Today is my last day as an employee of Mozilla. It's been almost exactly seven years - two years working on graphics and layout for Firefox, and five years working on Rust. Mostly remote, with a few stints in the Auckland office. It has been an amazing time: I've learnt an incredible amount, worked on some incredible projects, and got to work with some absolutely incredible people. BUT, it is time for me to learn some new things, and work on some new things with some new people.

Nearly everyone I've had contact with at Mozilla has been kind and smart and fun to work with. I would have liked to give thanks and a shout-out to a long list of people I've learned from or had fun with, but the list would be too long and still incomplete.

I'm going to be mostly stepping back from the Rust project too. I'm pretty sad about that (although I hope it will be worth it) - it's an extremely exciting, impactful project. As a PL researcher turned systems programmer, it really has been a dream project to work on. The Rust team at Mozilla and the Rust community in general are good people, and I'll miss working with you all terribly.

Concretely, I plan to continue to co-lead the Cargo and IDEs and Editors teams. I'll stay involved with the Rustfmt and Rustup working groups for a little while. I'll be leaving the other teams I'm involved with, including the core team (although I'll stick around in a reduced capacity for a few months). I won't be involved with code and review for Rust projects day-to-day. But I'll still be around on Discord and GitHub if needed for mentoring or occasional review; I will probably take much longer to respond.

None of the projects I've worked on are going to be left unmaintained, I'm very confident in the people working on them, on the teams I'm leaving behind, and in the Rust community in general (did I say you were awesome already?).

I'm very excited about my next steps (which I'll leave for another post), but for now I'm feeling pretty emotional about moving on from the Rust project and the Rust team at Mozilla. It's been a big part of my life for five years and I'm going to miss y'all. <3

P.S., it turns out that Steve is also leaving Mozilla - this is just a coincidence and there is no conspiracy or shared motive. We have different reasons for leaving, and neither of us knew the other was leaving until after we'd put in our notice. As far as I know, there is no bad blood between either of us and the Rust team.