3 years ago, I left my wife & 1 week old (!) girl to fly to San Francisco for a week, to start a new job at Mozilla.
That was a huge change in my life since I had to interact daily with people in English, cope with the 9 hours timezone and try to keep up the pace of working with smarter people than me (I am still the dumbest.)
I was the only guy in Europe in the Services team, and had to wait until 7pm to actually chat with my colleagues and exchange info. I had numerous late nights of work the first year.
But it was worthing the pain: I was the first Python guy in the Services team and worked to convert the Firefox Sync server to a "state of the art" Python application, along with all the ecosystem around it.
A big challenge I was quite proud of taking. I was trusted to do the right things and helped the team moving off the PHP version.
The Python launch did not go well because of a bug we could not really have avoided, and I had a few sleepless nights and nightmares before everything went back to normal. Eventually, the Python version worked very well and the next apps were built using the same tools & recipes.
The team grew and more Python folks joined later on. I've learned a lot during that time and looking back, those stressful weeks were the best times I had.
Since that first year, a lot of things have changed at Mozilla: Alexis joined the team and I slowly went back to a normal schedule since we've managed to start a 'Europe team' and work together.
The new Paris office opened a few months ago and you can feel that the Europe side of Mozilla is growing big time.
I don't feel like a remote guy away from his office anymore so that's great :)
These days I am doing a lot of work in building tools for server-side developers. I should include qa and devops as well.
Namely: Circus, Vaurien, Loads & Cornice.
I love what I am doing and I think those tools are useful outside our team itself.
Circus & Cornice are starting to get patches from outside Mozilla so that's great.
Last but not least: Everytime a privacy or a patent scandal occurs, I am proud that my thoughts & opinions are exactly the ones that are defended and echoed by Mozilla voices. (Mitchell, Alex Fowler, etc)
Looking foward to the next 3 years.