A little more than 7 years ago today, I was at a park in Aliso Viejo with my then 2-year old son when @dan_portillo called. Mozilla was looking for a Network Engineer.

A little more than 7 years ago today I was interviewing in Mountain View. I carried a cell phone that could only make phone calls.

7 years ago today I walked into Mozilla’s Landings office and configured my own Thinkpad laptop by myself (we didn’t have Desktop Support).  

Two weeks later Mozilla’s company-wide All Hands fit in the back of Tied House. Two months later I moved my wife and two babies from Orange County to Northern California.

Along the way I bought a house and called this home.

7 years.

7 Years of Change

I’ve gone through 3 CEOs & 3 bosses. My team’s grown from 3 to 80. I manage an IT Operations team. I’m learning how to lead, how to lean into my strengths.

I’ve learned to delegate, to trust, to let go. And I’ve been surprised and impressed at every step by the caliber of people who chose to surround me.

I now have co-workers friends whose first names I don’t know and who I’ve only met in person less than a handful of times.

Before Mozilla I had only traveled internationally once. For my honeymoon.

I’ve been to Argentina (pictures) & China twice. Stepped foot in Peru. Been to Whistler twice. I’ve seen a bear eat out of a trash can and stood on top of a mountain in July. While it snowed.

I’ve been to Berlin, Switzerland, Amsterdam, Vancouver. Lost count how many times I’ve been to Toronto, to London, to Paris. 

I traveled to Nice and stayed with a fellow Mozillian. Half my twitter stream is in Spanish. My arguably best friend lives 8500 miles away.

Along the way I lost my passport.

7 years ago my first smartphone was a Palm Treo running Windows. I now carry three phones & a tablet and saw the future I want last year as Mozilla shifted to Firefox OS. I have — and want — the web in my pocket.

7 Years of Personal Change

My 9 month old daughter is now 7 (or 13, it’s really hard to tell). My son knows how to find my name in about:credits.

I’m deeply focused on being an advocate for Mozilla Webmakers. I care about eliminating the opportunity gap through Year Up. I’ve learned that a mission with purpose means more than profit.

7 years ago I was a shy introvert. I still am but you probably wouldn’t know it.  7 years ago I was a Windows user.

I’ve become a San Francisco Giants fan & saw my team win the World Series. Twice.

In the past 7 years I’ve made friends. 

Along the way I learned that without music life would be a waste. 

Celebrating 7 Years

I don’t want any gold watch.

I want to do the same thing I’ve done every day for the past 7 years. I’m going to go to work.  

I’m going to go and work with people who make Mozilla not just a job, who have made this my home for 7 years, and who are as passionate about Mozilla & the Open Web as I am.

Morning mocha. Morning Mozilla. #mozillamwc #Mozilla (Taken with Instagram at GSMA App Planet)

We are just about two weeks away from MozCamp Europe (Nov 12-13) and three from MozCamp Asia (Nov 18-20)!

As I talked about in Step 1, we want to figure out how we can leverage our resources and expertise to support the entire Mozilla Community and build a better, stronger Mozilla. At each MozCamp we’ll be hosting a workshop to talk and learn from you.

Even though we’re a couple weeks out, I wanted to share with you a draft version of the slide deck. Take a look - Mozilla IT & Community IT.

ps. Have you joined our Mozilla Community directory @ https://mozillians.org/ ?

“Help me… help you. Help me, help you. ” ~ Jerry Maguire

Last week I blogged about our efforts to be radical and pivot. The first area we’re focusing on is what I’ve started calling Community IT.

Mozilla’s IT/Infrastructure & Ops team is very adept at supporting the large and complex environment needed to support Firefox users. This same team supports Mozilla’s growing number of paid staff and supports the Mozilla Spaces & Offices, including network infrastructure and audio-visual systems.

There are a lot of technical tools this team manages at a very large scale. We want to answer the following question:

How can we leverage our resources and expertise to support the entire Mozilla Community and build a better, stronger Mozilla?

For the remainder of 2011, we hope to lead a discussion into what the Mozilla Community needs from IT. Think of it like your IT department. You are our customers.

• How can we help you?
• What IT resources do you need when you’re hosting a Mozilla Community event? A brown bag? A meet-up?
• What sort of collaboration tools do you need?

I invite you to look at some of the notes we’ve already started collecting at https://wiki.mozilla.org/IT/Community.

Want to get involved?

• Join the conversation and join the Community IT mailing list. Help us understand what you need from this team.
• Join the IRC channel, irc://irc.mozilla.org/it
• Join the Community IT SIG. Be part of this task force.
  • Help us teach others about the IT tools we have available at your disposal
  • Help act as IT support at Mozilla Community events
• Meet us in person! At these events we’ll be holding round table discussions to learn more from you. We’ll also be on-hand to to lend support.
  • Mozilla Festival (Nov 4-6)
  • MozCamp Europe (Nov 12-13)
  • MozCamp Asia (Nov 18-20)

This is a particular interesting Step 1. I’ve seen what Community can do. Imagine what you can do with the right set of IT tools.

I’ve been at Mozilla for 5.558 years (or 2001 days but who keeps count?).

Over that time I’ve seen my role within Mozilla change from a network engineer on a team of three to helping orchestrate a team of 38. While my role and job title has surely changed, I don’t think my job actually has. In fact, I can sum up my entire job description with the following:

To empower the Community to promote the Mozilla Mission.

