Today is my last day working for Mozilla. I will soon be starting a new job with Apple.
I have worked on a lot of different things over my twelve years at Mozilla. Some numbers:
- Three years as a contractor, and nine as an employee.
- 4,441 commits to mozilla-central, 560 to rustc, 148 to rustc-perf, and smaller numbers to several other repositories.
- 2,561 bugs filed in Bugzilla, 2,118 bugs assigned to me, 27,647 comments, 2,411 patches reviewed.
- Three module peerages and one module ownership.
- 277 blog posts.
- Six managers and four managees, across three teams. (One of my managees later became my manager. Thankfully, it worked well!)
- More trans-Pacific air miles than I want to count.
Two areas of work stand out for me.
- I started the MemShrink project and for several years played the roles of tech lead, engineering project manager, engineer, and publicist. It changed Firefox’s memory consumption from its biggest technical weakness into a strength, and enabled the use of more processes in Electrolysis (for responsiveness) and Fission (for security).
- My work on the Rust compiler, rustc-perf, and related profilers helped the compiler become roughly 2.5x faster over a three year period, and laid a foundation for ongoing future improvements.
I have a lot of memories, and the ones relating to these two projects are at the forefront. Thank you to everyone I’ve worked with. It’s been a good time.
As I understand it, this blog will stay up in read-only mode indefinitely. I will make a copy of all the posts and if it ever goes down I will rehost them at my personal site.
All the best to everyone.
7 replies on “Farewell, Mozilla”
Thank you for your hard work, as a Firefox user I really appreciate it!
Are you you going to be working on Rust at Apple? Or can’t you say?
Hi Nicholas, thanks for all the hardwork you put into both Firefox and Rust. As an end-user I’ve seen visible improvements from the work you did and am very grateful for the same.
I hope you had a fulfilling 9 years at Mozilla and wish you the same at Apple and wherever you go!
I’ve benefited from your work, the performance improvements in Firefox and rustc, and more than that, the way you blogged and documented your process and various tricks was really useful. I hope there can be more. Good luck with the new job.
That’s a shame. Pretty soon there will be nobody good left at Mozilla.
Memshrink was an incredible achievement, and utterly changed Firefox adoption at my job site, and continues to make Firefox a go-to browser on all my lower end machines, simply because it’s the only one that works. A real shame to see you go, but I hope to see you do new and interesting things at Apple
Your blogging has always been inspired tenacity.
Thanks for making Firefox better
Thanks much for all the efforts you put into making FF and Rust the great products that they are today. Wish you the best in your future endeavors. Hope you will still dip your toes in Rust and FF occasionally. I’m a user but have always been in awe of your amazing coding skills. Mozilla is losing a truly gifted talent my friend!