My next career step: Adobe’s Brackets project

Mozilla has been an extraordinary place to work over the nearly 4 years that I have been with the organization. Many times that I’ve been out and about wearing a Firefox shirt, random strangers would talk to me about Firefox. Some of those times, it has proven to be a great opportunity to tell people about how Mozilla is a non-profit organization that’s out to make the web better for everyone.

A lot of people seem surprised that there’s a software company with widely used software that is truly built for the public good, but it’s absolutely true. As a product manager, I’ve been involved in many discussions where we talk about what Mozilla should build next and we are always working on behalf of users. It can be refreshing to not have to think about “where does the money come from?” for once. Of course, cultivating a very user-centric view of the world is a positive thing in general, even in for-profit enterprises.

How great is it to work with a large community of people, all focused on helping everyone experience a better web and building some awesome open source software? It’s truly amazing.

Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking that I wanted to get back into software development. There’s something magical about the hands-on building of software, and I think that the right thing for me at this time is to get back to it. I considered a number of interesting options to get back to building software within Mozilla.

Ultimately, though, I just couldn’t pass up the chance to work on Adobe’s open source Brackets project. You may remember that I worked on a browser-based code editor when I started at Mozilla (Bespin, later renamed to Skywriter and ultimately merged with Ace). Brackets is a fairly new project, but it’s already surfacing interesting ideas and has a great dogfooding experience. The development team is really sharp and the community is active and wonderful and I think we’re going to have a good time together building an awesome code editor for web projects. It’s already quite usable, so give it a spin!

Adobe, in general, has tons of work going on “to help move the web forward” and their long history of awesome tools for creative people can help feed a lot of new ideas to the web.

I’ll be starting work on Brackets on Monday.

A big thank you to all of my friends and colleagues at Mozilla for four fabulous years. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend working there… there’s a ton of work to do in desktop browsing still, mobile browsing is also hot, oh and there’s that little bit about cracking open the whole mobile ecosystem… not to mention plenty of new possibilities in developer tools!