alex.polvi.net

… but my last day as an employee at the Mozilla Corporation is June 9th. By the end of next week I will have worked for Mozilla for exactly 1 year.

I thought it would be appropriate to talk about my experience at Mozilla via a chronological “highlights reel”. So yeah, here it is…

Polvi’s Mozilla Highlights Reel / Shout-out frenzy

June 2005 - June 2006

• Being hired!
• Supporting and befriending Justdave (he was the only sysadmin when I started)
• Implementing the Linux Virtual Server infrastructure that powers www, addons, aus, and various other things
• Researching and purchasing an network wide backup solution
• Being a booth-babe at OSCON with Mary and Rebron
• Getting Mitchell and others kicked out of a bar at OSCON
• Realizing that Brendan Eich was Brendan Eich
• Trips to the colo with Myk, in particular our discussion about profit and cost centers
• Releasing developer.mozilla.org
• Making Deb happy by releasing developer.mozilla.org
• The hour of terror
• Tejava
• Watching 5 seasons of Buffy with Mac daddy Aas
• An all night bug triage with justdave
• Riding in Stuart’s Lotus, “Heyyyy, wanna take me for a riiiiiiiddddddde?”
• Sneezing so hard I broke my powerbook
• Being one with spreadfirefox (the performance, the hacks, and the community)
• Getting locked in my garage in Mountain View on a Saturday at 1am when my roommate was gone for the weekend, and having Chase pick me up and take me to the Office (no keys, shoes, phone, or wallet) for sustenance and an ssh connection
• Physically picking up and driving cvs.mozilla.org across town
• Interviewing Aravind
• Having an engineering manager be hired
• Having a IT manager be hired
• The hand scanner at the colo!
• Trembling as I put www.mozilla.com into production, diverting a majority of www.mozilla.org traffic to it during the Firefox 1.5 release AND having the most kind and gracious moral support from Paul Kim while I did it (I had not physically met Paul at this point… seriously Paul, that was awesome, thanks again)
• Meeting Paul Kim
• The run around the office saying hi to everyone during the first 10min being on-site
• Screaming out Steven Garrity (from acts of volition radio!!!) at an inappropriate time
• Working with morgamic
• Working with morgamic to stabilize addons
• One hardcore night of Perl profiling with Shaver
• Being honored as Oregon State University’s Student Employee of the Year
• Going to nVidia to a “what’s up” with Jensen, Stuart, Vlad, Jonas and Oremj
• Any interaction with Karen
• Justin’s calm and helpful explanations of hosted environments, dealing with vendors, ASPs, and life
• Learning python
• Meeting preed at a LUG meeting before meeting him at work
• Developing a big enough collection of mozilla shirts that I can be constantly wearing a clean one (thanks marcia!! :)
• Talkin’ shop with Lilly and Schrep
• Learning the innards of mysql
• Taking a first look at mozilla statistics
• Being given guidance while looking at mozilla statistics

Whew!

Surely I left plenty-o-experience and people out, sorry about that… I’m human! (heart)

So, what’s next? In a couple weeks I’ll be moving across the country (NYC) to work for Google. Why? Well, it’s an experience thing. Mozilla has treated me extremely well and it is really hard to just get up and leave, but I’m still young and impressionable, so I need diverse work experience. I’m excited about learning completely new things, meeting completely new people, and understanding a completely different company.

I have no idea what I am doing after the summer is over. Nor do I have any idea what I’ll be doing when I graduate from college (spr ‘07).

I would especially like to thank the “powers that be” at Mozilla for supporting students. My heart is filled with joy because this year we have more students than ever working for the project.

So yeah, thanks for the amazing experience!

PS: If anyone is in NYC this summer around July 16 — I’ll be having my 21er! Parrrtay

This entry was posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Mozilla, Work.