I have accepted a position at Mozilla Messaging and will start at the end of March. Posting has been rare as of late and will be rare until then because my spare cycles are being given over to providing closure to my day-job projects, dealing with various hardware failures, and other small fires.
Hobby-wise, this will translate into a focus on visualizing e-mail from within Thunderbird. My nascent Python library, visophyte, will likely have a JavaScript sibling, but will not be abandoned.
Job-wise, I expect to focus on improving Thunderbird for both users and extension developers. Although my interest in creating a useful visualization extension will inform my efforts, it will not be my focus. Which is to say, do not worry that I will be engaging in flights of fancy and neglecting the core of Thunderbird. However, do be happy that good visualizations will depend on non-trivial data analysis and snappy, interactive behaviour and that this should translate into good things for Thunderbird, even if you don’t like shiny things.
It wasn’t an easy decision to leave my current employer (I have only great things to say about The PTR Group; check them out if you’re in the greater DC metro area), but Mozilla Messaging is an exceedingly rare opportunity that I could not pass up.
