Five-Year Moziversary

Wowee what a year that was. And I’m pretty sure the year to come will be even more so.

Me, in last year’s moziversary post

Oof. I hate being right for the wrong reasons. And that’s all I’ll say about COVID-19 and the rest of the 2020 dumpster fire.

In team news, Georg’s short break turned into the neverending kind as he left Mozilla late last year. We gained Michael Droettboom as our new fearless leader, and from my perspective he seems to be doing quite well at the managery things. Bea and Travis, our two newer team members, have really stepped into their roles well, providing much needed bench depth on Rust and Mobile. And Jan-Erik has taken over leadership of the SDK, freeing up Alessio to think about data collection for Web Extensions.

2020 is indeed being the Year of Glean on the Desktop with several projects already embedding the now-successful Glean SDK, including our very own mach (Firefox Build Tooling Commandline) and mozregression (Firefox Bug Regression Window Finding Tool). Oh, and Jan-Erik and I’ve spent ten months planning and executing on Project FOG (Firefox on Glean) (maybe you’ve heard of it), on track (more or less) to be able to recommend it for all new data collections by the end of the year.

My blogging frequency has cratered. Though I have a mitt full of ideas, I’ve spent no time developing them into proper posts beyond taking my turn at This Week in Glean. In the hopper I have “Naming Your Kid Based on how you Yell At Them”, “Tools Externalize Costs to their Users”, “Writing Code for two Wolves: Computers and Developers”, “Glean is Frictionless”, “Distributed Teams: Proposals are Inclusive”, and whatever of the twelve (Twelve?!) drafts I have saved up in wordpress that have any life in them.

Progress on my resolutions to blog more, continue improving, and put Glean on Firefox? Well, I think I’ve done the latter two. And I think those resolutions are equally valid for the next year, though I may tweak “put Glean on Firefox” to “support migrating Firefox Telemetry to Glean” which is more or less the same thing.

:chutten