So I just have to believe that it was one of the first things that was built, and it was like “Hey, this is pretty rad. We didn’t have a debugger, I’m not even sure if it had a console, but it did have 3D View in the bottom. And then on the right in content is the role view. So I recently saw a screenshot from – I think it was Firefox 17… I’m not sure when that was released, but it was one of the earliest versions of a DevTools that we built - it wasn’t Firebug - and you’re looking at the Inspector and you see the markup view, which is that DOM tree. Let’s apply some of the same practices and really focus on the experience - help beginners, but also help advanced programmers do what they’re trying to do.” Products like Atom and Nuclide and VS Code, and Chrome DevTools has a full-time designer, but that wasn’t really a thing three years ago… So about the same time three years ago we’re like “Hey, these tools built for developers aren’t any different than tools built for other humans. I think that’s true for DevTools at large. On the flipside, you look at the larger product and you realize, “You know, we really wanna think through some of these experiences.” So I’m not sure if it was 18 months ago or two years ago, but Bryan Clark joined the team (he’d been at Mozilla for some time) and we really got a product mentality - full-time design… And just internally there was a recognition that we could do better. I think both put really exciting tech, great features, and it doesn’t resonate. I think you have that recognition internally. And with Firefox OS becoming less of a focus, and then not becoming a focus, at the beginning of last year we’ve been able to make a lot of progress just improving the quality of the UI and the experience within Firefox DevTools. But I would wager a bet that because of this split focus, it was harder to keep up. So there was this amazing tooling built out called the WebIDE that allows you to work on a mobile app, OS even, through this tooling, in Firefox. Because Mozilla was working on both a desktop app and a mobile operating system that was built on the web platform, there was this split focus. Maybe two, three years ago, a larger team got formed - that’s my understanding - around DevTools in the browser as a thing that employers would work on and built out. They had a great contributor team, lots of contributions, and I think that fit the mentality at the time that this problem was mostly being handled, probably up until Chrome DevTools got started, and started really refining it. We can get into that later on, but sourcemaps, and even Emacs and Version Control and what not.īut Firebug was really successful. The history of computer science kind of like blows through some of these people. We were both drinking, and… You have a lot of people around when you’re at Mozilla who have done things that just blow your mind. Yeah, I had to confess a couple months into working with them that he was kind of my hero, and that was a nice moment. Two years ago I started working on a Chrome DevTools extension, and I realized then that while you can do a lot in a tab, like the React DevTools and what not, what was really cool was if you could do something in the tools themselves - in the inspector, in the debugger… And the day I figured out that that was open source was just – the rest was history. I had wanted to get involved ever since, and then when I started working in the web, it seriously made sense to go to DevTools in the browser, as opposed to maybe like a REPL for Ruby, or something. That’s how I stumbled upon working on REPLs for Ruby and Python, and realizing that you can actually do this stuff, it’s possible. I knew I hated that feeling when you’re working on something and it just doesn’t work and you’re not quite sure why… I thought I could spend a little bit of time just getting involved in open source so that would never happen again. They have fellows come in, like Marin, who works on CodeMirror and ProsMirror, and Jose Valim who’s worked on Elixir… I got there, and I had just graduated college and done a little bit of programming. Oh yeah, you meet the most amazing people.
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