Posts from February 2021

The first week on the job at Igalia was… it was good, y’all.  Upon formally joining the Support Team, got myself oriented, built a series of tests-slash-demos that will be making their way into some forthcoming posts and videos, and forked a copy of the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) so I can start making edits and pushing them to the public site.  In fact, the first of those edits landed Sunday night!  And there was the usual setting up accounts and figuring out internal processes and all that stuff.

To be perfectly honest, a lot of my first-week momentum was provided by the rest of the Support Team, and setting expectations during the interview process.  You see, at one point in the past I had a position like this, and I had problems meeting expectations.  This was partly due to my inexperience working in that sort of setting, but also partly due to a lack of clear communication about expectations.  Which I know because I thought I was doing well in meeting them, and then was told otherwise in evaluations.

So when I was first talking with the folks at Igalia, I shared that experience.  Even though I knew Igalia has a different approach to management and evaluation, I told them repeatedly, “If I take this job, I want you to point me in a direction.”  They’ve done exactly that, and it’s been great.  Special thanks to Brian Kardell in this regard.

I’m already looking forward to what we’re going to do with the demos I built and am still refining, and to making more MDN edits, including some upgrades to code examples.  And I’ll have more to say about MDN editing soon.  Stay tuned!

• First Week at Igalia was published on Monday, February 22nd, 2021.
• It was assigned to the Projects, Standards, and Work categories.
• There have been two replies.

Today is my first day as a full-time employee at Igalia, where I’ll be doing a whole lot of things I love to do: document and explain web standards at MDN and other places, participate in standards work at the W3C, take on some webmaster duties, and play a part in planning Igalia’s strategy with respect to advancing the web.  And likely other things!

I’ll be honest, this is a pretty big change for me.  I haven’t worked for anyone other than myself since 2003.  But the last time I did work for someone else, it was for Netscape (slash AOL slash Time Warner) as a Standards Evangelist, a role I very much enjoyed.  In many ways, I’m taking that role back up at Igalia, in a company whose values and structure are much more in line with my own.  I’m really looking forward to finding out what we can do together.

If the name Igalia doesn’t ring any bells, don’t worry: nobody outside the field has heard of them, and most people inside the field haven’t either.  So, remember when CSS Grid came to browsers back in 2017?  Igalia did the implementation that landed in Safari and Chromium.  They’ve done a lot of other things besides that — some of which I’ll be helping to spread the word about — but it’s the thing that web folks will be most likely to recognize.

This being my first day and all, I’m still deep in the setting up of logins and filling out of forms and general orienting of oneself to a new team and set of opportunities to make a positive difference, so there isn’t much more to say besides I’m stoked and planning to say more a little further down the road.  For now, onward!

• First Day at Igalia was published on Monday, February 15th, 2021.
• It was assigned to the Standards and Work categories.
• There have been thirteen replies.