Self-Introduction
06.08.07 - 11:29am
Hi, I’m Al Billings and this is my blog on the shiny, new blog.mozilla.com site. I acted quickly and have a coveted two letter moniker.
I’m just starting on the Mozilla QA team in the next week (I actually don’t start for most of a week). A few people here and there might know my name from previous work. I worked on Internet Explorer at Microsoft starting in IE4 and 5, taking some time off for other projects, and then continuing in IE6sp2 and IE7. I ran the public Internet Explorer blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie for about a year and a half and also the aborted and much lamented public bug database that was put away after I left the company…
A bit over a year ago, I decided that I was tired of working at Microsoft and living in my birth city of Seattle so I upped and quit, moving to the Bay Area with my wife. I found a job working at MobiTV doing QA for PCTV, which is television on personal computers extending the products that MobiTV offers for cell phones. This project was (and is) browser based and I spent much of the last year doing primary QA work in Firefox. Much of the PCTV project was done using open source development tools and using Linux as a primary piece of our infrastructure. Recently, members of the Mozilla team and I began talking and they convinced me to see the light and to come work on projects here.
Most of my geek time over the last 20 years has been spent on the Internet, especially the web once it was created. I’ve been on the Internet since 1989, back when we had to hack into the modem dial-in pools at my local university. I’m an ex-moderator of a couple of Usenet newsgroups (soc.religion.gnosis and soc.religion.shamanism) Since the mid-90’s, I’ve had a bunch of domains of my own on the net for various projects of mine, mostly spiritual stuff, and I’ve moderated a number of e-mail lists over the years as well. Before I worked at Microsoft, I was a webmaster at Spry, a Seattle-area startup that put out Internet in a Box, one of the first Windows Internet software suites with its own version of Mosaic.
I’ve been blogging for over five years with my primary blog currently being at arcanology.com. I have a podcast that I’ve begun doing recently called, “Ex Templo: Out of the Temple” that is over at extemplo.org that focuses on some of my non-tech interests.
I have a Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from the early 1990’s and I’m currently finishing my Master’s degree at a California State University school. Much of what most people qualify as “free time” is currently being spent on writing my thesis, which is currently about half done at the 70 page mark.
Needless to say, I have a fairly diverse background and I’m really looking forward to working with the members of the Mozilla community on making the best software for the web.
You might have convinced mozilla.com but you are certainly not welcome in the mozilla.org community. I can’t believe the lack of judgement in hiring you.
You decided to work for the Borg; you ran the disgusting IE Blog. How much propoganda were you responsible for there? How many web developers did you avoid listening to? When did you ever give a straight answer? Then you have the gall to try to infect Firefox. You’re probably just a trojan horse for the M$ patent wars anyway.
You seemed to have a typical Micro$oft bunker mentality when you were there – I remember the flamewar on the Obasanjo weblog. “When do you start at Google” was your pathetic reply to some genuine criticism about a IE7 beta version – but you didn’t have the guts to say it before you were leaving. Do you really think that was cool?
We don’t need the PM culture that is suffocating M$ in the open source world, thank you very much. You say you’ll do QA but I bet you’ll spend most of your time whining.
Well, as always, you are welcome to your opinion. I disagree with it and I’m pretty sure that the people I’m working with now do as well. I’d be happy to have a constructive conversation about any of this if it could be kept civil and not become some kind of personal thing.
I’ve been working at MobiTV, a Bay Area startup, for the last year on a web-based TV project. The work was fun but I found that I wanted to work on browsers again as the web has been so much of what I’ve done since the 1994 and Spry. I’ve been running open source software on and off for years (I run Ubuntu about half the time on my main system and do a bunch of stuff with your typical LAMP installations for my web projects) and I’ve also been supporting Firefox for projects that I’ve been on for a while. It seemed like a good fit with my background in the browser space and I’ve been happy to be given the opportunity.
I’m not sure where the vitriol directed at me personally comes from. There isn’t much point in making things personal when they don’t have to be. Seriously, I do understand why people don’t like Microsoft and, really, I had my own issues with many many aspects of what the company does and is. I decided to go work for them because it was a good opportunity career-wise when I was in my mid-20’s and I was a Seattle native. Questions about what the company’s effects on software and goals are part of why I eventually left, moved away, and found other work. I didn’t want to support it anymore and I wanted to do something a bit more interesting with my life. Working at a startup proved not to really be it either. I think that Mozilla has a continuing opportunity to continue to make a difference on the web and that’s part of why I came here.
I’d much rather chat with people in the community and if people have questions about me or my background, have it occur in a respectful manner rather than just exchange rants with people. That really doesn’t serve anyone, does it?
I’m hardly a trojan horse though. I’ve been gone from Microsoft for more than a year and I’m an individual just like anyone else. You can read my main blog at http://www.arcanology.com if you want to delve into my non-work interests but a lot of it centers around finishing my Master’s degree and various Buddhist things.
As to the “disgusting” IE Blog, I’m not sure that I follow. Was it “disgusting” simply because it was attached to IE or was there something about it specifically that you didn’t like? I’m fairly happy with the work that I did while I was there and my attempt (and it was an attempt) to get IE to have an open bug database.
That blog was and probably still is very popular and was one of the first continuing windows where people in the larger world could interact with members of the IE team. There are no specific propaganda to it other than showing that the project had a human face and to make it a bit less of a black box. Microsoft has gotten a lot better about that over time, even if it is a huge monster of a corporation.
The way that the IE Blog worked and probably still works is that the person running it would solicit posts from the members of the team for things that they were working on or ongoing issues. With a few exceptions when marketing people came around and wanted to try to make sure there were posts mentioning upcoming conferences or releases, it was driven by the desires of individual members of the IE team without a huge amount of oversight. I and the others were given a lot of rope to potentially hang ourselves with.
Mozilla is way ahead in that sort of space and in openness in communication. That is also part of what drew me to come work here. Where else can you work on a pretty cool set of projects in such an open atmostphere and without it being driven simply by the desire of people to make it rich through an IPO or the like? I’ve found that everyone here really cares about the project and the web. As someone who has worked on three web browsers now at three different companies (four browsers if you want to count MSN Explorer but I generally don’t) and who has been building websites since 1994, I really do find that to be of value.
Al
Joe, I’m not sure who you think gave you the keys to the “mozilla.org community” but you certainly don’t speak for me and I’m a founding member of that community. I’m sure thankful that most of the people I know in the community don’t share your attitude, because if they did, this wouldn’t be the kind of project to which I’d want to contribute.