ThunderCast - S3E1 - Roadmaps

Welcome everybody to another episode of Thundercast, it's actually the first episode of Thundercast,

our new podcast from Thunderbird.

My name is Alessandro and with me I use usual, or usual for the very first time, but it's

going to be as usual, the very lovely Heather, hello.

Hello, it's so nice to be here.

So good, finally we're back, it took us a long time to be back and doing some podcasting,

right?

Yes, I missed it and some of you might have seen myself and Monica and others in our monthly

community office hours.

And so it's nice to be distributing yet another medium to our lovely community.

Yes, exactly.

And the question might arise, like why are you doing these also alongside the community

office hours and the videos that we publish and all the mailing lists and all the blog posts,

all the communication out there, do you really really need to do also a podcast?

I mean, if you're asking me, I'm very much a social butterfly, so yes, I do.

I need to talk and say hi to everybody.

Of course, yes, no, absolutely, the answer is absolutely yes.

Outside communication is never enough, always finding a way where different people consume

media in different ways and it's our objective to be as open as possible and share about everything

about Thunderbird.

But also things adjacent on the bird, we're interested in showing some suggestions and

other things all around the technology, open source, and ethical way of doing things.

Because sometimes some of us, but our audience also, we forget that we are humans and there

are humans behind the machine and it's good to be out there and show our face or share

our voices and talk about all the things that we like and we don't like.

So there's a little bit more of a personal connection that it builds around a product

that helps us also to stay honest, honest with ourselves and build a better product that

doesn't diverge from what users want.

Yes, and we like to listen to our community and what they want and need and so a little

bit later we'll tell you guys how you can reach out to us and request topics or make suggestions.

Just say hi.

Say hi, please say hi, we're lonely here.

No.

Say hi.

Yes.

Okay, perfect.

We can jump into a couple of updates coming from Thunderbird.

First of all, we got the usual releases for this month.

Oh, by the way, these podcasts Thundercast is going to be a monthly release cadence.

We're starting with this type of cadence we'll see if we have the capacity and also the

content to be able to do it more often, maybe a couple of times per month.

But once a month gives us enough time to create a good episode for everybody.

And also it ties with the releases of our applications.

We got a couple of new releases as usual.

We have version 148 for desktop and version 17 for Thunderbird for Android.

The Thunderbird for iOS is still on alpha test flight.

We have the objective maybe before the end of the second quarter.

So around June, July to start releasing a beta and there is like partially functional

beta, you can sign up with your email service and read your emails.

It's going to be very exciting.

But yes, please, if you're not a monthly release on desktop, switch to monthly releases.

Keep yourself up to date.

And mobile, there's, we also publish at the same time, the regular monthly release, but

also the beta release, there's a beta channel that you can easily switch.

We are planning to also release an alpha channel for Thunderbird for Android.

So for you that like to live on the edge or experiment with early features and stuff like

that, you can consume all of that.

Is that alpha channel going to be like a nightly build for like a really bleeding edge?

Probably every day or building a place once every two days and updating it right away.

We're trying to automate as much as possible.

So we don't need to like manually publish upload and do all the silly things that the

Play Store asks us to do.

That makes sense.

Yes.

It's hiding.

I know that a lot of people are excited for that iOS release, that initial release.

There were a lot of questions about that at Fostom and in the US, I know that most

people, I'm not one of them, but most people are on iOS.

Yeah, of course.

Well, it turns out it's pretty difficult to build a developer application from zero, especially

on a platform.

iOS is such an interesting place because throughout the years, we did our due delinence,

right?

Like we researched competitors and all the other things that are happening on that platform.

Throughout the years, we noticed that a fair amount of email applications they were created.

None of those were fully open source.

So there's no like available open source project or library that maybe we could have acquired

to start from an already built established base.

But the interesting aspect of iOS is that they were in the past 10 years, five major email

applications.

I don't remember their name, sorry, but I should have write it out, but they were five major

email applications that they were always acquired by Apple and then deprecated.

So there's that brand there and we're not going to do that because it's impossible for

us to do it unless Apple decides to buy the entirety of Mozilla, which is sounds pretty

insane.

Yeah.

I don't know.

We're going to say no.

I'm just kidding.

Or we can do the opposite.

