Hunting the Shmoo

This probably isn’t a groundbreaking revelation to most Mozillians, but it’s something I haven’t quite managed to put into words until now.

On the Tools and Automation team at Mozilla, the easiest way to describe what we do is to say “We try to make the lives of others within the community easier”. This is a vague statement, but it’s about as close as we can get without writing a small dissertation.

Sometimes, I look at what others are working on within the community and can’t help but think “Wow, my project is relatively unimportant compared to theirs”. This makes me feel sad for a minute, until I remember that their projects are only possible in the first place because of the “relatively unimportant” ones that came before it. I then come to the realization that I get as much satisfaction out of enabling others to do great things as I would out of doing great things myself.

I was reading some article about recent advancements in the field of quantum computing when a similar thought crossed my mind, “Wow, all this web stuff we’re working on seems awfully unimportant in comparison”. But then I realized that none of those exciting research problems would be possible without the internet, and their health is largely tied to the health of the internet as a whole. We at Mozilla are charged with making the lives of the researchers who are trying to advance humankind, easier. By making sure their data remains free and accessible, by making it easy for them to collaborate, by connecting them to the brainpower of the billions of people who are unconnected. Of course the field of science isn’t the only example, but it’s what popped into my head.

So while I’ll probably never be a quantum physicist, I can still be happy knowing that I’m doing my part.