One Year At Mozilla

When I was a naive but bright-eyed kid attending a small technical college in 2002, I was first introduced to Mozilla.  The Mozilla browser looked incredibly similar to Netscape but provided a few additional development tools (like syntax-highlighted source windows)!  Developing within Mozilla's browser really sparked my love of web development.  Then Mozilla's browser became Firebird, and then eventually Firefox.

In 2009 I caught the attention of Mozilla (or a Moz recruiter) and I was flown to Palo Alto for an interview.  Mozilla was relatively small in those days;  the offices were rented across from Google, the building was old, there were many fewer employees, and many fewer projects.  I was devastated to not get hired back then but I kept a Mozilla employee's business card in my car to remind me, when I drove to work each day, that my goal was to represent the dinosaur and that I was on the fringe of being "good enough."  There's no better reminder of a goal like that then seeing the dino on the way to a job you dislike.

Three years later, in April of 2012, I was again summoned to Mozilla and I was blessed enough to make the cut.  My second week was spent in Santa Clara getting tipsy meeting with my coworkers, proposing new ideas, improving my team skills, playing beach soccer, and winning that work week's hack contest.  When you wake up in a hotel overlooking the ocean in your second week...you know you're doing OK.

My primary responsibility has been and continues to be the Mozilla Developer Network.  I've been working with legends like Luke Crouch, Les ("Is More") Orchard, James Bennett, Eric Shepard, Ali Spivak, and numerous other quality developers and documentation gods.  I've worked for an incredible manager, James Socol, who has been the best manager I've ever worked for;  quick to get answers, honest in criticism, and never afraid (even motivated) to jump into a code review.  Even the WebDev boss, Mike Morgan, listens to my hoops smack talk.  The atmosphere and developers I've found myself around are unbelievable.  Inspired to do legendary things every day.

Since joining Mozilla, I've been able to:

• Help launch kuma, the new MDN platform
• Implement new features on MDN
• Travel to Brazil to speak about MDN and Firefox OS
• Travel to Toronto, Mountain View, and Austin to talk about Firefox OS and MDN
• Dip my hand into gaia (Firefox OS), X-Tags, Firefox Marketplace, Mozilla Hacks
• Be a test drive for the Firefox OS phone
• Make acquaintances with hundreds of incredible developers

That's one hell of a year, man.  This first year at Mozilla has been a blast, and look forward to many more years helping to keep an open web!