So great, that’s my job, summed up in one line. What does that actually mean? How do I go about doing that? And what is the Community?

Good questions.

First, the easy one. In the Mozilla world, people are everything^*. The Mozilla Community is you. It’s me. It’s everyone who contributes to the Mozilla project, whether paid staff or volunteer contributors. Es todo el mundo.

Second, I’m going to back up a bit. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve been spending time with Engagement and talking more and more about Community, so much so that I’ve started using it as a proper noun. How did I get there?

Back in late Spring, I took a now pivotal trip to Buenos Aires. People close to me are probably tired of hearing me say it, but I came back from that trip with an affinity for gelato and espresso. And Community.

Then I took a trip to Paris (and yes, lost my passport). I spent a little time there learning more about the Mozilla Community.

Then it hit me. I’m IT, an Ops guy. I am also Engagement. We all are. A couple weeks ago Mozilla had nearly all 600 employess onsite for a company All Hands. One particular keynote hit me and focused a lot of my thoughts and feelings into a singular point. I took notes. A lot of notes.

• We will never have enough employees to compete
• We need to create on ramps to create & participate
• You do not need to be an employee to participate
• Make others stronger, build better aspects of Mozilla
• Be fierce. No one will build into the Internet the kinds of things we want to build

In less than 60 minutes, I saw 2012 as a chance to pivot IT and came up with this simple idea to guide 2012:

How does IT put Community first?

So back to that question, how do I “empower the Mozilla Community”? There’s the obvious and then the three things that will define 2012 for me.

1. I orchestrate a group of nearly 40 folks who manage Mozilla’s IT Infrastructure and Operations. These are the folks who are largely behind the scenes running all the computers that support all the websites.
2. Community IT. My collective teams manage an dizzying array of technology. We support a company that was nearly 40 strong when I started and is nearly 600 today. We have all these tools at our disposal. Do you know about them? How do I make these same set of tools available for you to use? Teach me what other tools you need. Help me help you leverage the resources and skills we have to empower the Community and push Mozilla’s mission forward.
3. Community Sysadmins. IT is generally closed. Mozilla is not. There’s a incredible disconnect there. How do we leverage the expertise of the Community in running some of the busiest websites in the world?
4. Air Mozilla. How do we reinvigorate Air Mozilla such that it becomes a focal point for the Mozilla Community? A place to show case open source video and technologies? A place for the Mozilla Community share content?

Over the next several weeks you’ll see a couple more blog posts talking more about those and how you can get involved. I’m going need your help, afterall. My own personal goals by the end of 2012 are:

• to have 5-10 volunteer Community Sysadmins actively helping run Mozilla’s network and servers.
• to have a vibrant Community IT group…
• to have a premiere source for open source video technology, a site where the Mozilla Community can find, share and create video content

And, quite frankly, I’ll be even more excited if those are thriving on their own, independent of me.

This feels like the most ambitious set of projects I’ve ever tried to start. We might stumble, we might fall. I suspect, however, we’ll succeed because of the strength of Mozilla’s Community.

To be crystal clear, and to quote Mitchell, I am utterly committed.

ps. For those Excel folks, ROUND(YEARFRAC(DATEVALUE("3/15/2006"),TODAY()),3) & DAYS360(DATEVALUE("3/15/2006"),TODAY())

(This post is pretty delayed.  Had hoped to post this shortly after I got back but life happened and here I am a month later.)

I just got back from a little more than a week in Paris. I went mostly for work but since I’ve never been to France and only to Europe three times before, I tried to mix in some personal time.

One of my former colleagues whom I admire often blogs to write down his own experiences. I think that’s a neat idea and I find myself taking random notes on my phone while traveling now.  This post is a result of those notes.

I’ve never been to New York City but I imagine it to be much like Paris. A city that seemingly doesn’t have a bed time. I never got a hang of the time shift from California and would often be awake at 2am. So was the street outside the office. And so were all the restaurants around the office. The energy at 2am was as electric as the energy at 4am.

Walking around the corner at 2am to grab a crepe did not seem out of the norm. Mostly, I got to see things I had only seen in Ratatouille.

Spent a lot of time in Mozilla’s Paris office upgrading some of the network equipment and trying to understand what it means to work remote from Mountain View.

The time shift off California was something else. I’m surprised anyone at Mozilla Paris (or Europe in general) is able to function with Mountain View. 9 hours made real time dialog really difficult and really emphasized the need to record various meetings for time-shifted viewing.

I took a train down to Nice and met Cedric, one of the localizers. Nice felt like Santa Barbara in a lot of ways but with warmer water.

And here’s where Buenos Aires left an indelible mark on me. After my trip to Buenos Aires, I picked up an interest in a number of groups, including Gotán Project. They were playing at Les Nuits du Sud in Vence, just outside of Nice.

This was one of my trip’s highlights, especially when they played Santa Maria. I emailed a friend right after the show and commented to her,

Gotán Project was better than I imagined live. Such a great show. I mean I’m in France standing in a town square listening to Spanish music sung by an amazing woman with half the crowd dancing Argentine Tango. Everything I like about classical Spanish guitar & electronic music.

The most interesting thing about this trip was the number of non-Paris based Mozilla folk that kept arriving in Paris.  The first week I was there David Ascher was in town.  The following week, the US-based Jetpack team was in town. 

Paris certainly ranks in the top handful of favorite cities but still has a bit of a way to go before it can oust San Francisco.