By Matthew Schoolfield, 2007 MSc Philosophy, the University of Edinburgh
The offices of Mozilla sit under the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. This is the centre of the open-source movement, and at the centre of Mozilla is their browser Firefox. The man behind the company is CEO Chris Beard, who is, to my surprise, a fellow Edinburgh alumnus.
Chris Beard, CEO of Mozilla and an Edinburgh graduate
I was invited to the Mozilla building last month, for a University alumni gathering. Chris Beard spoke about the future of the open-source movement in the private sector. It seems only fitting that the University’s Principle, Professor Sir Timothy O’Shea, who holds a PhD in computer based learning, was there to speak too. Quite a few graduates of the School of Informatics were in attendance as well. It was in this setting that I was happy to meet many of my fellow alumni to discuss our shared memories of Edinburgh, and the benefits and challenges of our lives now in the Bay area.
It’s always refreshing to learn about fellow alums, and what they’re working on. I met up with an old friend who’s working at a start-up firm building self-driving cars. As soon as I told him the Principle had a degree in machine-learning, we found him and they were quickly in deep discussion of the modern techniques and how the field is changing. I then started up a conversation with another alumnus who’d been working in environmental science, but then came out to San Francisco to apply her knowledge to the tech industry after she’d begun programming.
While technology is a subject that looms large over the Bay Area, there were also fellow graduates who’d come here to work in the arts, medicine, and other fields, and it was great to catch up again since the last alumni event, and I thought Mozilla was an excellent location for it. The food and drink were wonderful, and we stayed as long as we could. Then I headed back out from under the Bay Bridge after saying goodbye to my old friends and the new ones I’d made that night.
