Mozilla @ 6 Months

Wow, It’s been six months since I joined Mozilla.

I’m super happy with the work, the team(s), and being closer to the Mozilla community. Working remotely hasn’t been an issue, I think for two reasons: Most of the webdev team is remote and Mozilla has been doing remote development for a looong time.

But being remote does mean that many people only know you through a textual nickname. When I’m messing around with Ubiquity, ServerJS, or SocialActions communities, it’s a grey area whether I’m wearing my Mozilla hat or my Ozten hat.

So that’s why I am…

Changing My Nick

I’ll be logging into IRC as ozten instead of aking from now on. At the risk of confusing people, I think it’s worth it in the long haul♦. I am already ozten on some of the many Mozilla community user databases and it’s the nickname I use across the net.

I’ll be updating my bugzilla email address to ozten.bugs (from mozilla.bugs.aking which was overkill anyways, but proves that I’ve hacked Java before).

♦ I don’t want to pull a make, where Dr. Feldman decided not to fix the whitespace issues of Makefiles, for fear of breaking his “dozens of users”.

Goings On

What have I been doing? Well not blogging on my personal site much… but that will change. No really, promise

I’ve been working on:

• Socorro UI – Mozilla’s crash reporting system, we’ve done several pushes

• Prior Art – A repository for you to record facts about software that is useful for patent research, defending against bogus patent claims, etc. think wikipedia + creative commons for developers and lawyers. This is going into alpha and we are looking for partnerships with organizations with lots o’prior art already collected to seed the database.

• Community Take Action Week – I’ve just started my first end to end project with marketing and QA around building a mini-site to promote volunteering and organizations that need tech help from the Mozilla community

Outside of Work

• I am also working on the last phase of my school / personal project. It will be launching soon, so stay tuned. It’s an experiment in adding “facets” to your “Lifestream”. It builds on top of Ubiquity and Firefox.
• I’ve help craft a UW extension program Foundations in Professional Software Development

Oh ya, and we’re remodeling our bathroom.

So the last 6 months pretty much flew past.

What’s it like inside the red beast?

Your soaking in it — Madge

So although I work for Mozilla Corporation, which is housed within the Mozilla Foundation and the larger Mozilla community, very little of what we do is Sekrit Corporation info. Everything I write is checked into public code repositories. Our Wiki, Bugzilla, and IRC communications are open for you. In the first couple of months I was amazed to see that the ship really is steered by the community and an overriding vision to keep the web open to anyone.

I’d have to say that the it’s part web developer and part public servant. This is a really great, and at times, a difficult thing, like any public service job.

I hate to use the term community so many times in this post, but I think I’m learning a lot about the concept in action.

Although I am young in my days at Mozilla, I feel like I made the right decision coming to work here. Here’s to the next 180 days!