Mozilla staff photo from All-Hands event in Austin, December 2017.

Today marks my fifth year working for Mozilla! This past year has been both fun and frantic, and overall was a really good year for both Mozilla and Firefox. Here’s a run down a few of the things I got to work on.

Firefox Quantum launch

In November we shipped one of Firefox’s biggest updates ever, called Firefox Quantum. It was a huge update that took a ton of work, and the very successful launch was a real focused effort from many different teams across Mozilla. In all my time here, I don’t think I’ve seen such a combined focus in both improving our core product and getting the message across loud and clear that Firefox is fast again. My own small contribution was building some of the main download pages that were used for the launch campaign.

Mozilla rebranding

Mozilla also went through a major rebranding exercise over the past year. In the midst of launching Firefox Quantum, we were also busy redesigning www.mozilla.org to incorporate the look and feel of our new brand. This is a huge task in itself, and something that is likely to take quite some time to complete given the size and number of the web properties we own.

Performance

To try and help us redesign fast and performant websites at Mozilla, one of my personal goals has been to try and help our team more closely monitor website performance. To this end, I built a web performance dashboard to help monitor the sites we are accountable for. It uses WebPageTest API and Google Lighthouse to measure the performance of key high-traffic pages on our properties. I hope to hack on this some more in the near future, but it’s already helped us identify some key issues that were otherwise difficult to spot.

Design System

After talking about it for way too long, we finally got buy-in to start building a design system for Mozilla websites! This is something we’re only just starting on, but it’s big enough to warrant a mention here as it will help us shape the future for our design and development processes. It’s called Protocol (which is a hat-tip to the internal code name that was used for the redesigned Mozilla logo).

Contributions

I made over 224 commits to bedrock this past year.

I have now filed over 522 bugs on Bugzilla, been assigned over 632 bugs and made over 4985 comments.

Travel

On the travel front, I got to visit both Austin and San Francisco for Mozilla all-hands weeks. As always, both weeks we’re fun but exhausting. Austin is a great city, and we ate way too much BBQ.

Mozilla Austin all-hands closing party, December 2017.

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