After a nice relaxing thanksgiving week, with almost no e-mail to read (I can’t stress enough how nice this was) - I’m incredibly excited to start my first day at Firebase tomorrow! If you haven’t heard of them before, it’s because they’re a startup :) And they’re in the business of building a scalable, real-time backend for apps.

When I joined Mozilla, it was very hard for me to envision any better job than the one I had. In fact, I still think that’s true, but when I met and spoke with the folks from Firebase, I knew I had found another job that could be just as good! The team is small (7 including me), consists of really intelligent and likeable people, all of whom are engineers, and they’re working in a space I have a deep academic and professional interest in.

But why a startup? In the words of Cobb, from Inception:

What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere.

And somewhere along the way, the thought of what it would be like to work at a startup entered my head. Maybe it was the near constant buzz about startups around me, or my daily reading of hacker news. Maybe Cobb and crew planted the idea when I was unconscious on a plane. I don’t know. But there it was…

I normally ignore emails from recruiters, since most of them are poorly written and ill-researched (my friends have had similar experiences), but this particular email was well crafted and it had to do with start-ups. I was already pretty curious, and finding out more couldn’t hurt, right? Here we are!

I’m really looking forward to this roller-coaster ride, as one of the founders put it. In addition to writing code, which I love, I’ve also always enjoyed talking to others about my work. At Firebase, I’m going to be doing a bit of both, so you’ll most certainly hear more about my adventures as they unfold.

Wish me luck!