After nearly 4 years, my tenure as Mozilla staff is coming to an end. Today is my last day.
It’s been a wild ride, fellow Mozillians. I’ve enjoyed working with many of you and will miss getting to do so as part of my day job. No specific post-Mozilla employment plans as yet, other than to rest and enjoy the last days of summer.
I’ll continue as a volunteer as module owner for MozillaWiki.
Please keep in touch. You can find me in various place online:
After nearly 4 years of employment, I have given notice at Mozilla. My last day will be 27 August.
I’m not going quietly.
Mozilla has serious, systemic cultural and organizational issues. Addressing these is imperative to Mozilla’s advancing its stated mission to “promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web.”
In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing more about Mozilla. In the meantime, you can read these collected tweets about why I’m leaving: part 1 and part 2.
I just requested that Facebook permanently delete my account.
This change is a long time coming. I’ve grown increasingly concerned about the power Facebook exercises to commodify and influence our social interactions. There’s nothing holding Facebook accountable in the exercise of this power. Aside from all of that, I get very little out of time spent on the site. Yes, it’s a way I can connect with some folks for which I’m not in the habit of calling, emailing or writing. There’s nothing stopping me from doing this, however. I have the phone numbers, emails and addresses of the folks I generally care about keeping in touch with. I do wish more folks had their own blogs, though.
Earlier in the week I posted a message on my timeline telling folks that in a few days I’d be deleting my account. I listed a few other ways to get in touch with me including twitter, my blog, and email. The other thing I did was look at the settings for every Facebook page I’m an admin on and ensure I wasn’t the only one (I wasn’t). I also downloaded a copy of my info.
Today I logged in, ready to delete my account. First I couldn’t find a way to do so. I noticed a “deactivate my account” link under security settings. I figured this was the only way, so I tried it first.
When you try to deactivate your account, Facebook presents you with a page that does everything to try and get you to keep your account active. It shows you pictures of your friends, says they will miss you and prompts you to message them. I found it particularly funny that one of the friends it showed me was Creepius the Bear (and identity created to demonstrate how creepy one can be on Facebook):
Creepius will miss me after I’ve left Facebook.
And then after this you must provide a reason you’re deactivating your account. For any reason you select, you’re given additional information that supposedly resolves the concern:
Facebook wants to know why you’re deactivating your account.
What caught my attention was the Email opt out option, which states:
Note: Even after you deactivate, your friends can still invite you to events, tag you in photos, or ask you to join groups.
Not what I wanted, so I started figuring out how to work around this. Unfriend everyone first? Sounds tedious. Then someone asks me in IRC, “why don’t you delete instead of deactivate?” I responded saying I didn’t know that was an option. So, I searched Facebook’s help for “deactivate my account” and found this help page: How do I permanently delete my account?
I follow the link in that article, and got this prompt:
Deleting my facebook account.
Much nicer, right? No guilt-trips and attempts to invalidate address my concerns. I clicked “Delete My Account”, filled out my password and captcha and got the following confirmation:
Confirmation that my account has been deactivated and will then be deleted
I also received confirmation via email.
So, that’s it! Assuming I don’t log in to my account during the next 14 days, my account will be deleted. Ah, freedom!
If you like the idea of doing this, but want a more gradual approach, check out de-facing, in which one person talks about their plan to leave Facebook one friend at a time.
Yesterday, nearly four years after our religious ceremony, Sherri and I became legally married. I am so incredibly happy and proud to be able to call Sherri my legal spouse, and me hers, with all the rights and responsibilities therein.
Christie’s mom Laura reads a few words.
The ceremony was brief, at our home, with a few clothes friends and family members in attendance.
These are the words I spoke to Sherri:
Not quite 7 years ago, I set out for Portland to start a new part of my life. Someone, or something must have been aware of my plan, because I was guided to you shortly upon my arrival here.
Since then I have learned that you are one of the most generous, compassionate and courageous spirits I have ever met. From the beginning, you opened your heart wide to me and while cautious at first, I have learned to take great refuge in your presence.
As many here know, the last handful of years together has been difficult. But between the challenges we’ve faced, we’ve found space for joy, laughter, and delight. I would do everything all over again for the privileged of getting to build this life with you.
