I finished the last paper of my college career half an hour ago, and I’m totally done now. The fact that I’m really graduating and moving on hasn’t hit me until now, and its turning out to be a bit more of an emotional time than I expected. I’ve been at Macalester College for a long time, and it seems to me that I’m nothing like the kid who started here four years ago. Luckily, the change has been an overwhelmingly positive one I think. Macalester is an amazing place, and I’m incredibly grateful that through a combination of choice and coincidence I ended up here.
The huge amount of time and effort that has been devoted to school over the past four years will now be devoted to Mozilla. It’s sort of crazy to think about the fact that the majority of most of my days will be spent working on Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.. I can’t imagine anything else I’d rather do, but simply being so committed to one thing in particular is a little scary. All my life up until now has been an exploration of my options, and to have made a definitive choice by signing a contract with Mozilla Foundation, at least for the next few years probably, is an odd experience. I will only live the next few years of my life once, and commiting such a huge part of them to Mozilla is a dauntingly large decision, easy as it was to make. Its time for me to do less dreaming about the possibilities for the next few years and focus on getting something done. Thank God I will be doing something I believe in so much on so many different levels.
I found out a few days ago that I will need to move to Mountain View, CA, at least for the next few months, to work on Firefox 1.1. I wasn’t planning on making the move so soon, if ever, and honestly it has some very problematic consequences for me. However, I entirely understand the reasons for it, and furthermore, I cannot argue with an opportunity to participate so intimately with what I view as one of the top 3 or so most important things to happen in the world of computing since I started observing it a decade ago. Firefox 1.1 is that important in my opinion, and I look forward to putting everything I’ve got into it.
I’m not going to say much about why Firefox 1.1 is so important because that would make this post way too long, and if you’re reading my blog you probably already have some idea why already. What I do want to do though, is remind everyone how critical yet easy it is to help promote Firefox. Install it on all of your friends and relatives’ computers. Bring it up in conversation. If you’re in college, try to get it installed in your college’s computer labs. Write about it in your blog. Put Firefox buttons on your website. Email a web site admin and ask him or her to support Firefox. Whatever. Part of what is so great about this revolution is how easy it is to participate in meaningful ways as part of a massive and collectively powerful group of people throughout the world. It doesn’t take plane tickets to some march in DC or hours spent writing letters to your congressional representatives to do something that matters. So please try to do something, no matter how small it is. There is a very real possibility that Microsoft will almost single-handedly decide upon the future of the internet as most people know it, and the consequences of that will not be pretty in terms of your privacy, your security, your rights to content and information, your bank account, and most importantly, your ability to communicate effectively in the ways that you see fit.
