Two years ago I blogged about how it had been six years since I wrote my first patch for Firefox. Today I get to say that it’s been six years since I started getting paid to do what I love, working for Mozilla. In that time I’ve moved to a new continent, found a wife (through Mozilla no less!), progressed from coder to module owner to manager, seen good friends leave for other opportunities and others join and watched (dare I say helped?) Mozilla, and the Firefox team in particular, grow from the small group that I joined in 2007 to the large company that will soon surpass 1000 employees.

One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Mozilla is how flexible they can be about where you work. Recently my wife and I decided to move away from the bay area to be closer to family. It was a hard choice to make as it meant leaving a lot of friends behind but one thing that made it easier was knowing that I wouldn’t have to factor work into that choice. Unlike many other companies I know there is no strict requirement that everyone work from the office. True it is encouraged and it sometimes makes sense to require it for some employees, particularly when starting out, but I knew that when it came time to talk to my manager about it he wouldn’t have a problem with me switching to working remote. Of course six years ago when I started I was living in the UK and remained so for my first two years at Mozilla so he had a pretty good idea that I could handle it, and at least this time I’m only separated from the main office by a short distance and no time-zones.

The web has changed a lot in the last six years. Back then we were working on Firefox 3, the first release to contain the awesomebar and a built-in way to download extensions from AMO. Twitter and Facebook had only been generally available for about a year. The ideas for CSS3 and HTML5 were barely written, let alone implemented. If you had told me back then that you’d be able to play a 3D game in your browser with no additional plugins, or watch videos without flash I’d have probably thought they were crazy pipe-dreams. We weren’t even Jitting our JS code back then. Mozilla, along with other browser makers, are continuing to prove that HTML, CSS and JS are winning combinations that we can build on to make the future of the web open, performant and powerful. I can’t wait to see what things will be like in another six years.