We can acquire Apple, but no, like that's the thing, right?

Like we, they weren't really available libraries, open source libraries to do any of the things

that we wanted to do and all the email interactions and servers and protocols, all the stuff needed

to be investigated and built from zero, but also we needed to use the iOS components.

iOS is a lot more strict in terms of the libraries and components.

You just have those and you use those.

It's very difficult to create something extremely custom or out there.

You need to abide to the rules of that operating system.

Oh, yeah.

Hopefully it's going to be a beautiful application.

The first open source iOS application out there that it's widely used.

It's going to be exciting.

Are there really not other open source applications at all?

Or is it just email that didn't have any open source code out there or like build that

are the base of iOS applications, but for emails specifically.

Gotcha.

There's one, but it's deprecated as a being updated in many, many years.

Right.

So we didn't feel comfortable just starting from that, like, maintain base, like, yeah,

more technical debt.

No, we don't want that.

I mean, it's kind of cool that we get the opportunity to bake in whatever design we want

in architecture, not design, but I mean, like code design, code architecture so that, you

know, we really are starting from no technical debt.

But yeah, it is quite a mountain to climb.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, slowly, slowly climbing.

It's at the good hike right now.

So can't be good.

There is some also exciting stuff happening with our Thunderbird Pro services.

Heather, you want to tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah.

So as many of you have heard, we are coming out with Thunderbird Pro services.

And we have started to invite some of our top community contributors to kick the

tires and give us honest feedback.

And I believe as of yesterday, we had about 30 people signed up.

There's a wait list that you can join if you're interested.

You can go sign up at tv.pro.

And yeah, it right now it consists of Thundermail, which is our exciting email provider based

on stalwart and appointment, which is a calendar scheduling tool.

It's very convenient to not have to public, like to publish your calendar to be able to

schedule meetings with people.

So you kind of have this appointment connected to your calendar and then you provide a shareable

link to someone and they can see all of the time slots that are just available.

And then we have Thunderbird Cent, which is end-to-end encrypted, large file sharing service.

Yeah.

So we are still kind of talking about, ultimately, if what exactly that final price will

be and what those final offering storage, that kind of thing, tweaking things a little

bit based on feedback.

But we're very excited to be able to provide this.

Now all of those services, even though they are going to be like a paid subscription package,

they're still open source.

So if there was a very motivated engineer that wanted to set up and run these things, they

could.

Yeah.

Because that is part of our mantra, our ethos is open source and yeah.

So that's exciting.

That is extremely exciting.

Yeah.

I already have a couple of users from appointment that they forked and they deployed on premise

on their own infrastructure and they use it internally for their own team.

And they reported a couple of bugs and they helped us to improve a couple of things.

So the power of open source is our core.

The power of open source.

Yay.

I hope they contribute changes back up to.

Yeah.

No, that's great.

I'm glad to.

Glad to.

That's awesome.

I'll be there by thunder mail.

We all want to step away from Google and Microsoft and all this corporation stuff.

To me, the most exciting thing is send.

I do a lot of music production and sometimes I need to share like heavy files with my friends

or my band members across the globe and I always sometimes use drive or sometimes drop

box or sometimes we transfer.

And every time, I think every time I try to upload something like once a month, suddenly

the price changed, or the file size limit changed, or, oh, now the files are not encrypted

anymore, anybody can read and download, it doesn't matter, it's my silly music, but still

it's such a disappointment how these platforms, from useful, they become kind of annoyance

and they're like, ah, another compromise that I have to make.

So I mean something, built-in, encrypted, that I can manage my files, I just play a

flat fee, and it's integrated with my Thunderbird application, it's going to be such a time saver.

Yeah, that is, I actually find appointment to be really useful, because if I need to collaborate

with people outside of Thunderbird and schedule a time, it's such a pain to email, oh, here's

my availability for the next week, right? And it's really nice that it's essentially the

public part of my calendar that I want, which is when I'm available. Yeah, so I've gotten

to use that in file a couple of bugs and see them fixed, and it's a very useful tool.

