lilmatt’s mozilla blog

For the last eight months I have been fortunate enough to have my work on Calendar funded by the Mozilla Corporation. During this time we’ve had two releases of both Sunbird and Lightning (0.3 and 0.3.1), and are on the cusp of a third (0.5). We have added tinderbox builds for our localizers, delivery of nightly builds to our testers (via AUS), crash reporting support to Sunbird, iTIP/iMIP invitation support to Lightning, read/write support for Google Calendar (via an extension), and improved CalDAV support, and have developed a community of regular contributors and testers. I am proud to have helped steward the Calendar project these past eight months and to have directly contributed to many of the above accomplishments.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and so my MoCo contract ends Saturday, March 31. On Monday, April 2, I begin working for Flock, the “social web browser” based on Firefox. I will continue to contribute to the Calendar project, and will continue driving the Sunbird/Lightning 0.5 release as much as I can, however I’ll no longer be all-Calendar, all-the-time. At Flock, I want to push some of their work on the core of Mozilla back into Mozilla-proper, so that we all can benefit. I feel so lucky to have found work where I can continue to hack on Mozilla stuff full-time.

I’ll be in Mountain View all of next week for indoctrination, and I hope to see folks for lunch, dinner, hockey or what have you. Working with everyone at MoCo has been a wonderful experience, and I deeply appreciate the opportunities I’ve had these past few months.

A number of people have asked me why I work for on Mozilla. They want to know what about Mozilla makes me want to be a part of it. Up until now I hadn’t been able to give a cogent answer that wasn’t simply a stream of consciousness exercise, full of insight but impossible to follow. However, after some lengthy discussions with folks, I may be able to explain this in thirty minutes or less.

My brother, Ph.D. does crazy-go-nuts immunology research. I have no doubt that if he hasn’t already, he will eventually save someone’s life through his work. It is clear to me that he makes people’s lives better through his research. His ex-wife, Ph.D. is the head of the mental health and counseling department for a large university. She without question has saved lives, and directly helps people with her work on a daily basis. My wife is a financial aid counselor for an Ivy-league university. She helps potential and current students get the funding they need to they can learn and become the next generation of crazy-go-nuts immunology researchers, head of mental health and counseling departments, and financial aid counselors, among other things.

Like my brother, his ex-wife, my wife, and all the rest of us, I have a set of skills and those skills are for the most part finite. Sure, I could attempt to learn absolutely anything, but for whatever reason, be it physical, genetic, or level of interest or enthusiasm, I just won’t be as successful at some things as I am at others. With good fortune, many of my skills and interests relate to computers, networks, software, problem solving, and the Internet.

Mozilla, through the software it creates, the community it has developed and maintains, and the technical influence it wields on the Internet, makes people’s lives better. Much like how an incandescent lamp converts electricity into light, helping Mozilla is how I feel I most efficiently, directly, and significantly can convert my skills and interests into real positive change for people, all over the world.

I hope this gives a folks a little more clarity into why I work for on Mozilla, and why I feel it working for MoCo has been such a privilege.

The next Calendar test day is tomorrow, December 19, beginning at 13:00 UTC.

Visit http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Current_QA_TestDay for all the details.