I’ve been a Mozilla employee for all of 5 days so this isn’t so much of an update of all that I’ve accomplished (learned a tremendous amount of names and forgotten half of them) but rather some first impressions.
I spent the week at the Mountain View office which is where roughly half of all Mozilla employees work. (The rest work from the Toronto and Paris offices or from home, like me and most of my team.) The atmosphere is both laid back and intense at the same time. Everyone is very busy and it seems like most of the office is involved in an intense discussion most of the time but everyone was extremely welcoming and happy to help. I really liked how the offices were laid out. Everyone is in a very open cube format with lots of meeting rooms every where. Meeting rooms varied from big tables to informal sofas. I also liked how much of the discussion happens in public wikis and IRC channels.
I started work the same day as Gary Kovacs, the new Mozilla CEO, and we were introduced at the all hands meeting (which is not private to Mozilla employees but open to all the Mozilla community) along with Alex Miller, the 12 year old that fixed a security flaw in Firefox and won a $3,000 bounty. And a few other Mozilla new hires. I apologize that I have already forgotten your names – I was a bit nervous at the time. 🙂
I spent the week meeting people (both local and remote), meeting people face to face that I know from email, twitter and blogs, learning what they are doing, asking lots of questions about what they thought the developer engagement team should be doing as well as doing mundane (but somewhat exciting) stuff like getting a new laptop and signing up for benefits.
Now I am working on creating the 3 year plan for the developer engagement team with tasks broken down by quarter for next year. Luckily I work with a lot of smart people with some great ideas for the next couple of years.