It is extremely useful. Yeah, so we started our early bird launch some of you, if you sign

up to our initial mailing list to get on the line, you're starting to receive some invitations

to get, some will get some very nice discounts to start using it for free at the beginning,

so check your emails, or otherwise go to tb.pro, our website, and sign up for the mailing

list for the week list, and you'll get notified as soon as we keep opening and do different

phases of launching. Super, super exciting stuff. Yes, some exciting. A couple of housekeeping

stuff. So we did recently a user survey from the Thunderbird desktop survey. So we have

these beautiful things called in-app notification in time Thunderbird that allows us to send remote

notification pings. Usually we use them for the donation appeals, the one that probably some of

you, a lot of you see at the end of the year or in the middle of the year, we use that to not

needing to do some like push some code remotely or do some in-between updates that are not needed.

We can just like ping our server and read some nice very non-intrusive notification. One of those

we decided to do like a very small subset of users, so a lot of users didn't see that,

but we got a fair amount of users that saw a request for survey, just give us your feedback.

We have a very interesting reality here at Thunderbird, which we have an average of 20 million

up and down active users per month, but then if we actually calculate all the active community

members and the people that do bug reports, we're probably like around one or two thousand.

So there's a huge discrepancy between actual users and the users that are active. So sometimes

it happens that we get a false positive or we get like a different opinion or we focus on a problem

that it seems very very difficult or very concerning, but actually affects a very small percentage

of our users. And we always try to learn what our users like, don't like what they want, what they

don't want. So being able to ping the users directly once a year and ask them to give us your feedback

is extremely vital, especially because our telemetry is completely anonymous. We don't track

users' information. We only actually learn is the menu bar visible or not. How many times someone

clicks on the app menu, all these things that they help us to improve the UX, but they don't really

tell us the story. And instead of going the evil route of tracking all the data, we actually ask

the user tell us what you like and what you don't like. And the survey was very interesting.

Overall, very positive. I think we are on the like higher percentile of good engagement and

positivity. People are happy and satisfied about the product, but it is such an interesting white

spread. We have some users that they tell us, I love the product as it is. Don't change it. You're

changing it too much. And then we have the complete opposite spectrum of people telling us,

I love the product, but it's too old. You should change it more often. You should put more modern

things. So we're still elaborating that data and trying to find a good middle ground, but it's

always like that. Compromise, understanding how to satisfy the majority of the users, but there

are so many different opinions and point of views. And it's fascinating to learn all these things.

And alongside this, we're doing some user testing. We're trying to improve the quality of the

features that we're shipping by doing user testing. Sometimes we ping directly in our community,

especially for UX and UI user interface and user experience testing. So if you're willing to

participate, if you're curious about testing, you features early, join our community. We have our

topic box. You will find all the links to join all the stuff in the description of this podcast,

in whatever podcast application you decide to consume this audio. But yes, you can join user

testing, security testing, or just testing early releases when we first launch the exchange support,

or we're implementing graph API. And when we're doing the future, implement J-MAP, we will ask

user to please test a test build before we release a final or even like a beta version. So if

you're interested in willing to give us feedback and to leave on the edge, please join our

mailing list and our community. We'll much appreciate.

Yeah, I just want to add that on developer. Thunderbird.net, there is a getting started page

that has a link to our matrix channels and our topic box. And I'm sure we'll include a link

to it. But for people that, you know, don't want to go look at their phone to look in the show notes

that are just listening, but eager to Google or not Google, but to to Dr. Go. Dr. Go.

You're too search. Yes, yes, please. You can go find how to reach out there. Yeah. And

Heather, I heard that you traveled last month to some place weird up north where they sell

like beautiful waffles and fries and beer and let's just happen. Yeah, I was fortunate enough

to be able to join the group of Thunderbirdies that went to Fostom, which is the annual

largest free software conference that always takes place at a university in Brussels. And

it's always, I mean, everything about Fostom is kind of amazing, like just the number of people,

the caliber of people that care about Thunderbird and open source in general, the talks.

And then, of course, the tasty things like the amazing beer and chocolate and waffles.

There was a point where we almost got a 3 a.m. waffle tattoo.

Oh, no. It didn't happen. It didn't happen. But next year, there's always next year.

So, yeah, we were in building F this year, which might be nothing to people,

but we were right next to the Firefox folks and got to see a lot of familiar faces.

But also, it's always really interesting to kind of see what questions people are asking.

Because it seems like every year, there's some common themes in the questions.

