Author Archives: Timothy Chien (blog)

Leaving Mozilla

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Last week, I ended my journey at Mozilla. The decision to leave was bittersweet, but I felt it was the right time for me to try something new instead.

I am sincerely grateful to everyone who took their chances on me. I am thankful for the lemons too — you can’t make lemonade without them!

During my time at Mozilla, I worked on now-defunct Firefox OS as an engineer and later manager. I helped built the short-lived “Taipei Development Center” as well. It was quite a ride. Last year, as an individual contributor, I spent a large chunk of my time moving web content UIs to a Shadow DOM-based widget architecture, which shipped last week in Firefox 65.

I would like to share this paragraph from my goodbye letter to my colleagues here:

The internet has an impact on humanity akin to the printing press. For better or worse, we are in a place in time where we are empowered to shape the future for the next 500 years, just like what the printing press had done for the last 500 years. May we all find our ways to tame the beast.

I am joining Apple to work on MapKit JS. Looking at how modern web applications are built is a great opportunity to reflect my experience building a browser. I am looking forward to find out what I can contribute.

The Truth About Veritasium

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This is a candid piece from Derek Muller, the science educator/YouTuber, talking about his journey leading to what he does today. This is not yet-another-so-successful-wow story or you-must-follow-your-dream story. His approach to life and grip is something to take inspiration from.

Computer Security In The Past, Present and Future, with Mikko Hypponen

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If you are into computer security and not a security expert, this is a great talk by Mikko Hypponen. He is a security researcher from F-Secure.

Some of the highlights from the talk includes a floppy disk containing the first known computer virus from Pakistan; Y2K and Y38K (“Try to set the date to year 2038 on your smart phone; you can’t”); introduction to Stuxnet and it’s implications; implication to network security as the world become more connected with IoT devices.

One of the comment worthy remembering was (paraphrasing): when he started his career, he didn’t know he would be fighting against state actors, and/or gun-carrying organized criminals who would literally jump over the window to flee.

He also highly recommends the movie Zero Day, a documentary about Stuxnet.