Today marks my fifth year working for Mozilla! This past year has been both fun and frantic, and overall was a really good year for both Mozilla and Firefox. Here's a run down of some of the things I worked on in the past year.
In November we shipped one of Firefox's biggest updates ever, called Firefox Quantum. It was a huge update that took a ton of work, and the sucessful launch was a real focused effort from many different teams across the organisation. In all my time at Mozilla, I don't think I've ever seen such a combined focus in imporving our core product and getting our message across loud and clear that Firefox is fast again. My own contribution was building some of the main download pages that marketing used for the Firefox Quantum launch campaign.
Mozilla also went through a major rebranding excersize in the past year. In the midtst of launching Firefox Quantum, we have also been busy redesigning www.mozilla.org to incorporate the look and feel of our new brand. This is a huge task in itself, and something that is likely to take quite some time to complete given the size and breadth of the project.
To try and help us redesign fast and performant websites at Mozilla, one of my personal goals has been to try and help our team closely monitor our individual website's performance. To this end I built a web performance dashboard for the sites we are accountable for. It uses WebPageTest API and Google Lighthouse to measure the performance of key pages on our web properties. I hope to hack on this some more in the near future, but it's already helped us identify some key issues that we're otherwise difficult to spot.
After talking about it for way too long, we finally got buy-in to start building a design system for Mozilla websites! This is something we're only just starting on, but it's big enough to warrant a mention here as it will help us shape the future for how we design and build all our websites. It's called Protocol.
- I made over 224 commits to bedrock this past year.
- I have now filed over 522 bugs on Bugzilla, been assigned over 632 bugs and made over 4985 comments.
On the travel front, I got to visit both Austin and San Francisco for Mozilla all-hands weeks. As always, both weeks we're fun but exhausting. Austin is a great city, we ate way too much BBQ.