I remember last year, there was a lot about exchange. This year, there was a lot about AI.

There was, you know, and some about exchange too, right? But it's always a good like kind of

pulse of the community, what they're concerned about and what they want.

And Brendan, one of our leads in the Microsoft Exchange implementation world,

gave a nice talk, had some good conversations. And yeah, Fostom was great.

There were several Thunderbird folks that attended that had never been before,

and some that had never been to Europe before. So, it was nice to meet them initially,

like, you know, for the first time, but also to be able to kind of share this very unique and

special experience that happens annually. Yeah. Yeah, it's such an incredible conference,

like the dozens, thousands, and tens of thousands of people that attend their conference,

of all different demographics, the passion in general of everybody. It doesn't matter.

Like, they all bring their own very unique perspective and the questions that they care

of a specific technology or a specific approach, or where the product is going.

It is so refreshing. Sometimes is one thing that I noticed, I went there like two years ago.

I wasn't there, but I don't know if it's still the same. One thing that we notice is online,

mostly it's easier to get complaints and negative messages. But then when you meet in person,

it's like, it's the opposite. They are still, there are like, I wish you could do this,

or when are you finished? This is all like, when are you going to release this? But overall,

they all are wrapped around a, I love Thunder Brawl of this product. You're doing amazing work.

Was the sentiment still the same also this year? Absolutely. I would say even more so than a

couple of years ago when you were there, because there were still some people that came up a

couple of years ago with some animosity and want to, you know, verbally battle about why the

chat protocol that we chose. But this time I didn't see any of that. I saw a lot of

same, you know, very glad to see Thunderbird is there. The booth was very busy all the time

when some other booths in our area were not so busy, which kind of speaks to the level of

emotional support that they kept at Thunderbird. But yeah, there were a lot of people that just came up,

wanted to sticker, or even a couple of people I talked to that were lingering and I would say,

oh, are you a Thunderbird user? And they would say, yes, I've been for many years. It's like, do you

want to sticker? And they're like, oh my God, thank you so much. And it's like, no, no, no, no,

thank you so much. Take two. I mean, oh my God, so gracious. Look at us.

Thank one of each. Because I mean, anybody that's gone to Boston knows the sticker game is strong.

Every booth has, you know, lots of fun stickers and we are no different. We even had

some fancy hats. So Wayne is one of our popular community folks that he's been around for a long

time. And he brought these baseball hats that had like LED screens and then Seoul, who's one of our

designers designed this cool Thunderbird scrolling logo. And we had so many people come up and be

like, where can I buy that? And I was like, oh, well, this is just for us. But as we think about

things to add to our merch store, maybe we could find a way to do that because there were so many

people that wanted to. Yeah, I think it falls them is slowly turning into an arts and crafts fair

or more than a technology fair. Like, yeah, the the merch game is extremely strong. I feel like

there's an unspoken competition between everybody at the boot or it's going to have like the coolest

sticker and the coolest poster. That's so true. Like the Firefox people had these like headbands that

had little Fox ears on them. And all weekend, we were like, well, how do we need those?

Yes. We need to have blue wings on ours. How can we upstage the

it's a friendly competition, right? Yeah. Next year, we're going to be like a full bird

which Monica and I we have definitely looked at like real good bird costumes.

Oh my goodness. Yeah. This is getting out of hand. It's going to be a lot of fun.

There was a big BLC. There were several of the Mariah D.B. people also had a big costume

and the Evernote people. There was an elephant walking around. Whoa. Yeah. It's a lot of fun.

It was a very good very good event. And now I think a group of people are getting ready to

leave for scale, which is the SoCal Linux Expo in Pasadena that starts I think at Friday, but yeah,

our teammates are leaving tomorrow to go to that. So that's exciting. Very different vibe, but

very good, extremely different, very more enterprise-oriented, a lot more serious. I would say

like business casual type of approach, but feel like a lot of like open-source

passionate people, which makes the conference a lot better. Yes. Well, the food is also very

good in Pasadena, but so it is in Brussels. Maybe I just like food. Probably. Yeah, that's the

purpose, like the attending a conference, just a consequence of your food. We're here to support

you. It's fine. Yeah, it's great. All righty. I guess it's time to switch and talk a little bit

about our main topic. We're here. Every episode is going to be is going to have a main core topic.

