I’m Polish and I currently live in Warsaw. I don’t seem to be able to stay at one place for too long, however. I’ve lived in France, Switzerland, and the US and I speak English and French. I also learned Russian back in school, but most of what’s left of it in my mind is the alphabet (which I adore; don’t you think that “p” just looks as if it sounded like “r”?) and the Polish faux amis. I’m slowly getting back to it now.
When I first stared to learn about HTML back in the ’90s, I was appalled by the sorrow state of standardization back then and the fact that followed from it: most of the sites where inaccessible to people using less popular browsers or devices, or to people with disabilities. This motivated me to contribute and I did so by localizing Mozilla into Polish.
Come to think about, accessibility now seems to be almost a given.
Imagine a web developer come to you and tell you that the website she’s
working on will not be available on small-screen devices. WAT?
I joined Mozilla nearly four years ago to work with Pascal and Seth on
community metrics: running surveys and mining the web traffic data on
our websites. Pascal was actually my mâitre de stage, the internship
mentor who got me into Mozilla in the first place. Yay Pascal!
There’s a lesson here: check out our internship openings!
After that I transitioned into community management, which is really
a fancy way of saying that I had a chance and honor to meet and work
with tons of amazing people from all over the world. I learned a lot
about cultures and languages, and this acquired knowledge and diversity
that I was exposed to are two of the coolest things I personally have
Mozilla to thank for.
Today, I focus on l20n, the new platform and a programming language for
localization. You can find out more about it on the wiki, and in the recent posts from Jeff on this very blog.
You can find me on twitter (@5tas) and I blog from time to time at
http://informationisart.com.
5 things you may not know about me:
- I have background in linguistics and mathematics, and the job I’m currently doing seems like a perfect place to use and develop further the blend of the two.
- My job title says “Localizabilizer.” I felt that I had the right to make this word up, seeing how much of my work is about words in other languages. I also considered “l10n tamer” (get it?).
- I’m a GNU/Linux fan. I also think that I have developed a sort of vendor-lockin-phobia. (Brrr flickr.)
- I in-line skate a lot.
- There’s a couple of other facts about me that can be found in this blogpost: http://informationisart.com/037/.
No comments yet
Post a comment