that came from the dev-platform discussion was for improved meeting notes. I would like to know whether the changes that have been made to the meeting agenda have resulted in an improvement to the notes. If you read the notes, I would appreciate your input. Please comment on this post, post to dev-platform, or e-mail me privately. For your reference, here’s a link to this week’s notes.

Feedback From the First Meeting

The feedback after the first meeting was very positive. Here’s a sample from IRC:

“congrats on drastically improving this meeting (IMHO) I am feeling greatly optimistic about mozilla all of a sudden”
– Brad Lassey (ref)

“this is the change we needed”
– Doug Turner (ref)

“yeah i think i’m going to start coming to these regularly again”
– Jesse Ruderman (ref)

“this is exactly what I wanted to get out of this meeting”
– Daniel Veditz (ref)

“this meeting was very useful to me, learned several interesting things”
– Gavin Sharp (ref)

A Work In Progress

I consider the Engineering Meeting a work in progress. This meeting should continue to evolve to meet the needs of our engineering teams. Have an idea to improve the meeting? Please post to dev-platform or get in touch with me privately.

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