This first episode, we are going to announce something and we're so happy we're finally able to do

and thanks to Heather, primarily her initiative and she drove all of this. We are going to publish

our roadmap publicly in a much more useful and realistic approach and fashion. Just to give

a little bit of context, we always did roadmaps. Every year, we do a roadmap for all the services

and all the products that we ship. But then our roadmap leaves on a document somewhere and once

every two or three months, maybe that roadmap is a little bit outdated because other things come

up and we need to shift priority and change things. So we sometimes copy the whole roadmap. We

put it on developers. Thunderbird on that and that that becomes stale after three months. It's

not updated and some users come in like, oh, you wrote that you said you were going to do these,

but you didn't do it. Why? None of them nonsense anymore. We're going to do a much, much better

job of communicating with our audience and being open out there. So we decided to build a roadmap

website. Heather, can you tell us what it is and a little bit about it? Yeah, it's exciting. So

the roadmaps website, we are working on polishing right now, but we'll be available at roadmaps.thunderbird.net

and it is going to be a kind of a human readable version of the desktop roadmap, the services

roadmap and the mobile roadmap. The idea is that each roadmap item should be accurately represented,

you know, if we are working on it or if we're planning it and it should be a quick

dis concise high level description that anybody of any technical level should be able to read

and understand and get on with their day. We don't want to bore people. We don't want to be too

technical. I know some people would like that. Some people would not, you know. For me and my goal,

I think about like can I show a roadmap like this to like my parents and would they have an

understanding more or less, right? And so yeah, we are we are working on some final polish for that

to be visible soon. I'm excited for us to finally have this. And like Alessandra said, you know,

they would go out of date. There are very fluid documents and we didn't, you know, always do the

best job of keeping them up to date, communicating changes. And so to address that, we are starting

some quarterly roadmap reviews. Yay. So we'll meet with each, you know, team lead and revisit

the roadmap, talk about the priorities, tweak things if we need to because, you know, things always,

you can't predict what kind of obstacles or new things pop up, always, that might shift your

priorities. And so we will make those tweaks to the roadmap and then communicate out to the wider

community on topic box about what those changes are and why they changed. So that should

minimize the gap of keeping the roadmap up to date and be a bit more realistic, hold ourselves

a little more accountable. Yeah, I'm excited to be able to share this out publicly. Yeah, it's such a

great initiative. It's going to be publicly available in roadmaps. Thunderbird.net is roadmaps

or roadmap. It should be plural. Okay. Yeah. Well, there's the link in the notes anyway.

It is plural. It is plural. Yeah, of course, because there I'm going to be all the roadmaps

available, not just one product or one service. It's going to be desktop, mobile, divided by Android

and iOS and all our services. Yeah, I'm extremely happy about this. Every time we refine more and

the way that we do roadmaps, we try to be a lot more realistic, a lot more honest on the things

that we can do and we cannot do. And having this website that we update once a quarter, it's going

to help us to communicate a lot more. As Heather said, yeah, we try to keep it light as a light

read just give it like a good concise overview. But we're also exploring the possibility to just

put a link to the meta bugs in bugs Zilla or GitHub or whatever other platform our bug trucking

is happening. So if you're curious, you're a technical person, you want to learn more, you can

actually see how those initiatives are split into multiple bugs and what is the prioritization.

We are trying to be a lot more diligent about this. Not that we were in diligent in the past,

is that in the past, even last year, we didn't have a lot of people and it's all about human

resources there. It's difficult to maintain a very large product with a lot of technical that

when you have just a bunch of engineers, like five, six engineers, even 10 engineers. As I said,

we have almost 20 million active users per month and we only have 13 engineers in desktop and

four engineers on mobile and other like seven engineers for services is like so hard to. I mean,

we're growing, right? But we have to be very choosy about what we plan to do that has the largest

reach among our users. Exactly. So let's jump a little bit and talk a little bit about the desktop

roadmap. You're going to all be able to see that all the things that we're going to talk about on

the website, but we want to talk a little bit about how we build that roadmap using the desktop

roadmap as an example and then talk about why some things are not on the roadmap, how do we

prioritize things and why the hell it takes so long to finish things? Why are we so slow?