My vows to you:
Because our life together will not always be easy, I vow to meet challenges in our relationship with a sense of compassion and adventure.
Because our family is but one piece in a very large puzzle. I vow to live a life of service to you, to our marriage and to our community.
Because while love is not scarce, many resources are, I vow to make sure you always have the things you need most such as food, water, shelter and art supplies. I vow to utilize our resources wisely.
Because I want to spend the most amount of time possible with you and grow old together, I vow to care for my body and mind.
Because play is just as important as work, I vow to cultivate playfulness, laughter and lightness in our relationship.
Because what I was hiding, deep inside, you brought out into the light, and even thought it is terrifying at times, I vow to stand bravely in the light of your love.
My dearest Sherri, You are the first person who made me truly feel loved. I look forward to sharing a life of practice with you and I am truly honored that you are recognizing again this commitment with me here today, in front of our friends and family.
While I wish we didn’t have to wait at all to get legally married, I’m grateful we have been able to do so in our home state earlier than I had anticipated. I’m grateful for the opportunity affirm “yes, I know what these vows mean in practice and I continue to commit to every single one of them.”
The Ursula K Le Guin quote that Sherri sent out with our invitations says it all:
Love does not just sit there, like a stone; it had to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
After almost a year and a half on the Technical Evangelism team, my role at Mozilla is changing. As of March 3rd, I am the Education Lead on the recently formed Community Building Team (CBT) led by David Boswell.
The purpose of the CBT is to empower contributors to join us in furthering Mozilla’s mission. We strive to create meaningful and clear contribution pathways, to collect and make available useful data about the contribution life-cycle, to provide relevant and necessary educational resources and to help build meaningful recognition systems.
As Education Lead, I’ll drive efforts to: 1) identify the education and culture-related needs common across Mozilla, and b) to develop and implement strategies for creating and maintaining these needs. Another part of my role as Education Lead will be to organize the Education and Culture Working Group as well as the Wiki Working Group.
There are many privileges I have working at Mozilla. One of them is a decent amount of time off, by American standards. This year Mozilla continued the tradition of closing offices and halting business for the last two weeks of the year. Originally I had thought about getting some volunteer work done during the time off, but ended up just spending time with Sherri and our friends, puttering around the house and playing a lot of Skyrim. It’s difficult for me to disengage from my various responsibilities and truly allow myself time to relax and rest. I felt guilty the first two-thirds of this time off. Despite that, I did manage to have some good rest and in taking a break, I was able to think clearly about what I want out of the next year or so.
What I realized is that I’m ready for a shift. I haven’t been able to make the kind of progress I’d like on a few projects that are actually very important to me. There are some good reasons for this lack of progress. The past 18-24 months have been extremely chaotic on a personal level. Sherri and I became deeply involved in caring for her ailing mother. We lost a dear friend. We bought a house and moved.
I’m happy to say that a lot of that is behind us now. Sherri’s Mom is settled into assisted living and others are responsible for her care now. We aren’t planning to buy a house, move or have any major construction done. We also seem to have found medication regimine that is keeping my asthma somewhat under control. As a result, I’m sleeping better at night and can engage is more physical activity than I have been able to in quite some time.
With things on the home and personal fronts feeling more settled, there’s one remaining barrier to going deeper into my most important projects: having too many projects.
In a lot of ways we falsely operate on a model of scarcity. Lots of things aren’t actually scarce when we think they are. Time, however, truly is available in limited amounts. If I’m involved in ten projects, each one of them is going to get less time, on average, than if I’m involved in five. It sounds like a simple, obvious, statement. But, like possessions, it’s easy for us to accumulate projects and difficult to let them go.
There are a lot of reasons we hold on to our projects: No clear succession path, not wanting to say goodbye to the project itself or to something it provides for us, not wanting to feel like you’ve failed or that you’re letting someone down, the uncertainly of knowing what will take its place, habit. All of these represent valid needs we have and it’s important to honor those needs and the feelings that arise when thinking about not continuing to be involved in something.
Over the years I’ve cultivated a set of questions I ask myself to help navigate the process of identifying whether or not it’s time to let go of a project. These include:
If I stopped doing this project, what are things I could do with that time instead?
What other things I’m excited about have I been saying no to because I’m involved in this project?
Am I still learning things or otherwise growing as a person as a result of being involved in this project?
