My friend Dion Almaer and I started Ajaxian.com a few years back out of an intense enthusiasm to track the nascent Ajax movement, a community-driven discovery of new techniques to wring better user interfaces out of old browser technologies. Our earliest role at Ajaxian was to help spread the word that whole new worlds of experiences were possible with the current browsers; as time passed, this role has largely evolved into tracking the latest news in the Ajax community.

In parallel with these efforts, Dion and I have had separate careers, in each of which we’ve had the opportunity to use the techniques we’ve covered at Ajaxian (and in some cases do entirely different kinds of development work). As we compared notes along the way (with ourselves and others in the industry), both of us noticed ample opportunities to make Web development more productive than it is today. Eventually, the size of this opportunity became so distracting that we started exploring how we might pursue efforts to address it full-time.

To make a long story short, we’re announcing today that Mozilla has hired both of us to lead an initiative to create Web development tools–to make life better for Web developers. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be building up a team and sharing more details with the community.

I have immense respect for the crew at Moz; I couldn’t be more thrilled that they’ve invited us to join them and for the opportunity at hand.

Read more at:
- Ajaxian.com
- Mozilla Labs