Switching careers, starting soon with Mozilla

On July 6th, I will be going through a major change in my life: I’ll be leaving the company I co-founded and worked at for nearly a decade, and will be starting at Mozilla as a contractor.

I’m confident that the company I co-founded will continue to prosper under its new parent company, and I will be excited to hear about the company’s success over time.

I’ll leave behind many great memories, exciting projects, and extremely intelligent co-workers.

A few months ago, I was approached by a Mozilla technical recruiter and after careful consideration actually turned down the offer for contract work. For several months, I was torn on whether to stay at my current comfy job, or to step out of my comfort zone, and do what I’ve always wanted to do.

Several months later, reading John Resig’s (creator of jQuery) advice, I reconsidered and took the job.

It’s been an incredible experience working with everyone at Mozilla. The company is easily one of the most developer-friendly organizations I can imagine, with some of the smartest coders in the world. Mozilla is hiring across the board – I strongly encourage you to apply if you’re looking for one of the best jobs you’ve ever had.

I’ll be working as a contractor at Mozilla with the title of Platform Engineer. I’ll be working on Firefox and Core components which includes working with XPCOM, XUL, XBL, JavaScript, CSS, Python, and C++. I feel very privileged to be working on such an exciting project.

Why I chose Mozilla

A few reasons why I chose Mozilla:

• Much of the web’s technology and innovation was developed at least in part by Mozilla.
• The Internet wouldn’t be what it is today without Mozilla.
• They are a relatively small and open source organization; your work will be seen.
• They support openness and stand behind their beliefs to deliver a free and open web.
• Some of the smartest people in the world work there, my old company also had this, but the other people had similar backgrounds to me.
• Firefox has a significant market share and is used by millions of people around the world.
• Mozilla has a thriving extremely intelligent community behind it.
• They are not forcing me to move and they embrace a distributed team.
• They do what is right, and not what makes the most money.
• I get to be part of something larger than myself.
• Mozilla is one of the coolest places and code bases I could ever have the privilege to work on and contribute to.

Mozilla is accelerating their release cycle as well which is exciting in itself. Firefox 4 was released in early 2011, and they plan to also release versions 5, 6 and 7 in 2011.

If you are a developer interested in contributing to Mozilla related technologies, a good place to start is the Developer Guide. If you’d like to find out more about pursuing a career at Mozilla, read here.