Is the project still evolving as a result of my involvement, or has it stagnated?
Are there ways to deescalate but still maintain some involvement that would be satisfying to me?
If I can’t identify a clear succession path for the project, what’s the worst that can happen?
If I think the worst case is that no one continues it, does that mean that the project had reached its natural end?
What are the ultimate goals of my project? That I want to be around for?
What do I envision the end of the project to be? What does it looks like when my project has accomplished its mission, achieved all its goals?
Generally, we spend a lot of energy on starting, building and sustaining projects and very little energy on defining a project’s end. No wonder we have trouble ending projects! Often we rely on external factors to drive decisions about endings. Work life becomes untenable so we quit, or we accept an offer elsewhere. Or we disengage from a project abruptly when some other issue in our lives becomes a higher priority and gives us permission to do so. I wonder if there’s a benefit to bringing additional mindfulness and intention to how we approach ending projects. This doesn’t mean mapping out a complete plan at the beginning of a project and then rigorously and stubbornly abiding by it, regardless of changing circumstances. Rather, I think it’s a useful strategy to periodically inventory what we’re working on, ask the above questions of each.
In asking myself the above questions about all my projects at the end of this year, I was able to arrive at a clear picture about which projects I’m okay letting go of, or decreasing my involvement in, and which new projects I’d like to take on.
The plan for 2014 is something like:
Organize fewer events. The main event that I plan to maintain my involvement in this year is Open Source Bridge. All others I either won’t be involved in, or will only be involved in an advisory role. Stepping back my event-planning role means that I’ll be able to devote more attention to my role as President of Stumptown Syndicate.
Attend fewer repeat conferences. I’ve decided not to attend PyCon or OSCON this year. Both of these conferences I’ve been to multiple times and crossing them off my calendar means I’ll have more time to attend new conferences. Top on my list are: Allied Media Conference, Wikimania, WikiConference USA, LibrePlanet.
Submit no conference proposals. I’m not planning to do any speaking at conference unless specifically invited to do so. This frees up time to work on our Event Planning Handbook and accompanying workshop.
Spend less time on social media. I have a bad habit of treating social media like a sweet or a cigarette. Stuck on something? Check Twitter. Stressed about something? Check Twitter. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. Stress relievers are good — as long as they are serving their purpose. However, social media tends to become a distraction and one that generates more stress than it relieves. Spending less time on Twitter/Facebook means I will have more time to engage in deeper conversation and nurture one-one-one connections. I’ll still use social media, but with intention and in time-constrained amounts.
What about you? What are some ways you figure out how to continue or end projects? What things are you planning to do less and/or more of this year?
Change people’s hearts and their minds will follow. In other words, you have to change people’s hearts before you can change their minds.
I’m more important to make a connection than to be precise or correct.
We have an extraordinary ability to ensure that our needs are met. This is fundamentally an emotional processes, not a rational one.
People are, above else, social creatures. We deeply need each other to survive, but we also often harbor great fears about revealing our fundamental selves.
Life is complicated. And yet can be reduced to the utter simplicity that we have a limited time on this Earth and should use that time as wisely as possible.
We may have more advanced technology, but we human nature hasn’t fundamentally changed. We have basically the same challenges we have for hundreds, probably thousands of years. There are patterns to these problems and studying them gives us insight into how to approach them.
Sometimes people you love die and it’s awful.
Sometimes people you love amaze and astound you and it’s wonderful.
Good friends are invaluable.
Cultivate the relationships that nourish you. Let go of the ones that don’t.
What follows is my tech origin story. Thank you to my colleague Crystal Beasley (@skinny) for the inspiration and for shepherding #mynerdstory (follow along on Twitter and Facebook).
Like a lot of folks who grew up in chaotic home environments, memories of my younger years are fragmented and hazy. I can’t say with certainty what our first computer was, or when exactly it arrived in our home. I remember both an Apple II and an IBM PC with an 8088 processor making appearances in the mid- to late-eighties. Both were second-hand. The IBM machine stuck around longer and was the one that I did the most exploring on. I can still vividly recall many evenings spent during my sixth grade year in front of the blue Wordperfect screen and clackity-clack keyboard typing essays. I also recall spending a lot of time online that year as we somehow managed to have a modem and a subscription to Prodigy.