Oh my god, we are the worst. It's so hard. No, it's fine. But we're improving.

Yes, exactly. All right, for the desktop roadmap for this year, we have multiple priorities.

There are, of course, an infinite amount of things that we could do, but we decided to limit

the prioritization of top priorities to only three objectives for the front end and two objectives

for the backend. So in total, we're trying before the end of the year to finish five major initiatives.

These five major initiatives for the front end are first time user experience. So when you launch

Thunderbird for the first time, it opens up something. Right now, it opens up a tab that tells you to

set up. We want to have a better guided experience of how do you want your Thunderbird to behave and

to be like you want a specific panels orientation, but also improving the auto discovery of your

account setup. So you don't need to learn what a protocol is if you're not a technical person. Like,

do you want pop, I'm up Jay map or exchange? No, we can help you automatically select the best

options and automatically connect all your other services. So calendars and address book,

it's all integrated. You do set up once and everything is configured properly. Then we are

pushing to update our calendar interface because the calendar interface thunder is extremely outdated.

And then we want to implement the front end for conversation view. This is tightly coupled

to the back end initiative because conversation view it's something that every email application

out there has, which is it's even difficult to describe for people that don't understand what it is

without it. It's basically when you open a message that a multiple replies, all the replies and

the different messages are properly listed in the same thread and there are also your replies

in line with the messages that you receive and it gives you the full conversation you don't lose.

The conversation we are building the front end for that but that tightly coupled we the two major

back end initiatives. The first one is the global database. Thunderbird has a very old 20 years old

implementation of a strange database called morgue. And we're stepping away from that. We're

doing SQLite. It's going to be so good. And then the other major major initiative is implementing

support for Microsoft Exchange, both EWS and Graph. And that will allow us to all the people

that have Outlook accounts, Office 365 account, all those like university or work, they can also

use Thunderbird without any add-ons or any other things. And to be clear, that kind of plays with

the calendar update too because a lot of people that use Exchange or Microsoft services, the suite

they want calendar. Yeah, that's it's it's going to be difficult like we're going to

probably this year. I mean, this year we're focusing primarily on the

email part of it. Once that's completely done, we're going to include and implement calendar

and address the contact support. Microsoft also comes with a bunch of other

connected services like OneNote and Teams and other stuff. That's for the future maybe we'll

evaluate. Yeah. But our core main objective is to have a cohesive, consistent and

productive experience when you consume your email. And consuming your email means

having access to your contacts and having access to your calendar is not just the email it's the

whole suite of all. We need that new beautiful calendar first. Yes. Yes, we're going to yeah,

it turns out shocking revelation for everyone building a calendar UI. It's not easy. It's very

complicated. I mean, like those grades tables in a responsive environment and multiple pop-ups

and dialogues and especially our calendars. I don't know how many events you have in your calendar,

it's pretty insane. And then Heather, we have the usual questions like, why are you always

only going to work on five things? What are all the other things? Why don't you work more

and you don't do more things? It's not that we don't want to. But again, the very limited

engineering resources limited yet growing but slowly and still finite. We have to kind of

pick and choose wisely based on common sentiment feedback like, hey, I really want calendar to look

nicer. I'm like, oh, okay, a lot of people want that to let's work on that. But if some people

ask about improving the chat integration and it is not as popularly requested as calendar. So

we'll get to that and it's, you know, everybody's opinion and desire for features matters

and you can submit them or upvote them at connect. Thunderbird. No, connect.mozilla.org. Yes.

Under the Thunderbird project, my bad. So we have to kind of do this balancing act of,

you know, the engineering resources we have with, you know, the requests. So the capacity versus

the capability there. And we try and choose the items that impact the most people

positively. Yeah. Exactly. In the roadmap website, you're going to see also all the other

like planned initiatives, something that we're not actively working on. So you can get a glimpse

on other things that we want to do if we have the capacity and we're, if we are fast enough

to finish all the primary priorities and we can switch on other things. But as usual,

we don't just work on those things. Every day we work on multiple parallel bug reports,

especially if there's an issue, if there's a bug or a regression, something doesn't work,

we tackle that. We evaluate what is the severity and then we stop whatever work we're doing

and we jump on fixing that. So there's a lot of context switch that happens pretty much every day

and we need to evaluate every time we get an average of 80 bug reports per month.

