There already have been several excellent blog posts about the Summit. I want to talk about the biggest opportunity that the Summit provided – in-person connections. I’ve been involved with Mozilla since 2011 and this is the third Mozilla event I’ve attended. Compared to the previous events, Mozilla Summit 2013 was a sensory overload, in a pleasant way of course.
On Wednesday, I met pleia2 at Union Square. We walked around and had dinner at her favorite burger place, which had a beautiful view of the Union Square. The next day, I was at the Mozilla Space in San Francisco. I spent most of the day working on HTML parsing for “Who Owns What”. It turned out that Rob was headed to Santa Clara via Caltrain and stopped by the office to say hi. I love trains, and I joined Rob. We had a great conversation going all the way until the hotel.
At the hotel, I was excited to say hi to Ben, we’ve known each other from Ubuntu and Mozilla communities. I accidentally got into the wrong elevator and I met Wes on it. That evening, a hilarious confusion happened, which is now a running joke among those who know Ashish and me. Jen and a few others walked up to Ashish and asked if he was Nigel. When I finally did meet Jen, Sole, and jbuck; sole amended my nametag to say “The real nigelb”. I believe Ashish later had “Nigel Babu*” written on one side of name tag, with the * expanded below to “*Not”. That evening, I met Jessica Ledbetter and James Tantum, who I know primarily from the Ubuntu community, for dinner at a nice Greek restaurant.
Over the course of the Summit, I met glob, bhearsum, dolske, edmorely, Dino, Gen, sid0, peterbe, Kaitlin, Kate, Hilary, Ludovic, and lots of Mozillians from the Asian and especially Indian community who were familiar from the Mozcamps. On Friday evening, after the Firefox OS dinner, I met morgamic for the first time! It was definitely an exciting moment for me. Later, philikon was talking to morgamic and he looked familiar. I asked him his IRC nick name and I had an Aha! moment. I’m grateful to have met all the folks from Mozilla Webdev who were in Santa Clara – Ben, Erik Rose, Luke, David Walsh, Jen, Sole, Owen, James, Craig, Peter, Lars, Rob, zalun, and others who I don’t even remember names to make a proper list. After the Summit, I went to the Pinterest office to meet Dave Dash. He was my mentor when I first started contributing to Mozilla and again, it was great to meet him in person. As I think back to the summit, all the people I’ve met are my most treasured memory.
Note: If I haven’t mentioned your name, it’s because I’ve forgotten it. These few weeks have been a bit stressful and it’s been more then 2 months since the Summit.
Leave a Reply