How far we've come

When I joined Mozilla's Release Engineering team (Build & Release at the time) back in 2007, the mechanics of shipping a release were a daunting task with zero automation. My earliest memories of doing releases are ones where I get up early, stay late, and spend my entire day on the release. I logged onto at least 8 different machines to run countless commands, sometimes forgetting to start "screen" and losing work due to a dropped network connection.

Last night I had a chat with Nick. When we ended the call I realized that the Firefox 30.0 release builds had started mid-call - completely without us. When I checked my e-mail this morning I found that the rest of the release build process had completed without issue or human intervention.

It's easy to get bogged down thinking about current problems. Times like this make me realize that sometimes you just need to sit down and recognize how far you've come.