Joining Mozilla!

As some of you may have already noticed (and shamelessly tell the others) , starting from February, I got hired by Mozilla! After a period of careful transition that’s official now! :)))

So let me first introduce myself for those readers of planet.mozilla.org who don’t know me yet. My name is Zbigniew. It’s totally unpronounceable for majority, which is my parents revenge for UN not accepting Polish language as a Lingua franca. If you finished trying to pronounce Zbigniew, face a real challenge with my family name – Braniecki.

So it’s probably easier to just call me Zibi or ‘gandalf’.

I have an ultimate luck to great managers, and in Mozilla I’m reporting to Paul Kim himself 🙂 Beside of that I’ll be strictly cooperating with Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, and Jane Finette, Director of European Marketing, and I hope to fit into the matrix of great people working on communities in Mozilla like Pascal Chevrel, Axel Hecht, Seth Bindernagel and others 🙂

My first project is to help Mozilla Central/Eastern European communities  and raise the awareness of what’s going there in Mozilla project. :)) It means that I consider myself as a kind of evangelist, strengthening Mozilla signal in Central and Eastern Europe and on the other hand strengthening the signal from those countries inside Mozilla.

It’s a very important and responsible position. Just to mention that in numbers, the population of the region is 400 mln people, which is half of the Europe. While the amount of population connected to the Internet is much lower than in the Western Europe or North America, it’s changing rapidly – at the end of 2008, Russia will be the second biggest Internet population in Europe. This is a very active region, rapidly catching up. My role is to make sure that Mozilla is there, our mission statements are known, and the web is open.

I’d like to thank Jane Finette, John Lilly, Paul Kim, Tristan Nitot, Asa Dotzler and Chris Hoffman for helping me get through this process!

I hope you’ll all find me a valuable part of this amazing project :))

If you have any questions, mail me – zbraniecki at mozilla.com 🙂
I can also be easily found on IRC, nickname gandalf.

A bit of my history in Mozilla

My storyline crossed Mozilla’s one in year 2000, with some beta of Netscape 6. By the time I was working as a senior developer of biggest polish sport website. I somehow figured out that there’s Mozilla behind NS6 and found mozillapl.org forum led by Piotr Bartecki and Marek Wawoczny.

Then in I got involved more directly in Mozilla in 2001, and my first achievement was getting bzbarsky, caillon and jst frustrated all at the same time, by trying to prove that this is a well prepared minimized testcase for a DOM/Core bug. Eventually it came out that it was me knowing hardly anything about web standards.

After some time of bug hunting and profiling DHTML slownesses together with Markus Hubner I started working on Firefox source l10n system and Thunderbird source l10n system led by bsmedberg.

Then I spent some time between working on simple JS/XUL code for Firefox/Thunderbird UI and community work…

During last two years I’ve been keeping my position as a member of the Mozilla Europe board of directors, and as a part of the Flock project.

Beside of web thing, I’m also involved in open source/linux evangelism, I’m training mixed martial arts,  playing guitar and irish flute, studying sociology and

Today, I’m 24, which is much older than I have ever expected to be, and my path comes back to Mozilla doors.

Wish my luck 🙂