Raphael Aurich
Today marks 1 year of me joining Mozilla, so I figured it would be a great opportunity to look back on why I joined and reflect on my time here so far. 😁
I work out of the Mozilla office in Berlin, Germany along with 80 fellow Mozillians. We speak more than 18 different languages in the office–how awesome is that? 🌍🌎🌏
We collaborate together with our 1000 colleagues and about 10500 volunteers from around the world on various projects including our Firefox browser products.
Before I started here, I worked as a software engineer in Visual Effects, Daily Fantasy Sports, and Urban Mobility App development. During that time, I also spent a substantial amount of my free time contributing to open-source projects. Looking back, while I liked the challenges of working on complex technical problems, I had come to realize that I’ve always wanted to work on open-source projects that I deeply cared about and products that I used myself, like Firefox. 🦊
The idea behind the Mozilla project and the values which Mozillians try to promote, were one of the biggest drivers for me in my decision to accept the offer and join Mozilla as a full-time employee.
Our Mission
Mozilla is a non-profit organization that promotes openness, innovation and participation on the Internet.
Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.
The Mozilla Manifesto describes the values and principles that guide the pursuit of our mission.
These values very much align with my own: I personally believe that we, as technologists, have a certain responsibility as the internet has become an integral part of people’s modern lives:
Nowadays, technology touches and enhances many aspects of what it means to be human–whether it is learning to express yourself in a new language or developing new skills, or creating art and sharing that work with a global audience and potentially making a living from that. Whether it is staying in touch with family, connecting with friends from around the world, meeting new people and sometimes finding love. Whether it is finding a new job or growing our professional network, buying books, clothes and shoes, purchasing concert and cinema tickets, ordering food and having it delivered to our homes. Whether it is reading the news, listening to music and podcasts, watching movies and tv shows, meditating, doing yoga, logging runs and workouts, signing up for gym classes, monitoring one’s heart rate and tracking one’s fitness levels. Whether it is logging menstrual cycles, tracking macronutrients, maintaing a healthy sleeping schedule, storing medical records, or calling emergency services. The list goes on and on…
As a not-for-profit committed to an open an accessible internet, Mozilla plays an important role in and beyond the web browser space: While I’m writing this blogpost, I’m listening live to the oral arguments in the Mozilla v. FCC case challenging the FCC’s repeal of Net Neutrality. Over the past year, I have learned about so many important topics and projects that we are involved in: Firefox Reality, Common Voice, Project Things, Open Policy & Advocacy, and many more.
Firefox Telemetry
When people like you and I use Firefox in the real world, we can choose to allow the Telemetry component inside Firefox to measure and to collect non-personal information, such as performance, hardware, usage and customizations, and to send this information to Mozilla. Our product people and engineers use these metrics to learn about how Firefox behaves in the real world and to make informed decisions about how to make Firefox better.
In my role as Senior Test Engineer for Firefox Telemetry, I work with our Telemetry engineers on identifying critical client functionality and metrics. I am responsible for defining testing strategies and increasing the automated test coverage for Firefox Telemetry across different build platforms, update channels, and releases, by developing automated tests. These tests then run on our continuous integration systems and automatically detect breaking changes.
For example, we developed an integration test for search counts across sessions, which starts Firefox, opens a new tab, performs a search via the Firefox awesome bar, and restarts the browser. A Telemetry ping is submitted to a HTTP test server and we run checks on the data in the JSON payload. We then start a new browser session and perform further UI actions via automation to mimic user interactions with the browser and run additional checks to ensure the Telemetry Client inside Firefox is working as expected.
I am super proud of the work that we have done in this area in the past year and I have big plans for 2019. There’s a lot to be done, but I can’t wait to take on this challenge with my team! 🦊
Other Projects
During my first year at Mozilla, I also worked on number of other projects, such as:
- redash-ui-tests - UI tests for Mozilla Redash 📊
- Python 3 support for various Mozilla projects 🐍 (mozrunner, mozfile, mozinfo, mozlog, mozprofile)
- converting Python test suites from unittest to pytest
- open source projects like pytest, cookiecutter-pytest-plugin, pytest-cookies, labels
- and speaking at conferences like EuroPython 2018
I feel so incredibly lucky to be able to work on open-source projects full-time! It’s taken me quite some time to get there. 😃
Thank you
I can’t possibly wrap up this post without showing my gratitude for the amount of support from Mozilla, my mentor and my manager for my professional development & personal growth. I was given the opportunity to attend workshops on becoming a great leader, good communication, and creating and fostering an inclusive workplace. I have learned a lot from my mentee (!) and it feels great to pass on a few things to him, that I have learned over the years in my job as a software engineer. My coworkers have always been happy to schedule a 1:1 with me and answer my questions… and I ask a lot of questions! 😅
Thank you to my fellow Mozillians! I can’t wait to see what the future holds! 😎