We are actively fixing between 100 and 150 issues every month. So we are

tipping the scale to the other side. We're fixing more things than we receive. But every time,

even like receiving 80 reports, it means that some of us will need to stop and look at those 80

bug reports and evaluate them or these valid or these duplicates. What is the severity of this?

Is this really a blocker that we introduce a massive regression or is this like a very, very

minor issue? There's a workaround so we can just not tackle it right away and pause it. It's a constant

human-driven evaluation of what can we do? How can we do it and should we switch to another thing?

Yeah, one of the many reasons why it takes a long time to finish think other because

other than because our code base is extremely complicated there. But we really appreciate support

and especially involvement of community members. As we clean up the code and we follow

more strictly coding standards and we modernize our code base, we saw an increase in uptake

in community contributions and PRs from community members. And we love that. That helps us to speed

up because you as a community member, you're not bound and tied to our prioritization. If you like

something like you don't like the settings layout or you have like a pack peeve of

making the compose button a different sheet of blue. You can suggest those things. You can code

those little patches and submit them and we will help you. If they align with our product vision,

we will help you to lend them and it's the beauty of open source and we love it.

Yeah, one thing the community team wants to do this year is kind of improve what the

contribution journey looks like for each area. So if someone has a passion like improving a button

or adding a feature or something, they would be able to get from start to finish and we could

mentor along the way as possible. So yeah, love contributions and I know that it is a hurdle

to get through but we're here to help. So even if you're not sure, hey, I want to make this change,

but I don't know if they're even open to it. Just come to our matrix or send an email and

just kind of say, hey, this is what I'm thinking. What do you guys think? And have a conversation.

We're nice people. I promise. Very nice. Yes, we try to be. Yeah.

Yeah, there's also a very interesting aspect and is one of the last few priorities of this year

roadmap is that it happens not that often, but it happens sometimes that a community member

proposes a drastic change that doesn't align with our product vision or it's not a feature that

we're willing to support long term. Always remember that anytime we accept a piece of code,

then we start, we become the owner of that piece of code. So we will need to support an

perpetuity and if something breaks, we'll need to fix it. So sometimes there are some occasions

or a specific feature, something niche that is not really aligned or what we want. We rejected,

but that does not mean that cannot be part of Thunderbird. That's why we have our add-ons initiative.

The two top priorities for us this year is to drastically improve and extend the existing API

for add-ons. We want to make Thunderbird more flexible than it is right now. So if you really

want to do something instead of pushing into the core, you can build your own add-on,

hook it to our official APIs and then you can have the piece of functionalities and share it with

the users. We know some of our add-ons developers, they also ask for funds and it's a good like

shared economy that it happens there. So there's also a potential economic gain if you build an add-on

that is very well received and consumed. You have that opportunity there. But also the other

major initiative there is improving API documentation. This is something that we're trying,

it's very hard. We're trying to get a lot better at this. It's documenting our code.

We need to step away from the assumption of, oh it's code. If people want to use it,

they just read the code and they understand that. No, sometimes the code is extremely complicated

and we need to document what the code is and what the code does, not just for our users,

but also for us for historical reasons. Why we built it that way? Why behaves that way? So we don't

do, we don't need to do code archaeology every time we need to change something.

Yes, I agree. I think also the add-ons marketplace is a very nice little

community run area. I would like to mention that the Experiments API is something that we

are moving away from. So as you write your cool new add-ons, maybe avoid using.

Yes. Experiments are a nice little initial entry point to just test your ideas and see if they

actually can work inside Thunderbird, but don't rely on those long-term, especially for monthly

releases. We cannot support experiments because we change. So often, so the only reliable things

to guarantee that your add-ons will work in perpetuities to use official API.

Especially when we change add-ons API with Deprecate or introduce a new one, we always migrate

the old APIs to the new one or we maintain the old API version for a while and we offer a

migration path that is extremely guided. So it's a lot more stable and reliable than doing

experiments. Even if it's true, doing experiments is much easier because you have no boundaries there.

You can do whatever you want. But using APIs, official APIs are is the way to go. And if there

are missing APIs, let us know on Mozilla Connect or report a bug to request an add-on API edition

if something that you're trying to do doesn't is not currently support by official API.

