10 years a Mozillian, always a Mozillian

As of September 2021, I am leaving Mozilla after 10 years. It hasn't been perfect but it's been a wonderful time with fond memories and an amazing career rocket ship.

In April 2011, I joined as a web developer to work on internal web applications that support the Firefox development engineering. In rough order, I worked on...

• Elmo: The web application for managing the state of Firefox localization
• Socorro: When Firefox crashes and asks to send a crash dump, this is the storage plus website for analyzing that
• Peekaboo: When people come to visit a Mozilla office, they sign in on a tablet at the reception desk
• Balrog: For managing what versions are available for Firefox products to query when it's time to self-upgrade
• Air Mozilla: For watching live streams and video archive of all recordings within the company
• MozTrap: When QA engineers need to track what, and the results, of QA testing Firefox products
• Symbol Server: Where all C++ debug symbols are stored from the build pipeline to be used to source-map crash stack traces
• Buildhub: To get a complete database of all and every individual build shipped of Firefox products
• Remote Settings: Managing experiments and for Firefox to "phone home" for smaller updates/experiments between releases
• MDN Web Docs: Where web developers go to look up all the latest and most detailed details about web APIs

This is an incomplete list because at Mozilla you get to help each other and I shipped a lot of smaller projects too, such as Contribute.json, Whatsdeployed, GitHub PR Triage, Bugzilla GitHub Bug Linker.

Reflecting back, the highlight of any project is when you get to meet or interact with the people you help. Few things are as rewarding as when someone you don't know, in person, finds out what you do and they say: "Are you Peter?! The one who built XYZ? I love that stuff! We use it all the time now in my team. Thank you!" It's not a brag because oftentimes what you build for fellow humans it isn't engineering'ly brilliant in any way. It's just something that someone needed. Perhaps the lesson learned is the importance of not celebrating what you've built but just put you into the same room as who uses what you built. And, in fact, if what you've built for someone else isn't particularly loved, by meeting and fully interactive with the people who use "your stuff" gives you the best of feedback and who doesn't love constructive criticism so you can become empowered to build better stuff.

Mozilla is a great company. There is no doubt in my mind. We ship high-quality products and we do it with pride. There have definitely been some rough patches over the years but that happens and you just have to carry on and try to focus on delivering value. Firefox Nightly will continue to be my default browser and I'll happily click any Google search ads to help every now and then. THANK YOU everyone I've ever worked with at Mozilla! You are a wonderful bunch of people!