In 2014 I had the opportunity to join the Web Compatibility team on a six month contract. This mission based team and community, opened me up to a way of working I had never experienced before. It had a major impact on how I view my work/life balance and overall happiness. When the possibility of returning came up this year, I was dead in the middle of a corporate job that had me flying around Canada and the U.S every week. When I’d return home for the weekend I was exhausted, with little time for family, friends and hobbies. I knew that I needed to get back to a place where I could be excited to work and able to find balance. Back in October of 2015, I attended a conference in Austin, TX for a week. Before leaving Austin I met up with Mike Taylor for some breakfast tacos and caught up with him. At some point I remember saying how much I enjoyed working at Mozilla and would love to return one day. Four months later when a position on the Web Compat team opened up, Mike reached out to see if I was still interested - I was pumped!
The on-boarding process this time around was pretty sweet. In May I attended the new hire on-boarding week in Mountain View. The group must have been 25+ people in size, all from different places in the world and within Mozilla. Each day we’d go through team building activities and get to hear from the leaders of each department. It was so much fun and we learned an incredible amount about the past, present and future of Mozilla. For sure, it was the best on-boarding experience I’ve been through. One topic that came up during our break time was imposter syndrome. Mozilla is full of talented people, which can be intimidating for new hires. I’m thankful that someone opened up about the topic as the conversations were reassuring.
In the last two years things have changed a bit at Mozilla and in Web Compat. We’re no longer supporting Firefox OS, which was previously our main focus. Firefox is now on iOS, unsurprisingly we don’t see many compatibility issues using webkit. Firefox on desktop is having more issues though, there are sites using only webkit prefixes, various video problems and even some tracking protection related bugs. Our website webcompat.com has come a long way and now we see anonymous bugs reported from regular web users.
It feels great to be back, I’m excited about the work ahead.