Building steam (with a grain of salt)
Posted 4 years, 1 month ago at 10:36. 3 comments
Today is Chase’s last day at the Mozilla Corporation.
Chase has carried the Mozilla build/release process on his back since Firefox 1.0, and did so without complaint for far longer than we had any reason or right to expect him to. Perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay him is that the two of us who are scheduled to step in and try to fill his shoes are genuinely worried about being able to handle it.
As to the points about corporate opacity that Chase brings up, I really don’t know what to say. I think I’m better plugged in than some as to what is going on in the corporation, due in large part to daily IRC updates from shaver, but this could simply be another case of “not knowing that I don’t know.” Working remotely certainly doesn’t help in this regard.
Mozilla has chosen to walk a fine line, needing to balance community openness with the inevitable corporate secrecy that comes with running any company. It’s not an easy thing to do, and sometimes I think this ends up confusing things, muddying the waters and causing the opacity of which Chase speaks.
Having a strong, well-reasoned, sane internal direction is important to keep everyone on the same page. Since I started with Mozilla, I think the company has been getting better at conveying that direction to its contributors, employees, and hopefully to the community-at-large. Sadly, we didn’t do it well enough or fast enough to keep Chase.
Chase, it has truly been a pleasure. All the best in the future.
(On a totally unrelated side note, this post is totally not viewable when I come to it via a link within another post from Google Reader, such as “http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/preed/2006/02/everyones_telling_chase_storie_1.html”; the Google highlighting extension you have in WordPress totally dies. [Clicking on the post title fixes the issue, presumably because the referrer header doesn't include a Google address.] I’d appreciate if you’d submit a bug report on this to the extension’s maintainer or upgrade to a fixed version if one exists. In any case tho, feel free to remove this comment after you’ve dealt [or not dealt, if you choose] with this issue. Thanks!)
Since I don’t often surf to my own site from Google or elsewhere, it was very helpful to get this kind of bug report. I’ve upgraded the plugin, and things _should_ be working as expected now. Thanks for the comment, Jeff.