Are you hanging on the edge of your seat?

Posted 10 months ago at 19:59. 2 comments

Today is preed’s last day at Mozilla. I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve written this blog post before.

First and most importantly, mad props to preed. We were both thrown to the wolves when Chase left, but by virtue of you being on-site, you had to shoulder the brunt of the build team burden. You held the team — and by extension the company and, dare I say, the project — together through sheer force of will in early 2006. It wasn’t always pretty, but stuff got done. You also set in motion many of the release procedure improvements and automation plans that are paying dividends now. Those of us who remain behind in the build team are profoundly grateful.

The build team is a much different entity today than when Chase left. For one, it’s actually a team now, implying more than 1 person. But have any of the other concerns Chase raised when he left been addressed? I personally notice a lot more Firefox hate in the blogosphere these days (I won’t dignify it by linking to it), much of it related to Mozilla not being open enough. Part of that comes from becoming a bigger target now in terms of market share. We’ve also grown concomitantly as a company.

Admittedly my perspective from inside the Mozilla corporation might seem skewed or Pollyanna, but I can now cautiously dismiss the opacity Chase saw at the time (and feared was endemic) to organizational growing pains. As we’ve grown, people who’ve traditionally had their noses in everything — Mozilla employees *and* community members — have had to learn to take a step back and trust the really smart people we’ve hired to do the jobs they were hired for. I think we’re doing a better job these days of keeping everyone abreast of what’s going on at a level that is sufficient to keep people from panicking that stuff is being dropped on the floor. That hasn’t been easy, and it does require a non-zero amount of effort from everyone involved on an ongoing basis to make sure that it’s always the case. Eternal vigilance, and all that.

We’re still incredibly small in a corporate sense, especially relative to the user base we are trying to support. We are also not perfect. It’s easy for people to take potshots at, e.g. Mitchell’s blog posts, but Mozilla is trying to do something no open source project has done before. People are right to call us out when we misstep (and there will be missteps), but you’ll have to trust me (and our track record) when I say that our heart is in the right place. We err on the side of being more open rather than less every single time it’s an issue and the community has a genuine interest or need to know.

We’ve lost some good people recently at Mozilla. It’s been very public and, at times, very painful. I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow…er, preed. There will be much sadness and scotch tonight, and not just because it’s a Monday.

It’s been a pleasure and an honor, sir.

Current Tunes: BT - Fibonacci Sequence | Filed under Build/Release, Friends, Mozilla |