Tim's journal

Six weeks short of what would have been my two-year anniversary as a Mozilla full-timer (January 1, 2014), I've decided to leave Mozilla to work at a startup, AlephCloud. I've worked at Mozilla for longer than I've worked at any other full-time job: first six months as an intern, and now a year and ten months as a Research Engineer.

Some people leave a job and say that they're ready to move on. I wasn't ready, and I still had a lot to contribute to Rust. I just didn't see any way that I could continue contributing to it as a Mozilla employee. I'm unlikely to elaborate on that further except in private over a beer or a cup of tea.

I still hope to contribute to Rust as a volunteer. I know it's BS to say "hope" when talking about work; if I end up feeling like I want to do it enough, I know that I will, and if I don't, I know that I won't. That said, if I find myself with time to contribute to any open source project at all, it'll be Rust. For sure, I'm committed to mentoring a Rust intern through GNOME OPW, and I'll still be committed to doing that even as a volunteer. Thus, I'll still be the contact person for anyone still interested in working on a Rust project through OPW. Larissa Shapiro will take over the role coordinator for this round of Mozilla's participation in OPW.

That said, I can't commit to continuing my work on rustpkg while a volunteer, so I'm hoping to be able to identify a new owner for it. I've talked with one person on the core team who would like to take over ownership, and will try to settle the question before my last day.

On a personal level, I've grown a lot over the past two years. I mean both that I've learned a lot about software, and that I've grown as a person. Moreover, I think I understand a lot more about how the software industry works than I did at the beginning of 2011. In general, my colleagues on the Mozilla Research team have set an example both for how to build software, and how to build a community. I wish nothing but success to the Rust project, and what's more, I intend to continue to be there to help the project advance, even if it'll be for a smaller percentage of my time.

My last day as a Mozilla employee will be Friday, November 15, and with just a weekend in between, I'm starting at AlephCloud on Monday, November 18, in the role of Principal Software Engineer. At AlephCloud, I will be programming in Haskell full-time. I wasn't exactly ever expecting to be active in the Haskell community again, but I look forward to doing work that is central to the mission of my company, and it's icing on the cake that the company's language of choice happens to be Haskell. Though I expect I'll be working from various locations, my new office will be in Sunnyvale, so I'm not going far. Especially since my two closest future colleagues both work remotely (outside the Bay Area), I'm hoping to experiment with living outside the Bay Area for a while (student loans don't pay themselves), but I'll only consider that after a couple of months from now.