All Hands

Well, this week was the Mozilla All Hands event. It was actually my very first All Hands event...ever! I have never experienced anything quite like it. For anyone that has never heard of the concept of an All Hands, it is essentially bringing everyone that is an employee together for information, education, team building, and fun. I have been to company events with the various companies where I have found myself to be employed, however this one dwarfs them all.

I really do not know how this event was organized so well. I mean, the logistics of this event must have been a nightmare undertaking on its own. Half of Mozilla employees do not actually live in Mountain View. Mozilla is an international company with employees all over the world. With other offices in Canada, Europe, China and Japan (to name a few), and employees everywhere in between; it must have been a massive undertaking to not only organize their transportation to and from Mountain View, but their accommodations, meals during the three day event, and transportation to and from the off site events that were scheduled. Kudos to whomever organized all of this. It could not have been easy. From my point of view everything went really smooth.

The Mozilla All Hands was a three day event, starting on Tuesday and ending on Thursday. The days were filled with talks ranging from Intern Show and Tells, the state of Mozilla and Firefox, the Spread Firefox initiative, RSS, the No Asshole Rule, and everything in between. After the days were complete, there was a fun event planned for the evening. The first night was an evening out in Palo Alto. The second night was a fun filled evening with the 1954 film "Gojira". The final evening was quite interesting. We all took part in team building event called "Hands On Gourmet". This event took place at a beautiful location nestled in the mountains of Los Gatos. It involved laughs, drinks and each of us cooking our own food. We were divided into several groups who shared in the responsibility of making a specific dish. The team I was part of was in charge of making the pecan pies. The secret ingredient for the pie was whiskey and they were very tasty.

On the second night, the Gojira night, I actually took part in another off-site event. This was a QA team building event. Most of the QA folks went to Cupertino and had a fun night of bowling and arcade games. It was a lot of fun. Kudos to Tim for planning the event. I think everyone had great time. I discovered that I didn't suck any more or any less at bowling than I did the last time I played.

The whole All Hands was a really interesting experience and I learned a lot. It was great to finally meet the people I had chatted with so much on irc. Mozilla really has a great crowd of people.

Anyway, stay tuned for my next blog post, "a review of my internship".

Cheers