Moving to Mozilla

Eclipse family: March 23 will be my last day at IBM. I’m happy to announce that I’ll be joining the Mozilla Release Engineering team in April. 

We all wear many hats during our lives.  I’ve always been fiercely proud of the privilege of calling myself an Eclipse committer.  We’ve accomplished amazing things together.  I look forward to seeing the continued growth and success of the Eclipse community. 

At Mozilla, I’ll have the opportunity to work with a completely new software stack, and learn many new skills while working with very talented people. Best of all, my job will involve contributing to an open source community.  This is what I love to do.  The Mozilla goals of making the web better, and teaching a new generation to make content, instead of just consuming it, really resonate with me. Running builds on 1200+ machines raises some interesting scalability issues which I’m eager to learn more about.  It will be challenging work, and I’m honoured to have the opportunity to work at Mozilla.  I’ll be working from my home in Ottawa. 

Where there are new challenges ahead for me, at the same time it has been a difficult decision to let my contribution to Eclipse wane.  I’d like to continue contribute to Eclipse in some way but on a part-time or occasional basis.

My IBM colleagues, my fellow committers and the Eclipse foundation staff:  you are all extraordinary.  It has been a privilege to work with you and learn so much.  To those in the larger Eclipse community, you inspire me.  To the people on the Eclipse SDK and Equinox teams, I have never had the opportunity to work with such a wonderful group of people.  Not only are you creative and technically brilliant, but you are all so dedicated to doing the right thing and getting things done.   You’re all genuinely nice people, without ego, who are eager to share your knowledge with others.   It’s not often that software project ships on time every year for ten years and continues to delight its user community.  It is a testament to the team behind it that this continues to be the case.  

In the process of working on Eclipse, I’ve met some fantastic people, many who have become great friends.  I’ll miss the seeing your faces every day and discussing the finer points of Git migration strategies, but I’ll still be on IRC, Twitter, Linkedln, G+ etc.  If you live in the Ottawa area, I’m always up for lunch 🙂 

It has been a great run. Thank you all

Note #1:  I’ll continue to write on this blog. The name still applies 🙂
Note #2: I was going to call this post “Firefox-y Lady”.  Then I read the lyrics to the Hendrix song “Foxy Lady” and decided maybe not.