Aside from really liking Wordperfect macro and formatting codes, I knew nothing yet of programming. That changed when my father came home with a used TRS-80, which I was allowed to have in my room. The computer must have come with a book on BASIC programming, because within a short while of having it, I was making simple programs. This was around 1991, when I was 10 or 11 years old. My first program was designed to help my mother figure out what to make us for dinner.
That initial rush of programming activity didn’t resume until a long while later. Family life was especially chaotic then. We weren’t doing well financially and shortly we relocated under some duress from the SF Bay Area to Sacramento. I don’t think the TRS-80 followed us, or at least I didn’t have access to it again.
The summer of 1992 was my first in Sacramento. It was especially long since my parents pulled us out of school early in order to move. I spent a lot of time riding my bike and exploring the neighborhood, somehow unaffected by Sacramento’s blazing summer heat (much hotter than my native Alameda). I also spent a lot of time inside, on the computer. At some point I decided to read the entire DOS 3.2 manual, the one with the spartan cyan-colored cover. I wanted to know everything I could about how our 8088 worked and what I could do with it. The manual included a section on BATCH programming which I totally loved.
IBM DOS 3.2 Manual
Summer ends and I begin 8th grade, transferring schools after the first quarter so that I can participate in our district’s accelerated program. I am now bussed across town for school. The curriculum there is more challenging and interesting to me, but does not include any computer science and there is little time or support for it at home. I start high school, at a school that is very good but not in our neighborhood. I spend my entire freshman year being late to everything because my father is largely in charge of transportation. Fortunately we move to a house about a mile away from my school the summer before my sophomore year and I gain the ability to take myself to school (with my own two feet!).
Three significant “nerd” things happened during my sophomore year. The first was that I got my own computer again. As with the machines before it, a second-hand PC appeared without much explanation. Sometimes I wonder if these things were stolen or otherwise acquired under dubious circumstances, as was my father’s habit. In any case, this machine had an 8086 processor and CGA display. It ran DOS, probably version 4.0 and came install with PoliceQuest. I think I stayed up all night the first day I had it. The second thing that happened was that a I took the required computer literacy course and did so well I ended up helping the teacher run the class and being allowed to work on my own projects. This lead to the third things, which was to connect with the other students of my ilk who had quickly exceeded the basic computer skills curriculum and were allowed to work on other things. I actually ended up marrying one of the boys I met that year in computer lab (it didn’t work out in the long term).
Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel (source: Adventure Classic Gaming)
Around this time I got very into using BBS (bulletin board systems; remember this was per-internet) and in learning how to build and upgrade computers. Friends whose families were better situated financially than ours would always find ways to give me their old components and they upgraded theirs. I’ve never forget the pure joy I experienced the day I upgraded from my 2400 baud modem to 14.4k (my friend had just upgraded to 56k). Glorious. Having the ability to connect to others via BBSes was incredibly important to me. In fact, I think it may have saved my life. The summer between my junior and senior years was very, very dark. I was allowed virtually no social interaction outside of my immediate family. I was depressed and lonely and so being able to connect with others in a meaningful way via technology was a godsend. Even during the period that my father prohibited me from using it, as punishment for some now forgotten transgression, I managed to do so by waiting for him to fall asleep, quietly secreting the equipment back into my room, using it all night and then returning it in the morning before he woke up.
LORD: Legend of the Red Dragon, one of my all-time favorite BBS games.
I mention that last story because not only were my interests in computing not supported, but my interests were actively used against me at times as a form of punishment. I know I’m not alone in this. I’ve talked to lots of people whose parents saw any computer use as a waste of time and actively discouraged it under any circumstances.
Sometime during early high school I took my first programming class, during the summer. It was C programming at the local community college and I totally bombed it. It was the first coursework I’d ever encountered that I couldn’t understand right away and I had no idea how to ask for help. I didn’t even know asking for help was within the realm of possibility. All I felt was deep shame that I wasn’t automatically understanding the material and making progress. It might sound silly now, but keep in mind that this was before the internet, before Google and Stackoverflow and Youtube, before all of these resources were readily available. I didn’t have a readily accessible connection with anyone else who programmed. At some point I just stopped going to class. This early failure haunted me for a long, long time.
