…or I guess day 13 if you include weekends? (I don’t even watch big brother.) You can tell this is informal, right? And entirely my own opinions ;)

Work I’ve been doing

• Implemented and shipped the User Activation API in my first week!
• Almost done lazy loading iframes now too. Patch is submitted for review as of writing. Landing that and shipping next week, probably.

Rambling Headlines

Subtly sacrificing anonymity and/or privacy: My real name is now obviously tied to my username in some (work) places online publicly, and I’m okay with it. I still won’t use my name publicly in most situations as it is mostly an unneeded formality (hi Xitter™), for me at least.

Video calls are a necessary pain: if you’re like me (going to give it a 50% chance), you’re not very comfortable with your physical appearance generally. I’ve been trying to improve this for the past year or so by going out more, etc. and it has worked quite a bit (introvert–). Still not liking it most times but slowly becoming accustomed to it.

Blogging™: I’m trying to post things (see this) now. Even if rambling and mostly meaningless.

Positivity: I used to be quite pessimistic but this year I’ve mostly improved* that too. I try to just be uplifting because I know it makes me and (hopefully) those around me (be it colleagues, friends, or randoms) happier. I use :) probably 1000% more than before, heh. Sometimes it feels informal, but if someone thinks that, I don’t really care :)          * not necessarily a bad thing but something I don’t personally seek

Glossary glory: I’ve learnt many random internal terms over the past month. Some words make me laugh too much (foxfooding, firehose, chemspill). A lot are public! :)

Slack or Matrix? An eternal question: Mozilla use both Slack (internal) and Matrix (public). Most engineers prefer Matrix because open-source™ and transparency, etc. Slack is still used for internal talk; important things like dog pictures.

How public should where you work be? This is an interesting question I have been pondering on what my “policy” should be. While I should be free to just say where I work/what I do whenever to whoever, I should probably also understand the risks. Also I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to boast/etc. However, anyone with my username can find my profiles on other sites anyway and see where. Risks?

1. I guess someone could report you to your employee making up some yikes claim which could get you investigated/etc. Seems rare though? (Also quite messed up.)
2. Someone might hate your employer for whatever reason and therefore automatically hate you. welp.

Cool people are cool: I work with cool people, both in Mozilla generally and my team (still feels weird to say). They are all great, everyone is very welcoming and nice. That is it :)

@<bigcorp>.com: Every time I see a @mozilla.com or @google.com or … email to me, I still go !? internally for a second but realize that’s normal now.

Not talking about things: I mostly try to avoid browser preference talks now. I could, there is nothing really stopping me. Just it isn’t really a good idea, and nothing good would come of it. Also triple checking before posting things publicly since affiliated™.

Work life balance: Since beginning, I knew I should take this seriously and glad to say I have been doing so. I have mostly restricted myself to doing work/Mozilla things during my daily working hours (with the odd reply/quick fix). I also intentionally go in another room for breaks, it helps a surprising amount.

Text capitalization: I have adopted the approach for using capitals for formal/professional things. and then lack thereof for casual talking. Really, this post should be in lowercase but it is just above the threshold.

Trying to explain my job: ~90% of people I talk to understand what I do on a basic level, I work on Firefox, the web browser. What I actually do for it though, probably <5%. I say “DOM” and someone either goes “oh yeah cool” or they don’t know what I’m talking about at all. For the latter, I usually say something like “I work on browser features people who make websites can use to improve them”. (wait, is this really a devops job?) Shout out to one person who I said “I work at Mozilla” to and they said “what’s Mozilla?” - I forget that it isn’t 100% known.

This is probably all oversharing/rambling, but I’m okay with it. (unless it ends up on hacker news or something in which case… :p)