I remember arriving in Portland pretty clearly and I remember leaving. But the days in between? They’re a complete blur. It involved so many meetings and so many people.
Over the last few months, frankly, Mozilla has eroded a lot of my trust. The keynotes on Tuesday and Wednesday won a lot of it back. The Tuesday keynotes talked about the next year at a very high level at the morning. In the afternoon, the platform meeting with dougt and jst, narrowed it down to the context of the platform team. Later in the day, the A-team and RelEng coordination meeting narrowed it down some more. Just before the start of the platform meeting, I noticed the tree was closed and Wes and I were trying to narrow down what’s wrong and trying to fix it. The good part about having everyone in one room is, I could just walk over to catlee and say, “Hey, the tree’s broken due to something that looks like RelEng, can you take a look?”. We did that later too, when Ryan just walked over and asked Rail for help, since we were all in the same room anyway. Much more responsive than IRC!
My strongest memory from Wednesday’s keynotes is jonath’s daughter’s picture. Now I know why he starts his presentations with her picture! I found Darren Herman’s talk the most memorable of the lot (Well, except for Andreas, but that’s because it’s hard to beat an entry with ‘Ride of the Valkyries’). I remember the outrage from when we introduced Sponsored Tiles as a concept. I remember hating him a bit (okay, okay, a lot) and wondering why Mozilla even hired someone like him (Sorry!). In the context of our #ChooseIndependent campaign, it makes quite a lot of sense. This also took me back to a conversation I had with a friend before I started contributing to Mozilla. My friend said that he doesn’t believe that Mozilla is useful. They are entirely funded by Google, their competitor and Google can kill them any time (In retrospect, I think this conversation drove me to contribute). This focus to try and widen our revenue stream so we’re not dependent on one source is something that I now understand.
On Thursday, the schedule looked fairly light in terms of A-team related meetings and there was an extravaganza to attend! I tried to get some work done on Who Owns What during the day. Coding at a work week didn’t seem like a productive use of time and my instincts kept fighting with me. I eventually sat down and tried to narrow down the features of a minimum viable product. gps had a session about Mercurial that helped grok the internals a bit, though I still find git easier. My best guess is, I’ve made enough mistakes with git to recover from most fuck ups. On the other hand, I work with the Mozilla trunk branches with Mercurial and I can’t risk making a mistake.
I was purely running on an extra large dose of will power on Friday. I was exhausted and craving my own bed and lots of sunlight. The AWS game night was so much fun, despite losing. And digi has an excellent career as a chaos monkey. The party. Oh dear. I have videos that need to be uploaded. And a few videos that need to be converted to gifs. I mean, who wouldn’t want a gif of potch dancing, right? I wish I had the full video of the Psycho Killer performance. It was very well done. And hell yeah, Mozillians can dress up. Hats off to the IT team, who all looked really spectacular. I didn’t even recognize cshields at first 😛
Ted had coordinated Mozlandia running groups and I had bought all this gear to run in Portland, so I had to give it a shot. The jet lag woke me up at 5 am on Tuesday, so I went out for a run at around 6 am. As I left the hotel, the receptionist warned me, “It’s awfully cold”. I didn’t fully appreciate the gravity of this until I could feel my ears freeze over and I had a bit of a coughing fit thanks to the cold air hitting my lungs. I gave up at the 3 km mark, but it was by far my fastest run ever! I hurt my shoulder that night with an awkward sleeping position, so that was it for my running at Mozlandia 🙁
PS: Cheers to Mardi and the team behind the event for having it run so smoothly!
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