Borland C for DOS
Other computing events from my high school years that I recall vividly: I introduced a virus onto our home PC. I don’t recall which one, or the exact results, but I recall my father being very angry and it’s probably what lead our family to get a newer PC (a 386!). I did the DOS-equivalent of ‘rm -rf’ in C:/ trying to free up disk space. Opps. I wish I could say that’s the first and last time I ever made that kind of mistake. And I played a lot of Nethack and Civilization. I spent a lot of time working on an Asteroids-like game written in BASIC.
During my junior year, I started taking classes at Sacramento State university as part of a program that allowed low-cost concurrent enrollment to high-school students. I took a computer fundamentals course that gave me my first shell account and internet access. It was awesome. This was 1996 and we used the Lynx web browser and learned about searching the world wide web. We also learned PINE mail and gopher and telnet and irc. It was my first exposure to Unix/Linux and Open Source and I loved it. It was also my first exposure to really shitty computing/internet-related legislation, for that was the year that we started hearing about the DMCA. The following year, among other course, I took an introduction to programming, this one taught in visual basic, and did incredibly well. So well, in fact, that I was all set to apply to colleges for Computer Engineering… until I fell in love with physics. AP Physics amazed me. I was able to use something I loved, calculus, to solve real-world programs. I applied to UC Davis as a Physics major and was accepted and awarded with a full Regents scholarship.
My early university years did not go well for me. The summer before starting university was a rocky one. As it turns out, undiagnosed and untreated ADD and PTSD is a particularly unproductive combination and made the already difficult task of navigating university on my own completely unmanageable. When I think back on it, as with so many of my early years, I’m amazed I made it through alive and relatively in tact. I have some very good friends to thank for that. UC Davis kicked me out for poor academic performance twice, and in order to return and complete my degree I was required to switch majors to something in the humanities school. I chose English Lit. I’ve always enjoyed reading and had recently discovered that, much to my surprise, I was capable of writing decently well. Somehow I was able to create enough stability in my life that I graduated with a decent academic record and even earned an ‘Outstanding Graduating Senior’ commendation.
Despite my academic struggles, I did managed to have some very valuable computing experience in college. For a time I worked in our NOC as a student systems administrator. I learned about a huge range of systems: Unisys mainframe, VMS VAX, Unix and Solaris and I used Unix daily via the terminal as well as KDE desktop. Later on I worked for a climate change research group and my duties there include Windows NT as well as Unix administration and even a bit of ColdFusion programming.
2002 turned out not to be the best year for a new grad to enter the job market (though there would be worse years to come). My graduation also coincided with my fathering being arrested for solicitation of murder. I floundered for a bit. After quitting my job at UC Davis that had started as a student position, I canvassed for Sierra Club and CalPIRG, went to Burning Man for the first time, worked at WebEx giving demos, got married hastily and then worked at my husband’s company writing technical documentation and leading product training.
In 2003 I moved back to the Bay Area. I found a job as a print production manager with a small technology marketing publisher based in San Fransisco. In many ways it was a really great job for me. I had a lot of autonomy and I was able to use my diverse skills to streamline the company’s existing publishing process. It was fast-paced and deadline-driven, which kept me focused. I was able to hire and manage two staff members. Looking back, one of the most important things I was able to do was learn PHP/MySQL and bring the website programming and server administration completely in house. My experience at that small publisher allowed me to get a job at a more prestigious agency at which I was able to pivot completely from print production work to full-time IT/programming. In 2007 I stopped working at the marketing agency so I could freelance . Later that same year I moved to Portland and immediately got involved in our awesome tech community by attending a Code ‘n’ Splode meeting.
For a while I regularly attended PHP meetups and then started volunteering for events like BarCamp Portland. Meanwhile, freelancing was starting to get old and I returned to salaried employed at a local agency. I stayed there for about a year and then went to work for a local e-commerce startup in 2010. I continued to hone my programming skills and switched to using desktop Linux full-time (from OSX). In 2012 started at Mozilla, working first within Webdev on the Web Productions team and now on Tech Evangelism.
These days I program mostly in Javascript and Python.
I don’t consider myself a superstar programmer, nor do I aspire to that designation. I’m a well-rounded technologist. What I’m most interested in these days is finding ways to use technology to drive social change, to empower citizenship and to build better communities and relationships.
