Three months as a Mozillian

16 Oct 2013
25 May 2020
< 1 minute

Fred_is_a_happy_MozillianI wrote a post after my initial week, and after the first month, and now for me, it’s a new milestone: three months. Yesterday was the last day of my probation at Mozilla, and I still have a job! More seriously, I was not expecting to lose my job after this period the human resources department invented: any company can fire you at any time if you don’t do your job correctly. It was just funny to ask my manager during our latest 1:1 if I’ll still have a job after that time. I learn a lot on the company, and the role for the last three months.

I was at the Mozilla Summit two weeks ago, and I had an epiphany. I’m not an employee anymore; I’m a paid contributor. Mozilla is giving me money to contribute to the Web full time: to help the web be more open. It’s a huge, and important mission! I’m also really happy with what I’m doing day to day: I can be myself, work on the things I like, and do what I call real evangelism. I have amazing co-workers from who I learn a lot. If you want to grow, you need to be surrounded by people more brilliant, and better than you, and it’s what it’s happening right now. I made some good friends as it’s also important for me to move those relationships from co-workers to friends. I put some faces on them too, as working remotely have some negative aspect like not knowing in person your co-workers. I also think I’m a far better Evangelist right now because of my experience, and how I’m handling my day to day at Mozilla: I’ve been driving my journey by thinking about the impact, the visibility, and the scale that my actions have – in other words, being efficient (thanks Ryan for this). I also have the pleasure to travel a lot, and around the world: I have the latitude to take some days off wherever I am to do the tourist. That also means that as a public speaker, I made my debut as an international speaker, and as I like to share my passion with other, this is amazing for me. I was always, and will invariably be a pragmatic guy, but my heart was always on the open side of things: I can say now that I have to two feet in it, and that I’m believing even more about transparency, openness, and freedom on the Web. I also learn that Mozilla is really just not about Firefox, or Thunderbird: we have many softwares, and programs that we (paid staff, and amazing contributors) are working on. Mozilla wouldn’t be possible without all the contributors, who took their time to make a better Web: it was amazing to see many of them at the summit. This company, or organization, whether you would like to call it, is all about doing stuff: as an example, the summit was all about discussions, and collaboration, no sits, and listens conference style like others. I really believe in a more open web, and a platform like Firefox OS: the power of HTML5 with no proprietary APIs. It’s truly about giving the web back to people, and giving access to the Web, and giving amazing tools to the people who build it, no matter which platform you use.

I’m proud to be a Mozillian, and I hope I’ll be a contributor for many more months years…

P.S.: This post is more a brain dump of everything I had in mind about my three months, but I thought that, even without any conductive wire, it made total sense…

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