Today I start work at a new position with the Mozilla Corporation. This has been a long time coming (been interviewing with them for about 1.5 months now) and I’m terribly excited about where this is going to lead. I’m going to be working in Developer Relations; this involves interacting with everyone from Firefox core developers, to extension developers, to general web developers.
In general, the purpose of the position is to make the job of developers easier. This involves listening to what they need and figuring out how to get it done. In actuality, this will include writing tools (such as extensions or JavaScript libraries), writing documentation, and generally evangelizing the Mozilla platform.
There’s a lot of things that excite me about the Mozilla Corporation itself, in addition to their platform.
- They’re a very agile open source project. Virtually unencumbered by corporate tie-ins (unlike Red Hat or MySQL, for example), they get to work directly with the end users.
- They’re still (comparatively) young. They only have about 70-80 employees, but about 80 million users. There’s room in there for some explosive growth.
- They’re the darling of the web development community. They have the opportunity to promote tons of standards, while forging the way for creating some new ones of their own.
- They have a ton of really cool technology that’s just begging for some more attention. XULRunner is tons of fun – and has fantastic potential. The internal SQLite implementation is begging for some more attention. Much of the XPCOM functionality (Sockets, File I/O) is fantastically useful, just cloaked in confusion and terminology.
- They actively support web developers; they support popular tools such as the Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug, provide documentation on common web technologies (JavaScript, CSS, HTML) – and they’re looking to increase and improve this. Any company whose marketing technique is to improve web development, and win over users, is awesome in my book.
- They’re all about JavaScript. They created it, they’re implementing it, they’re building the next version. They’re looking to build all sorts of tools to help JavaScript developers and to make JavaScript-intense sites faster. This is definitely something that I want to be a part of.
- They want to better facilitate, and support, development with JavaScript libraries. Looking for ways in which the browser (or the tools in the browser) can help to solve common problems. This is very cool and a great step forward. Having significant experience with JavaScript libraries, I’m going to be helping to push this process along.
I’m going to be sorting out exactly what I’ll be up to in the upcoming weeks, but for now I’m content just reading through cool stuff like Mozilla’s SQLite and DOMStorage implementations. A large part of my position is going to be reading through and trying cool stuff (like, say, XULRunner) and writing tutorials/blog posts about what I find. This, alone, is pretty cool – but being able to hack on, and promote, some of the most influential code in the industry really just seals the deal.
In all, I’m quite excited by this new position and am looking forward to my prospects in 2007.
Dean Edwards (January 2, 2007 at 3:17 pm)
Congrats! That sounds like a great job. You deserve it!
Sean Graham (January 2, 2007 at 3:56 pm)
Again, Congrats!
Thanks so much for coming over my place on New Years, you guys helped make it a great party!
Neil Mix (January 2, 2007 at 4:05 pm)
Congrats John! I couldn’t imagine a better fit for the job.
Cheston (January 2, 2007 at 4:08 pm)
Congratulations! That sounds so exciting!
Steve (January 2, 2007 at 4:30 pm)
Congratulations! About half-way reading your announcement, it occurred to me how good of a fit you are with Mozilla. Bradley mentioned the company you were interviewing with was a good fit, but I didn’t realize it was an understatement.
I look forward to your contributions.
Justin Palmer (January 2, 2007 at 5:41 pm)
Congrats John! As Dean said, a well deserved job. Looking forward to those blog posts. :-D
Jurriaan Persyn (January 3, 2007 at 3:54 am)
Congratulations. Hope you’ll have a great and exciting time at Mozilla’s. I’m looking forward to hear more from it. Good luck!
Hatem (January 3, 2007 at 5:29 am)
Congratulations, hope you’ll enjoy the Mozilla’s experience.
Felix Geisendörfer (January 3, 2007 at 11:14 am)
Wow, that’s what I call an awesome job. Doing what you love to do, work with open source and write about it. Let me know if you get tired with it so I can take your place ; ) …
Zack Gilbert (January 3, 2007 at 6:28 pm)
Congrats, John!
Francisco Brito (January 3, 2007 at 10:46 pm)
Congrats! Moz or any other company that is lucky to have you is not just because of your proven technical abilities, but mostly because passionate [and good] developers are what really makes companies shine. Thus, I officially predict that you’ll make a big, long lasting, positive impact on the Mozilla Corporation and the rest of the developers across the world.
Good luck! (and don’t blow my prediction)
Patrick Hall (January 3, 2007 at 11:42 pm)
Congratulations, that sounds like a perfect fit.
Eric Shepherd (January 4, 2007 at 11:39 am)
Welcome to Mozilla, John!
Brock (January 4, 2007 at 11:46 am)
Wow, congratulations! Are you going to be staying in Boston, or moving out to CA?
shaver (January 4, 2007 at 11:51 am)
Welcome, John! It’s great to see that you’re as excited as we are about working together.
Now get back to work.
John Resig (January 4, 2007 at 2:54 pm)
@All: Thanks everyone for your kind works, I really appreciate them.
@Brock: I’m going to be staying here in Cambridge for the time being with a possible, eventual, migration to either Toronto or CA (but time will tell what’s actually the case).
Daniel Lorch (January 5, 2007 at 4:24 am)
I was expecting the “I work for Google now” :)
Theodore Ossit (January 5, 2007 at 1:05 pm)
Best wishes for great success, John. It’s great news for all of us, and especially for us web neophytes. As a MS Office/VBA programmer of many years but now just beginning to explore Mozilla and JavaScript development, I look forward to your guidance and insights as I begin the ascent of Mount XUL. Be my sherpa.
pd (January 6, 2007 at 8:46 am)
Great to hear that you are so intensely interested in mozStorage, XPCOM, libraries and so on. Of course your jQuery background suggests this but it’s great to hear your focus in your new role is to make these features more usable for developers.
I’m starting an Fx extension and the plethora of technologies and references to read through is somewhat of a substantial barrier to entry.
Coming from a Perl/PostgreSQL/JavaScript/CSS/xHTML background I’m having to get familiar with XUL/XPCOM/mozStorage and more.
Then I have to plough through the web searching for weird answers like how in XUL resize works only as a listener and not as an onresize tag attribute event handler. These inexplicable variations between web development and extension development are frustrating to say the least.
Perhaps when you are settled in one of your first tasks could be to document or simply remove the differences in web and extension JS implementations? Perhaps a normalisation library is possible?
More so than the reading, the lack of some simple widgets in XUL alongside the no-doubt powerful but messy XPCOM interfaces, really needs attention.
It seems to me that JS is the bridge between newbies with minimal experience and experienced coders who build the C++ interfaces to JS.
Unfortunately the bridge is more of a rope bridge of the type seen in Indiana Jones films than a solid, predictable, everlasting bridge such as the Sydney Harbour or Brooklyn Bridge.
If you can help signpost (documentation) solidify (fewer leaks, faster running) and smooth out (develop coder-friendly pickers and widgets) the bridge, I think both experienced and newbie developers like myself will undoubtedly benefit.
Bret Reckard (January 8, 2007 at 1:54 pm)
Welcome to Mozilla, John! We’re all excited to have you working for our current and future users!
Dan Webb (January 8, 2007 at 9:34 pm)
Damn John, That’s an excellent job you have there. Congrats!