Firefox
In November 2013 I flew over to the US and visited the Mozilla offices in Mountain View, California for a day full of job interviews. I think I did seven of them, back to back, over the course of that day.
In most of the interviews, we soon touched the fact that I was the main author of curl, I knew my way around HTTP and client networking and got into talking about specific problems or challenges of the day. They knew I knew HTTP, networking and Open Source as I had already shown that in the public for years. They mostly needed to also check if I would work socially in a team in the real world. I got the job.
Working on the Firefox web browser as a full-time job was quite a difference compared to the small scale projects I had otherwise mostly kept myself busy in. In this project there were hundreds of developers, it could end up in thousands of commits per day and there were more than a thousand new bug tracker entries filed every single day. The speed and the volume of things were overwhelming.
Doing Open Source all day, every day, is awesome. Everything is open and you can share, show and discuss your work with everyone. I could combine experiences and knowledge between curl, Firefox and HTTP specification work and all the work could be easily shared and openly discussed. And everyone involved reaped the benefits.
I worked in the networking team ("Necko") so I got to fiddle with HTTP, DNS, sockets, cookies etc. Things I knew and liked to fiddle with since before. It was a perfect job for me. Maybe the biggest downside was C++.
I quit Mozilla in December 2018 without knowing what to do next, but with a keen interest in trying to see if I could maybe make working on curl full-time a thing.
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