I’m Aurelia Moser, Community Leader at Mozilla, and This Is How I Work

Aurelia Moser is a developer, teacher, author, and also a bit of a cartographer. She works at the Mozilla Science Lab with researchers on open source projects and is also a mentor at Girls Develop It .

The Mozilla Science Lab is a community of programmers and scientists who work together to share and collaborate in the same open source spirit that you probably associate with Mozilla. Along with teaching at SVA-DSI and Parsons , Aurelia is one of those people who seem to play ten shows at once, but somehow stay organized with color coding, word processing and IRC. Here’s how it works.

Location: Brooklyn, New York. Current Workplace: Mozilla Science Lab, Community Leader + Developer, Girl Develop It, Department Leader + Faculty, SVA-DSI + Parsons, Visiting Professor. One word that best describes how you work: constantly, cartographically? Current mobile device: iPhone 6 with cracked screen Current computer: MacBook Air (2015) with closed camera

First of all, tell me a little about your past and how you became who you are today. How did you get into Mozilla?

My experience is quite colorful, both academically and professionally. I went on to graduate school in art and media preservation, including reanimating digitally born art projects and new media for ongoing display and viewing by visitors to libraries and museums. It was a great introduction to technical expertise, diagnosing code problems, and working backwards to develop emulators and solutions for broken applications, non-existent storage formats, and legacy APIs.

I worked for several creative technology agencies and then applied to the Open News program at Mozilla and Ushahidi , an East African technology company working to create global crisis mapping software based on both feature and data from smartphones. I have since become very passionate about maps and have worked at Carto and some geospatial software startups before returning to science and applying for a job at the Mozilla Science Lab , which is part of the Mozilla Foundation and the wider network that works to support scientists. who want to open source. their research (open data, open access publications, open science practice). It sounds fun and satisfying, and it’s nothing compared to my elementary education in conservation of natural sciences; open science and open source provide some opportunities for promoting and preserving research results … enabling scientists to exchange ideas and implement them faster based on feedback from the broader Internet research community.

What apps, software or tools can’t you live without?

• Sublime Text is a text editor of choice with a custom color theme that I change every few months.
• Mou is a side-by-side markdown preview application where I take notes and store text documents.
• Firefox / Chrome / Safari – all browsers for testing, sometimes to run multiple accounts at the same time on the same platform.
• Colloquy is an IRC application that we still use internally in Mozilla, although Slack / Gitter / MatterMost / Adium are quite popular these days.
• Shifit – Love this app to customize keyboard shortcuts for moving windows and apps around the screen, useful for anyone with a small screen and a big space saver.
• LICEcap – Animated GIFs are a whole computational language to me, and I use them to illustrate bugs, document pull request functionality, demonstrate programming concepts, and record delightful day-to-day interactions. This app will help you do it on any screen; apart from the strange name of the application, but the utility is just an ace.
• Mail – I don’t like a lot of local mail clients, but I use Apple Mail (and formerly Thunderbird) to encrypt PGP messages.
• Alarm clock on iOS. Probably something I really can’t live without: an alarm clock on my phone. I have set several alarms with a lot of tones to scare me into being stimulated.
• Boomerang is a great email scheduling app. I am zero for mailboxes, but I don’t like to impose my weird opening hours on other people.
• I also install a “dark theme” on every app I can to relax my eyes a little. I don’t really like f.lux or anything that brings the colors together on my screen because it distorts a lot of color and design considerations, but I do find the visual break in backlighting to be a good thing.

How is your workplace arranged? Coffee shop with laptop and headphones? Home office with a standing desk?

At Mozilla, we have the blissful ability to work remotely, which is why I work a lot from home. My stylish apartment with a small writing desk in the living room is my typical work environment. Mozilla also has a tiny collaboration space in DUMBO, Brooklyn, which I can cycle to if I want a little faster Wi-Fi. Headphones all day / always; I am on a diet of one pair a month, which is probably more of a sad accusation of poor quality on most headphones than overuse of headphones.

What’s your best time-saving shortcut or life hack?

I have tried planning the Pomodoro, but sometimes I find it adds unnecessary stress to my day. Alternatively, I usually try to do whatever takes less than two minutes straight away and compete with myself in fun ways to maximize my productivity during those two minute sprints. I also keep several browsers open and distribute tasks thematically, so if I need to focus on a task, I close my browser with loaded email clients so I don’t get distracted and receive notifications by email.