We can implement it. All righty. So usually, moving forward in this lovely Thundercast edition,

we will use the next section to answer some of questions and community questions. So I have

in a little Q&A section. In the past, in the previous season of this podcast, we used to go around

and collect questions from our community. But a lot of those questions were like very engineering

driven or very specific and technical and we were collecting it from our bugs in the forums or

from our technical meeting. It's all this thing. We would like to give an opportunity users that

have like all sorts of questions. They're not just about engineering, but also company like how do

we operate? What we do? Like what are our intention or what are our opinion on some specific things?

So please send us an email with your question. We are an email client. So emails, we love them.

We have a lovely address for you. It's podcast at Thunderbird.net. Send us your email and then we will

answer them live. Of course, because we're privacy respecting and we want to allow you to ask

questions without getting exposed online. Let us know in the message if you don't want us to

mention your name. We will never share your email address, of course, but we can say this question

is from Michael. This question is from Alex. If you don't want your name, you can use a pseudonym

or you tell us like, give me anonymous and we'll respect your wish. No bad words.

Please.

Yeah, that'll be great. Can't wait to hear from our listeners.

And Heather, you have some final thoughts here.

Yeah, so we are technical people, but we are humans as well. And so I just wanted to kind of

leave our listeners with another thought when you're not checking your email maybe go outside.

The weather is getting nicer. I recently got a new bike that I'm excited to ride and hiking season

as upon us. And I saw a pretty cool movie that kind of ties into techy things called Good Luck

Have fun. Don't die. Don't spoil it. I need to watch it. I won't spoil it. I'll just say it's a dark

comedy that is a social commentary on the future of AI. Oh, no.

Yeah, there's been a couple of good movies. Another one that I saw was send help, which is like a

be horror, Sam Raimi, so good if that's your thing. But yeah, I mean do try and take care of yourself.

I think that riding a bike or going for hike is great for your physical and your mental health.

And sometimes before you send that cranky email, it's good to go for a walk and then come back

and reread it and maybe make it a little nicer.

So you're asking our audience to be nicer by just go out. Just just just go out a little bit

and enjoy nature for a bit. And then you can tell us what's wrong, but it's just be nice, please.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, just in general, like be kind. I don't know.

That's okay. Yeah, I love it. Yes, I agree. Yes, I am.

Yeah, there was I think like a few months back, I realized that even after work, my only

reading material was like technical reading material. So to relax, I would read like a

engineering manager, 101 manual or reading the new RAS API or understanding like what is the,

yeah, all these things. And yeah, like I'm not, I realized that I wasn't reading for pleasure for

fun anymore. So I just dropped it and I forced myself to go back into books. And I am now going

through the entire, all the books written by Brandon Sanderson, which has like something like

15 books and five trilogies. This doesn't stop. It's just never ends, but I just finished the

Stormlight Archive. Oh, my God, there's so good. And I am the last book of the Mistborn trilogy.

Oh, that's one of my favorite trilogies for high fantasy. Yeah, one thing that I started doing,

usually in the morning after waking up with my coffee, I would just doom scroll on my phone

and check out my notifications. I removed that. I'm just actually I'm going to read a chapter.

And then I will check my notification on my computer, not on my phone. So I'm removing a lot of

applications from my phone. I'm not hooked that I disable notifications on a lot of the apps.

And I find myself less tired in the morning reading a book before work. It just wakes me up in

a different way than doom scrolling. I'd be recommended. Yes.

Yeah, I read my fantasy book at night right before bed. And I always have that to look forward to

during the day. Not that you should always live for the future, but you know, it's always a nice

little fantasy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Leaving your fantasy world. It's better. It's better in a reality.

Absolutely. Yes. Please send us an email and tell us what your favorite fantasy trilogy is.

Yes. Well, I think we are at the end of this lovely first thundercast episode.

Thank you so much, Heather, for for your help and for being there. Thank you. This was fun.

And I hope people enjoy listening to us. Yes. I'm sure they will. And if you don't send us an

email and tell us that you don't enjoy it, our voices, and we'll change it. We'll try to do better.

You'll change your voices. So it'll be fun. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, thank you all for listening.

And we will talk to you in the next one. Bye. Bye.