That’s all, folks! or Becoming Randall Stevens

Once again, I’ve let a month’s worth of dust gather on my blog.  But I have a good reason for being so busy!

Several good reasons, actually.

And here they are:

UCOSP has wrapped for the semester

This semester, I was a teaching assistant for the UCOSP (Undergraduate Capstone Open-source Projects) course.  I helped out with two projects:  MarkUs and Review Board.

This semester, we saw some outstanding work for both projects.  Lots of great students, lots of good code, lots of leaps forward.

I’m looking forward to helping out next semester with UCOSP.

I won’t be doing it as a paid teaching assistant though.  Why?  Well…

I’ve finished school

My research paper was signed off by my two readers, and I just wrote my last final exam a few nights ago.  Unofficial grades have been posted, and I’ve passed what I needed to pass.

So that’s that – I’m a Master of Computer Sciences, I guess.  Awesome!

I got a job!

I’ve been hired by Mozilla Messaging to work on the Thunderbird project!  I’m 100% psyched about this opportunity, and look forward to peeling into the code.  An added bonus:  since Thunderbird is an open-source project, I’m absolutely free to discuss the code and the various things I’m doing with it.  No NDAs for me!  So stay tuned – I’ll have lots to say about Thunderbird and the Mozilla Framework code.  Just give me some time to wade through it.

Zihuatanejo

It’s been a pretty long road.  I’ve been in school, in one form or another, for over two decades.  It’s strange that it’s over.  I’m extremely excited about my next adventures, but I think I’m going to miss school.

Still, I can’t help but be a bit dramatic…

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In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison. All they found of him was a muddy set of prison clothes, a bar of soap, and an old rock hammer, damn near worn down to the nub. I remember thinking it would take a man six hundred years to tunnel through the wall with it. Old Andy did it in less than twenty. Oh, Andy loved geology. I imagine it appealed to his meticulous nature. An ice age here, million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure and time. That’s all it takes really, pressure, and time. …Andy crawled to freedom through five hundred yards of shit smelling foulness I can’t even imagine, or maybe I just don’t want to. Five hundred yards… that’s the length of five football fields, just shy of half a mile…

Andy Dufresne – who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.

P.S.:  Here are some celebration rituals, if so inclined.

6 thoughts on “That’s all, folks! or Becoming Randall Stevens”

  1. Alecia

    Congrats Mike! Whoop Whoop! *high five* *chest bump* etc. etc.

    Soooo does this mean The Johnson Report will be booking more stage time?

  2. Florian

    Congratulations dude! I really enjoyed the Shawshank Redemption reference. You can’t help being a drama student, can you?

  3. Pain with Email Clients

    Congratulations and best wishes for your career at Mozilla!
    Here are my wishes for a Thunderbird-Developer:
    1) UNBLOAT!!! Really, Thunderbird is so slow and bloated, this is especially true if there are some plugins loaded, this should definitely be cured.
    2) PLEASE make it really portable! There are many reasons why it is good to have an email client on an usb stick and many reasons why I do not want to mix private mail with job mail in the same client, so Thunderbird should be really portable – that means it should be able to run multiple instances of thunderbird on one machine account at the same time without interferences.
    3) PLEASE check the functionality, usability and slickness of ritlabs TheBat – this is the all-time-fav for many people, and there is a reason for it – it is unbelievable good! I once talked to a developer of email clients (not mozilla) and the guy actually stated that he never did know about TheBat and was not even interested in looking at it – while I understand the emotional deepness of a developers soul when it comes to a comparison between “your baby and the other project” I totally did not understand how one person can be so dumb. Of course the client he worked on was really bad, ugly and totally antique in many aspects. PLEASE do not make the same error – take a look at what can be considered one of the best email clients in the universe and learn your lessons from it.
    THANK YOU VERY MUCH and GOOD LOOK with MOZILLA!!!

  6. Mike

    @Pain with Email Clients:

    Hey – thanks for the well-wishes!

    As for the Thunderbird-wishes – I’ll do my best to make Thunderbird the best e-mail client it can be. 😀 Take care,

    -Mike

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