hello planet mozilla!

Posted on by Luis Villa

Hello planet mozilla! As the class notice said, I am a long-time moz lurker, first-time poster, and I’m really excited to be joining mozilla.

factoids, possibly relevant:

  • My college next-door neighbor downloaded the first mozilla source release. He couldn’t get it to build. He was (still is) a genius, and I’m not, so if he couldn’t build it, I sure as heck wasn’t going to touch the code with a ten-foot pole. I decided to help out by doing bug triage instead. You can see my first full contribution here.
  • My first job title was ‘bugmaster’; I have also answered to ‘geek in residence.’
  • Two summers during college I was able to say ‘I am paid to play with legos’. The results are here and here.
  • IAAL, as of a couple of weeks ago. My strong, strong advice to you: don’t go to law school. If it is good for you (like it was to me), it can be great, but for the vast majority of people, it isn’t the right thing to do. Trust me on this.
  • My wife spent two years in a village of 800 people in Africa and then three years working for the farmer’s market in New York.
  • After growing up in Miami but spending time in Boston and Manhattan, my goal is to continue to move south. If Harvey will let me work remotely from Costa Rica, that will be just fine, but in the mean time Mountain View and San Francisco will be acceptable.
  • I did Linux desktop stuff for 8 years of my life; it left me with an appreciation of how difficult it is to design good GUIs and maintain large code bases, and with an appreciation of how rewarding it can be to do what you love with good people beside you.
  • I once spent eight weeks in a tent to go to a basketball game. It was totally worth it.
  • I had the horrible realization last week that even though I hate wearing suits I have basically become one.
me, in a suit, at the Supreme Court for oral arguments in Grokster

what I’m doing with Moz

I’m working with Harvey and Julie on a variety of things, possibly including sexy things like the MPL, trademark, and legal community building, and certainly also mundane but important stuff like bandwidth contracts. I hope to blog about a lot of it, but of course lots of it is privileged/confidential, and even more of it is boring, so we’ll see how that goes :)

how to find me

I’m pretty easy to find via email. I’ll also probably lurk in mozilla IRC once I figure out the right places. Say hi; unlike most lawyers I don’t bite.

Published by Luis Villa

11 thoughts on “hello planet mozilla!”

  1. I have some thoughts of visiting the Supreme Court for an oral argument sometime. I very briefly skimmed the guidelines PDF on the SCOTUS site once, but given a trip to DC isn’t currently on my radar (it’ll happen when it happens, no particular rush to visit very soon) I didn’t pay very close attention — is the suit really part of the dress code for attending an argument? That would be moderately sadmaking if so.

    Also, welcome. :-)

  2. I seem to recall that a suit isn’t mandatory, but it just seemed the right thing to do at the time. I think all the EFF folks I met there wore suits, at any rate ;)

  3. The suit fits you though, maybe a bit baggy on the pants, but who am I to judge / that’s probably how it’s supposed to be / you guys over there seem to be more into baggy clothing than here.

    Anyhow … congrats!

  7. Raphael: interesting, that is not how I’ve always used the word. (I’ve always thought it meant something like ‘small, trivial fact’ rather than false or media-created.) Lesson: use wikipedia before every writing any word, anywhere.

  8. Ah, but Webster’s (at least, their .com version) claims factoid has two meanings, one of which is “a briefly stated and usually trivial fact”. Same with Oxford (again, their online version).

    This of course is also listed on Wikipedia under _Other meanings_ :)

  9. As I wrote; I’m a nitpick, sorry for that. :D A term you might want to use instead is ‘factlet’.

    The thing that bothers me about ‘factoid’ it the (to me) obvious greek stem -oeides, which implies ‘likeness’, not ‘sameness’ or identity.

    So long!

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