To those I haven’t yet had a chance to speak to one-to-one (there have been a lot of you!), this is my last week as a paid contributor to the Mozilla project. It’s also the week I finished and published a board game I’ve been working on for a year or so, called Moving Out (At Last).

It’s a misleading naming combo for this blog post title, but it made me chuckle, so I’m sticking with it 🙂

To say my time at Mozilla has been ‘an experience’ would be an understatement. I will miss climbing mountains with friends and breakfast meetings where all participants are battling with remnants of glitter painted faces and recovering from wonderful conversations that had run on into the early hours of the same morning. Saying goodbye has been hard as this place is full of friends, but I also like change, and am excited about what’s ahead.

To keep doing my job well at Mozilla, I would need to keep travelling, and probably travel even more. And while I miss my colleagues when I’m working remotely, I miss my family and my little kids even more when I’m travelling for work. For me, right now, I want to be in my own locale. In a part of the world I call home, and where I feel totally privileged to be raising my family.

There’s never a ‘good’ time to leave an organization you care about, but this is probably as good as any. The Foundation are gearing up to implement a new strategy that I think will make their work even more impactful and which makes the role of the Foundation within the overall Mozilla project clearer than it’s ever been. It’s been an honour to contribute to that strategy, and I’m excited for the work ahead. The nice thing about stepping out of an open-source org is no-one shuts the door behind you (I hope not anyway!?).

“Have your heart be where your feet are” (h/t to CLAW who shared this article with MoFo colleagues last week). This quote perfectly captures what I’m excited about for the next phase of life.

As of next week, I’m joining the wonderful agency Kyan in my home town of Guildford. I’ve known Kyan for a long time through their work, and their efforts to bring together the local developer community. I’m excited to be working with new colleagues in the same physical location and the same timezone. And excited to be learning some new programming skills while getting to grips with new development projects. I’m endlessly grateful for the things I’ve learnt travelling around the world with Mozilla, but I’m happy to be swapping planes for trains.

Rather than taking time off between roles, I’ve overfilled my upcoming weekend by signing up for Awesome Sports Jam. By this time next week, I may have shipped a bad sports game to compliment that board game. Mostly though, I’m enjoying being a part of this community.

Just as I finished writing this post, this song came on Spotify. I wasn’t looking for a song to include, but it fits. To my friends and Mozilla “thank you for the records”: