Being in the Bay Area last week was great, as always. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the city of San Francisco, spending most of my time in its downtown area. The big highlight of my trip, however, was being in Mountain View at Mozilla’s offices.
I’ll share some of my impressions from the trip – I even brought home some nice loot. Also read on to check out some great websites and blogs of the people I met.
It was actually a pretty sunny day, especially considering it was winter. Dan Portillo was kind enough to pick me up at the hotel and drive me to Mountain View on that particular day. At the office, I got to – after standing frozen in place in awe of their wall of snacks and drinks and electric tricycles – talk with some really great designers and engineers. Mozilla’s offices are interestingly hugged from all sides by Google’s vast shiny complexes, but once inside you barely notice them. A very relaxed, pleasant atmosphere lingers in the open spaces of Mozilla.
Some people I’ve talked with there I already knew, like Aza Raskin, whom I’ve worked with on the new Ubiquity logo, and Alex Faaborg, whose blog I’ve been following for quite some time now. It was delightful to meet Jennifer Boriss and Sean Martell, both visual designers. Sean’s website is packed with awesome illustrations, like Kit, the web standards mascot. Can’t say no to that one:
He’s also working on the interface of Fennec, Mozilla’s effort to create a Firefox-based browser for mobile devices. An alpha was recently released.
While there, I also got some good schwag, including a Firefox shirt (which later on got me a good discount on a pizza in downtown SF – hey, not bad!), a Mozilla shirt in a Gran Paradiso bag, a set of buttons featuring Kit, and some Firefox stickers. Needless to say, I left feeling very pleased and with a bag full of awesome.
Later that week, I had dinner with Mike Beltzner and Bret Reckard in downtown San Francisco, which I really enjoyed. I’ve certainly gotten a great impression of what kind of a company Mozilla is, and what type of people (extremely talented ones) work there. I’ll be updating my flickr later on with more pictures of the office that I took, and of course I’ll follow up on this post once I’ve got more to tell about Mozilla and Cocoia.
… and if you’d really like it, I’ll post all the schwag in one picture. It’s just hard to fit it all into one shot ;)
sure… i’d like to see the schwag.
Who’s going to say no to the shwag shot?
Glad you had such a wonderful trip out here Sebastiaan! Thanks for coming to meet with the team and glad you got back home safe and sound!
It was nice having you over to the office, Seb! :)
The only thing missing are some pics from the offices… Oh well :) Swagpics then at least? :D