Moziversary #2

Today is my second Moziversary. I joined Mozilla as a full-time employee on May 1st, 2018, not too long after contracting with them via my previous company.

I am part of the Firefox Add-ons team and I work on AMO, which is much more than “just a website”. I spent 2019 working on the server stack as well as creating and deploying new security tools to cope with malicious activities. Everyone seems happy with my work, I received positive feedback from my peers and manager and I even “over-performed” last year. In 2020, I started to work on the Firefox codebase and that’s exciting!

Now, if I ask you to name the first thing about your current employer when you think about it, what would it be? For me, and that might sound dumb but it is the truth, my first thought is “Mozilla Firefox”, that piece of software I installed on every computer I could when I was 16-17 years old because “it was much faster than Internet Explorer” and… free. That was in the early 2000s.

My father was working for the main telecommunications company in France back then. Once my parents could afford a personal computer at home in the late 1990s (an IBM Aptiva <3), we were able to get 56k Internet, then 128k (ISDN) and later DSL. That’s how I met the Internet but it took me a few more years and bad grades in high school to grow an interest in computers.

I never imagined that I could work for a company whose icon was sitting on the Windows 98 Desktop of my parents’ computer one day. And yet, here I am, and that’s why Mozilla is and will always be special to me. It’s an immense part of my teenager memories, it reminds me where I come from (including my privilege).

Contrary to many of my colleagues, I wasn’t a volunteer before joining Mozilla and I knew little to nothing about Mozilla Corporation. I was following some of the Mozilla Foundation initiatives but I wasn’t a Mozillian. I fixed that since then ;-)

I am grateful to my current manager (who hired me) as well as all my colleagues in the Add-ons team and beyond. They are all amazing folks! I learned tons of things about everything, including myself, and these two years have been absolutely fantastic. Thanks y’all!