James Long talks with Dave Rael about working at Mozilla, building products, making it harder to make costly mistakes, and understanding why something works
James Long worked for Mozilla for 6 years on various projects ranging from Firefox OS to Firefox developer tools. Last year, he quit to pursue self-employed contracting, and recently has been working on launching his own product, Actual, a personal budgeting app. He enjoys leveraging powerful technology to solve real problems for end users, pulling ideas from remote places like academic papers and such.
Chapters:
- - Dave introduces the show and James Long
- - Completion of projects and the project currently capturing James's attention: Actual
- - How James views the success criteria for Actual
- - The reasons James is building Actual
- - Developers as users of software
- - Barriers for developers to launching a product as a business
- - James experiences at Mozilla
- - The true nature of contract work for James
- - James's story of failure - a production site that was set in development mode with costly consequences
- - James's success story - spearheading moving Firefox Developer Tools onto React
- - How James stays current with what he needs to know
- - James's book recommendation
- - James's top 3 tips for delivering more value
- - Keeping up with James
Resources:
James's book recommendation:
James's top 3 tips for delivering more value:
- Seek deep knowledge - understand why it's working
- Take time off
- Everyone does hacks - don't beat yourself up