What’s your favorite to-do list manager?

I enjoy taskwarrior , mainly because I can customize the color and encode it, and I am well versed in the color coding. However, it is local to your terminal, so it works best for private to-do lists and manual entry, so maintenance can be challenging.

GitHub project boards are awesome; I’m neurotic about organizing my problems and tasks on GitHub, so I move my to-do lists frequently to the GitHub repository, and I have a new repo with a task log for every job I do.

What are some of your best everyday activities? What’s your secret?

Buying strange domains, laughing at the wrong time, whistling and buzzing at the same time, snorting (a consequence of laughing at the wrong time).

But seriously, I’m obsessively over-organized and really good at coding colors. I group and color my phone apps, clothes in the closet, bookshelves … There is something supremely enjoyable about ROYGBIV distributions , at least for me. It may sound fake, but I have a chromatic memory: I can easily remember things by associative color, the arrangement of things in my apartment, their functions and usefulness … like useless synesthesia or mnemonics.

What do you listen to while you work? Have a favorite playlist? Maybe we can talk on the radio? Or do you prefer silence?

I superimpose music with Coffitivity , often other people’s playlists to Spotify. I love the weird intuition of finding people all over the world putting together a music collection that intrigues me more than the auto-generated preference playlist you can get by teaching Spotify or Pandora with your thumb buttons. If I need to focus, it has to be classical or instrumental; but otherwise I usually rely on shoegaze, twi-indie, 60s / 70s / 80s French and Spanish rock music.

I liked Songza for their creative and very specific playlist themes, Radiooooo for their space tracks, Pandora for making random playlists. I only have a few playlists on Spotify; this is probably my favorite one right now . I have a pretty strong emotional attachment to music, so if I listen to a track doing something specific, this action is superimposed on the music, and I find it difficult to listen to the same track by accident. For example, almost everything on my running playlist is a “safe” track that I can’t listen to without causing some sort of heart attack or mild panic attack.

What are you reading now? Or what would you recommend?

The Story of Your Life and Others , Cosmicomics , Lab Girl, and The Recompiler (an interactive tech journal).

How do you replenish? What do you do when you want to forget about work?

When I want to pass out, I do yoga, sometimes do ballet or take a bath. I am a terrible meditator, although I have tried it many times. My sleep schedule is ridiculously fickle, which is why I can’t claim to recharge that much, even though I’m a ferocious and violent dreamer; I feel oddly aroused over multiple lucid dreaming experiences.

What is your sleep pattern? Are you a night owl or get up early?

I would call myself “sleeping at a low level”; more euphemistically speaking, I can be described as “more developed.” I sleep about 5 hours a day, although I really try to get more sleep. I have small sleep routines; sometimes they include ASMR YouTube videos, hot tea, night yoga, melatonin gummy bears. I really enjoy getting up before 8am, and I prefer that to almost any nighttime activity.

Fill in the blank: I would like _________ to answer these same questions.

Penny Lane , Ian Webster , Robbie Craft .

Many people are interested in open science, new media and visualization … too much to offer.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

“The time you spend is not yours.”

From Paul Ford’s ” 10 Timeframes” , a really excellent graduation speech where he discusses how a creator or developer should consider the time it takes to develop their applications and projects. You should think about how many hours you are wasting in another person’s life when they use your creations, because this waste, if sloppy structured, is so toxic to human progress and such a sad debt to humanity. A pragmatic programmer is someone who respects other people’s time.

I’m really interested in the abstraction of time and the exploration of how we process and understand the passage of time, our most obnoxious non-renewable resource. I suggested timezone conferences and lost so many hours due to timing bugs.

So this phrase about being attentive to time </slant_rhyme> has always remained in my memory.

What else would you like to add that might be of interest to readers and fans?

If you are just starting your career, you should apply to join our Mozilla Fellowship Program , which is open until May 14th.

If you want to teach more women how to code, you should contact our nonprofit Girl Develop It . I lead the New York chapter with a few friends , but there are many local chapters in the US and possibly in your area if you are a US citizen.

Feel free to tweet me or contact me with any questions; I love making friends online: @auremoser .

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

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