Today—April 3, 2016—marks the tenth anniversary of the day I started working at Mozilla as a writer on the Mozilla Developer Center project (now, of course, the Mozilla Developer Network or MDN). This was after being interviewed many (many) times by Mozilla luminaries including Asa Dotzler, Mike Shaver, Deb Richardson, and others, both on the phone and in person after being flown to Mountain View.

Ironically, when I started at Mozilla, I didn’t care a lick about open source. I didn’t even like Firefox. I actually said as much in my interviews in Mountain View. I still got the job.

I dove in in those early days, learning how to create extensions and how to build Firefox, and I had so, so very much fun doing it.

Ironically, for the first year and a half I worked at Mozilla, I had to do my writing work in Safari, because a bug in the Firefox editor prevented me from efficiently using it for in-browser writing like we do on MDN.

Once Deb moved over to another team, I was the lone writer for a time. We didn’t have nearly as many highly-active volunteer contributors as we do today (and I salute you all!), so I almost single-handedly documented Firefox 2.0. One of my proudest moments was when Mitchell called me out by name for my success at having complete (more or less) developer documentation for Firefox 2.0—the first Firefox release to get there before launch.

Over the past ten years, I’ve documented a little of everything. Actually, a lot of everything. I’ve written about extensions, XPCOM interfaces, HTML, a broad swath of APIs, Firefox OS, building Firefox and other Mozilla-based projects, JavaScript, how to embed SpiderMonkey into your own project (I even did so myself in a freeware project for Mac OS X), and many other topics.

As of the moment of this writing, I have submitted 42,711 edits to the MDN wiki in those ten years. I mostly feel good about my work over the last ten years, although the last couple of years have been complicated due to my health problems. I am striving to defeat these problems—or at least battle them to a more comfortable stalemate—and get back to a better level of productivity.

Earlier, I said that when I took the job at Mozilla, I didn’t care about the Web or about Firefox. That’s changed. Completely.

Today, I love my job, and I love the open Web. When I talk to people about my job at Mozilla, I always eventually reach a point at which I’m describing how Mozilla is changing the world for the better by creating and protecting the open Web. We are one of the drivers of the modernization of the world. We help people in disadvantaged regions learn and grow and gain the opportunity to build something using the tools and software we provide. Our standards work helps to ensure that a child in Ghana can write a Web game that she and her friends can play on their phones, yet also share it with people all over the world to play on whatever device they happen to have access to.

The Web can be the world’s greatest unifying power in history if we let it be. I’m proud to be part of one of the main organizations trying to make that happen. Here’s to many more years!

Share this: Twitter

Facebook

Pocket

Email

