seanmonstar

Moved to Identity

I’ve been working at Mozilla on the same project for a year and a half now, and it’s time for some change.

I spent that time working on Add-on Builder, taking it from prototype to launched product. With it being largely a single-page app, I refined a lot of my views on organizing and structure large amounts of JavaScript. I formed that new knowledge into Shipyard, and got to work on that and improve it much the first half of this year.

I’m proud of how easy it is to start writing a new add-on for Firefox, test it, and publish it to addons.mozilla.org; all entirely in the browser.

I started thinking I wanted to do more, though. By more, I mean affect more people on the Internet. As various friends would ask me what I do at Mozilla, I would tell them I make a tool for developers to more easily make add-ons, that my friends might use. Except many don’t use add-ons, or even Firefox. I realized I wanted to make something that normal people would use. What is something on the Internet that normal people use, and currently sucks? Logging in.

Mozilla’s Identity team has been working on a new system to greatly improve signing into the Internet. I’ve been watching it since they announced it, and now I get to help create and improve on the new Persona project.

If we do our job right, eventually when my friends ask me what I do, I can say: I helped make it so you no longer need to use passwords everywhere. I helped make your online identity more secure. I helped make signing into the Internet awesomer.