I have officially begun. Friday was my first day of paid work with the Mozilla Corporation, and it was tiring. As expected, it mostly revolved around logistical stuff, though I did find some time with beltzner in the afternoon to watch an hour-long introduction to how Mozilla builds a DOM tree (thanks Johnny!)
Basically, what Friday allowed me to do was get my feet sufficiently under myself to come up with this:
I haven’t, historically, done much with mindmapping and other “thinking aids” but right now there is too much bubbling around to keep track of, so it seemed like a useful exercise. Attentive readers will note that the current list of thoughts is both incomplete and horribly short-sighted, stretching out a month at most. This is deliberate – I think it relatively stupid to hop on board on day 1 and to start making long term plans on day 2. I suppose someone will tell me that this makes me an “analytic” personality type, or some such, obsessed with having all the information before making a decision. I would suggest that this is grossly overgeneralized (as personality-classification schemes always, perforce, are) though I will confess to a preference for having some information before making any momentous statements of direction. I have always been nutty that way.
On a personal note, the first day (and, indeed, those leading up to it) has been grand. People at Mozilla are welcoming and congratulatory, people at IBM are well-wishing and congratulatory and, on balance, my LinkedIn profile has never been happier (though it is notably wanting for some more 1-degree-of-separation Mozilla love).
I really do think this was the right move to make, I’m pretty excited to be getting going. I’ll be heading to New York in early March with beltzner to talk to some of the people in the CA/Browser forum, and then later in March I’ll be in Mountain View to meet with some more of my newfound comrades-in-arms. In the meantime I’ll be trying to knock down that web of questions while simultaneously, no doubt, adding whole new subtrees. If anyone reading this wants to point out answers to some of the leaf nodes in that web, or alert me to obvious swaths of unmapped work, I can now officially be reached at johnath@mozilla.com. Huzzah! (Yes, my home email still works just fine, too).
[Update: Yes, the map was made with bubbl.us, mea culpa for not providing tasty linkage. ]
[Update2: Yes, the Johnny Stenback video is available online here. ]
Resumés are funny things because the one thing they don’t tell you is the one thing you want to know. As an employer, what I suspect I really want is a way to separate wheat from chaff. I want a way to say “Yes, fine, you have all the necessary checkboxes in place, but are you one of the good ones?” Even if you allow yourself the confidence necessary to believe that you are indeed one of the good ones, a resume is a terrible medium since, stylistically, it tends to force people down the path of enumeration-sans-substance. What is needed is a 
Software development, like most of engineering, and maybe like most of organized human production, has two sort of obvious approaches to solving a given problem. One is to start from the top and work down. Maybe the top is the higher level of abstraction. Maybe the top is the user interface. In some sense, the “top” is seen as the generic, “high-level”, gestalt view of the world. The style of development that begins from this point is known quite universally and unsurprisingly as “top-down”.
meandering wildly 