The roads I take...

Like many others, I've been thinking quite a bit these days about what went on last year and what will or might come up in 2012. (And I figure I should bring in a bit more from my overall personality into my future blog posts and mention or quote songs I have in my mind on a particular topic, so I'll start with that here).

One topic that has been with me throughout the year and will probably also continue to be with me is change. A lot of it started with my visit to Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View, CA, in October 2010, actually - I posted about my changing personal priorities back then. And I still remember driving my rental car up to Lake Tahoe, thinking about all those things and listening to the then-just-released Zac Brown Band album "You Get What You Give" and in particular the song "Let It Go", whose lyrics gave me the right mindset for what was I was going through and what 2011 would bring: "Save your strength for things that you can change, forget the ones you can't, you gotta let it go."

Following that, I started 2011 by transferring the vast majority of my responsibilities in SeaMonkey over to other people (we have built up a great team there over the last years, including awesome people like Callek, InvisibleSmiley, etc. - kudos to them to be able to take all that over in their free time) and get the ball rolling on making the project even more sustainable in the future (I hope we'll have news for you on that soon).

Instead, I followed another piece of advice from this song - "When the pony he comes ridin' by, you better sit your sweet ass on it" - and started contracting for Mozilla on the CrashKill team in February, first half-time, finally full-time. With that, my focus changed from SeaMonkey to Firefox and from project management to crash analysis.

For one thing, I ended up growing into that role better than I imagined at first, finding crash analysis more interesting than expected, for the other, this change ended up having more influence on my life than I had imagined. With the need to communicate a lot with different people in this job, from the CrashKill team via the Socorro team that works on the crash-stats server and which I'm coordinating with to various devs, engineering managers or release managers as the need arises in crash analysis.
Unfortunately with me being a "remotie" all communication needs to be online (or via phone) and is stripped down to the essentials needed for the job. Being a very social person, I'm missing the additional nuances that face-to-face communication would bring to the table, and more need for communication as part of the job makes that more obvious to me.
Then, the whole CrashKill team is based in Mountain View, the vast majority of the Socorro team spread across the US, and most engineering or release managers also based in Northern America, so most of that communication as well as all my meetings is happening during US working hours, which from my point of view in Europe is in the evening to night hours, which requires my work time to be mostly at the end of the day. I have been doing work at late hours in the years before, but there was not as much requirement of that before, while now I have to make at least the meetings, and should be available for more conversation on IRC at those times. Making evening appointments becomes quite difficult in that light.
And speaking of requirements, while I could basically completely make my own schedule before, I now should bring in 8 hours of work per day, and with doing that at the end of every day, I need to make all shopping and other private stuff in the afternoon, leaving me all day with "I still have a full work day to deliver today" in mind - until I achieve that and fall into bed. This causes its own share of subconscious stress.
And I'm doing all the work from my own private apartment, not getting out unless I go shopping or take my usual Monday and Tuesday evening off for some Karaoke.
So, I learned that working from home and remotely has its downsides, esp. for the kind of job I'm in there. This is one area I need to work on a lot in 2012 and find solutions that will be connected with another share of change I'm sure.

But not only my role and work life have changed - Mozilla went in a direction I had often spoken for and has changed to a rapid release cycle and started planning for that shortly after I started contracting. I commented in the planning phase and tried to help shape this process and always was convinced it was a good idea, even though we hit more road bumps than expected. I was heavily involved in coordinating to get crash-stats support rapid releases usefully and also laid out publicly how the new process can improve stability.
Mozilla also has revamped its mobile efforts completely - both with a completely new "native UI" version of Firefox for Android, which is in Aurora testing now and with a completely open mobile stack in the form of Boot To Gecko (B2G), a complete "operating system" based on the browser and open web standards (requiring new WebAPIs), which is also coming together piece by piece now.
And next to those changes, we're also working on changing how identity and logins work on the web and changing the current "silo"ed app store model by bringing open concepts for web apps and markets into the fold that easily allow decentralization and users really "owning" their apps.
In the middle of all that, Mozilla has restructured a bit, brought some previously split-off groups back into the common Mozilla fold, hired a lot of new people, lost (as employees but not as community members) a few high-profile ones who were looking for new challenges, worked on the MPL 2.0, founded exciting new initiatives like WebFWD and went stronger on marketing that we are a non-profit - clearly a lot of change happening everywhere, with the mission and the Manifesto standing unchanged and as clear as ever over all of it, though.

All this makes it clear that a lot of change has come in 2011, both to me and Mozilla, and that it's still only the seed for what's to come in the year(s) ahead. The winds of change are still blowing, and I'm excited for what they propel and which interesting experiences they drag in for all of us.