Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

Monday 8 December 2014

Portland

Portland was one of the best Mozilla events I've ever attended --- possibly the very best. I say this despite the fact I had a cough the whole week (starting before I arrived), I had inadequate amounts of poor sleep, my social skills for large-group settings are meagre, and I fled the party when the music started.

I feel great about Portland because I spent almost all of each workday talking to people and almost every discussion felt productive. In most work weeks I run out of interesting things to talk about and fall back to the laptop, and/or we have lengthy frustrating discussions where we can't solve a problem or can't reach an agreement, but that didn't really happen this time. Some of my conversations had disagreements, but either we had a constructive and efficient exchange of views or we actually reached consensus.

A good example of the latter is a discussion I led about the future of painting in Gecko, in which I outlined a nebulous plan to fix the issues we currently have in painting and layer construction on the layout side. Bas brought up ideas about GPU-based painting which at first didn't seem to fit well with my plans, but later we were able to sketch a combined design that satisfies everything. I learned a lot in the process.

Another discussion where I learned a lot was with Jason about using rr for record-and-replay JS debugging. Before last week I wasn't sure if it was feasible, but after brainstorming with Jason I think we've figured out how to do it in a straightforward (but clever) way.

Portland also reemphasized to me just how excellent are the people in the Platform team, and other teams too. Just wandering around randomly, I'd almost immediately run into someone I think is amazing. We are outnumbered, but I find it hard to believe that anyone outguns us per capita.

There were lots of great events and people that I missed and wish I hadn't (sorry Doug!), but I feel I made good use of the time so I have few regrets. For the same reason I wasn't bothered by the scheduling chaos. I hear some people felt sad that they missed out on activities, but as often in life, it's a mistake to focus on what you didn't do.

During the week I reflected on my role in the project, finding the right ways to use the power I have, and getting older. I plan to blog about those a bit.

I played board games every night, mostly Bang! and Catan. It was great fun but I probably should cut back a bit next time. Then again, for me it was a more effective way to meet interesting strangers than the organized mixer party event we had.