Just before the holiday break, Mitchell and I sat down together to fulfill a long standing promise I made years ago: to have Mitchell start a Firefox release herself.

After starting Mozilla just over 15 years ago, and dealing with all aspects of running a large organization, Mitchell finally kicked off a Firefox release herself last week – for the very first time. Specifically, she was going to start the official release automation for Firefox 27.0 beta2 and Fennec 27.0 beta2.

Timing was tricky. We didn’t want to disrupt the usual beta release cadence, especially just before the holidays. And Mitchell only had 25 minutes free between meetings, so we spent a few minutes saying hi, getting settled, and then we jumped right into the details.

To kick off Firefox and Fennec releases, there are only a handful of fields a human has to fill in for each product. They are (almost) all fairly self-evident, and a good number of the fields are populated by picking-from-a-list, so we made fast progress. The “Gimme a Firefox” and “Gimme a Fennec” buttons caused a laugh!

8 minutes is all it took.

That 8 minutes included the time to explain what each field did, what value should go into each of the various fields, and why. We even took the time to re-verify everything. After all, this was not just a “demo”… this was real. Mozilla shipped this Firefox 27.0b2 and Fennec 27.0b2 to all our real-live beta users before closing down for the holiday break.

Because it was so quick, we had spare time to chat about how much the infrastructure has improved since the Directors meeting in Building S 6.5 years ago when this promise was originally made. Obviously, there’s plenty of complexity involved in shipping a product release – the daily bug triage meetings about what fixes should/shouldn’t be included in a release, the actual landing of code fixes by developers, the manual spot-checking by QA, the press and PR coordination, the list goes on… – but the fact that such a “simple” user interface could trigger release automation running a couple of hundred compute hours across many machines to reliably ship products to millions of users is a note-worthy measure of Mozilla’s Release Engineering infrastructure. Mitchell was suitably impressed!

And then Mitchell left, with a wave and a smile, a few minutes early for her next meeting, while the various Release Engineering systems sprang into life generating builds, localization repacks, and updates for all our users.

We took this photo afterwards to commemorate the event! Thank you, Mitchell!