Who is this guy?
- Name: David Bienvenu
- Based in: San Francisco
- Status: Mozilla Employee
- Job title: Mozilla Thunderbird Architect
- Distinctive features: music and movie buff, runner, reluctant swimmer, knows the Thunderbird backend code much better than is good for him.
Background
David started by programming on a Texas Instruments TI-58 calculator, bought one of the first “luggable” computers, the Osborne 1, in college, and has developed for personal computers ever since. His initial interests were AI and developer tools but fell into the messaging space by working at a groupware company, Collabra, and then Netscape/AOL/Mozilla. He has been working on e-mail client software ever since.
His main expertise is in the C++ backend code, especially the folder, view, db, and protocol code but over the years, he has worked on all the C++ backend code and much of the front end js and xul code.
While he has developed on Unix, Mac, OS/2, and other OS’s, his primary development environment is Windows, which is relatively uncommon for a Mozilla developer.
What is his role all about?
Making sure the backend code in Thunderbird can support all the cool things the front end wants to do, while maintaining the stability and performance Thunderbird users have come to expect. His role is a mix of mentoring, code review, general consulting, bug fixing and new feature development in my spare time.
A typical day in a life of David:
- Go through bugzilla mail, answer questions in bugzilla.
- Look into any potentially alarming new bugs.
- Do some code reviews.
- Work on ongoing projects.
Why help David?
By helping David, you will participate in delivering a better product to millions of users. You will be able to share feedback about not yet final features, influence on the software while making it more secure and easier to use. David was around when most of the backend code was written, and wrote much of it himself, so you can learn a lot about the Thunderbird core code by helping him. Please click on this link to connect with the project.
David says:
“We have identified a lot of things in the backend code that would improve the Thunderbird experience for our 20 million or so users. For people with less time, there are many more bugs than we have time to fix. Some of them are fairly simple and we’re here to help people fix them.
“We also have a lot of code cleanup that can be done fairly easily, both in the core code, and in the xpcshell and mozmill tests. And many areas of the code could use more unit tests.”