Presenting the Thunderbird QA team, Interview #2 Gary Kwong

Interview conducted over email with Gary Kwong.

Can you introduce yourself a bit to our readers :

Hi! I'm Gary Kwong, now a 3rd year college student at National University of Singapore. I come from Hong Kong, and I love traveling around the world to meet people and visit new places.

What age you are ?

I'm 23 this year, I started touching Mozilla stuff in-depth when I just started high school, back when Thunderbird just branched out from the old Suite in 2003.

Where do you live ?

Singapore for school, Hong Kong for summer (usually).

What's your relationship with mozilla and thunderbird in particular ?

I started off creating Thunderbird installers in 2003, then started The Rumbling Edge in 2004. QA gradually increased since then, and there's nothing more fun than squishin' bugs. :)

How long have you been using it ?

4-5 years - Thunderbird taught me more about the email stuff (POP, IMAP, SMTP, eml format, etc.) way more than school did, wrt. the practical usage aspect. Even the QA process came out of Thunderbird too - it makes sense when generalizing and applying to other products in the IT industry (with some modifications, of course).

What os/platform do you use it on ?

Usually on the Mac Leopard, but recently on Ubuntu Linux too. I've touched Thunderbird on WinXP and Gentoo Linux as well.

What are your area's of interest when doing Quality assurance ?

Squishin' bugs - and especially being able to help others triage and resolve bugs too, so we have more manpower. Second opinions are sometimes needed.

Why do you participate in the quality effort ?

It's part of the grand open source crusade - my development skills aren't as professional as some others, so I found my calling in QA.

Why ? What do you get from it ? Is it fun ?

I find it exciting when I get a crash. No, seriously, it shows that anybody, as long as "If you put your mind into it, you can accomplish anything." (-quote from Back to the Future)

I learn a lot from the QA process, the bug filing procedure(s) and subsequent remedial action (be it a patch by others, or otherwise). I hope others can learn through QA too - it opens up doors to their lives, as they interact with people around the world working towards a common goal. One might become a better person, learn more skills, meet more people, etc.

(yeah, this sounds very philosophical but that's the way it is)

What do you think about TB3 ?

It's a long time comin'. There's more coming after that, I'm sure, so it's not like TB3's the end of the world. However, our route to TB3 has been long and hard, so I hope it won't have to go through the same large obstacles again.

Do you think you own part of it because you do QA ? Do you like it ?

Sure - being part of a vision that other people around the world also have, is a satisfying experience. :)

How do you use Tb yourself ?

Shredder - feel free to shred my bugmail (it has only eaten up some mail once, that was a few months back), else stable with many Gbs of data in various mailboxes. I use Archive often, but seldom touch Filters / Spam filtering.

Extensions ? - Which one ?

Bugmail, DOMi, Gloda Plugin: Bugzilla, Lightning, MozMill (it's the future in automated QA UI testing, folks!), Google Calendar provider, ViewAbout.

Anything you would like to add ?

Yeah! Thunderbird QA welcomes contributors from all walks of life, with all sorts of skills. As long as you have the passion and the willingness to learn, there's sure to be something available for you to be a part of.