A story about Brendan Eich

I attended a Mozilla work week a couple of years ago at Mozilla’s Mountain View office. There was a dinner event in San Francisco and, by chance, I ended up in Andreas Gal’s car, along with Brendan Eich and someone else (who, alas, I cannot remember now).

The destination was the California Academy of Sciences, a science museum in San Francisco, which was about a 45 minute drive away. Off we headed. Unfortunately, we headed off without closely checking where our destination was, and we somehow got the Academy of Sciences confused with the Exploratorium, another science museum in San Francisco. When we arrived and found it closed, we had to regroup.

Andreas confidently interrogated his car’s GPS unit and procured a new address that fortunately wasn’t too far away. Fifteen minutes later, we found ourselves in a residential area, outside a building that obviously wasn’t going to be hosting a dinner for several dozen MoCo employees.

Andreas again consulted his GPS unit for a new address. Unfortunately, this one
was on the far side of the city. Undeterred, we crawled through early-evening
traffic in the busiest parts of San Francisco — I’m pretty sure we actually
passed Union Square — to another address. Again, as soon as we laid eyes upon it, it clearly wasn’t the right destination.

It turns out there are several institutions in San Francisco with the words
“Academy” and “Science” or “Sciences” in their names, and we were doing a tour of all the wrong ones. On our fourth roll of the dice, Andreas found what ultimately was the correct address, and we crawled back to our final destination, which turned out — groan — to be not that far from the Exploratorium. We staggered in, two hours after we started, eliciting several comments of “what on earth took you guys so long?”

I remember being frustrated at the time — Andreas and Brendan were locals!
They should have known better. But now…

I’ve worked for Mozilla for over five years, but I visit California infrequently, and I’ve only had a chance to talk with Brendan in person a few times. The only
thing I remember from the conversation during the car trip is that at one point we were talking about the US economy and Brendan made a confident proclamation about the bond market — I can’t even remember what it was — that I wasn’t sure I agreed with but I wasn’t sure I could explain why I disagreed. It’s funny the details that stick.

This conversation was with Brendan the person — not Brendan the CTO, not
Brendan the inventor of JavaScript, not my boss’s boss’s boss, and not somebody who made a donation. Just Brendan, a person who knew a lot of stuff, had some interesting experiences and some strong opinions, and was good to chat to. It’s a small story, but it’s one I’ll remember.

Comments on this post are open, but be warned that I will delete without hesitation any comments that re-hash the CEO controversy of the past two weeks, or that I find rude or objectionable in any way. If you want to discuss the controversy, or be rude or objectionable, there are many other places on the web that you can do so.