so, yesterday was my last day at Mozilla.

before you say anything: no, I didn't leave because of C++. I may hate the language as an abstract entity (and despise the ISO working group that standardised it), but I found its usage in Mozilla to be a small island of sanity, with well-defined coding policies and a healthy set of rules...

sorry, tangent... let's get back to the topic at hand.

I found Mozilla an incredible place to work in; full of smart, talented people, who are working incredibly hard to make the open Web as a viable platform for content creators and consumers, and in the meantime provide open source tools for everyone to hack with and on.

... and that would be the reason why I left.

the truth is, I'm moderately burned out. I was on my way to a burn out around the time I left Intel; I should have taken two months of rest to recuperate, get myself into new stuff, or even just veg out on the couch watching anime and cute kitten videos on youtube. if I did that, I probably wouldn't be writing this, though you may never really know. if I had recognized the signs, I would have probably insisted into taking at the very least a month off before starting at Mozilla. sadly, the signs were masked by the existential horror of my last six months at Intel, so I thought: "well, the reason why I'm not very productive is because I'm not very happy with the current state of affairs; if I change job to something I like and has an actual effect on people, then I'll be productive again!". boy, was I wrong.

burning out is pretty bad, and not just because you feel like crap; it's bad because you cannot have people rely on your work — your productivity goes down the drain, and you just sit there and watch the code, and you may even know what you want to do, but nothing happens. the usual, direct channel between your head and the text editor is broken; self-doubt creeps in, and you miss deadlines. not that missing deadlines is bad, per se: software engineering is not something that works like an assembly line, there are things that, in order to be solved competently and correctly, need to recurse or span multiple components — and this is usually when a proper set of milestones can only be established after the fact.

burning out, to me, is similar to writer's block; I know that some writers don't believe in that, and their recipe is: write every day 2000 words, and you get to a point where writing is just as natural as waking up, or breathing, and you'll never get a block. I think it's a nice theory, and for the past... well, 10 years... I've been trying to keep this up: writing code every day, designing libraries, working on API documentation and examples. after 10 years I can honestly say that, at least for me, it doesn't work that way: burning out simply happens for a multitude of factors, and with it comes the "coder's block".

the important part about burning out is not avoiding it: it's recognising the signs, and prepare for it — mentally and physically. the sign that worked for me, and rung the 'Red Alert' bell, was that my contributions to the community were steadily declining to a trickle, an increasingly vanishing portion of what they used to be. those were my "2000 words every day": a bug, a patch, a review, a document, an example. by the time December 2012 rolled around, my biggest contributions to GNOME were the links to the documentation on the GTK channel. that was the wake up call, the sign that something was wrong, and it wasn't in my job description, or the management, or the environment I was in.

so, this is why, starting today, I'm going to take at least a month off: no work, no responsibilities, and full rest. I'll use this trip to Australia to recharge my batteries, so to speak, and when I get back I'll figure out what I want to do next. I'll still hang around the usual spots, and I'll still be available for the GNOME community, but I'm going and try to relax and see if I can get back to my "2000 words every day" routine — without forcing my hand.

I'd like to (again) thank everyone at Mozilla for their help and patience; they are an awesome bunch, and if you're looking for a change in your $DAY_JOB (especially if you're in London, or planning to move here), make sure you look at the job openings: you won't regret it.

see you out there!