John Resig leaves Mozilla Corporation

Yesterday, John Resig, the creator of jQuery , announced on his blog that he was leaving Mozilla Corporation, and also talked about working for the corporation and his plans for the future.


Today I will talk about a big change in my life: I leave Mozilla Corporation and join Khan Academy .

I started working with Mozilla Corporation in January 2007 after being a JavaScript evangelist for more than 4 years. Throughout my time at the company, I had a wonderful opportunity to promote JavaScript. Working at Mozilla is a great experience for me. This company is one of the friendliest corporations you can imagine, which employs some of the most intelligent programmers in the world. I highly recommend that you get a job here if you are looking for the best job you've ever had.

I had the opportunity to promote JavaScript as its evangelist (and create tools like FUEL , Dromaeo and Processing.js ), as well as run the JavaScript Tool Developer (and create tools likeTestSwarm , FireUnit , and improve QUnit ).

All this time, Mozilla gave me the opportunity to work a lot on jQuery. The result was 9 jQuery releases (including today's jQuery 1.6 release ) and a dramatically improved jQuery organization (we now obey the Software Freedom Conservancy , hold frequent meetings, public polls , notify you of the situation and actively encourage participation ). Fortunately, work on the jQuery project has been progressing quite smoothly lately, which allowed me to devote a lot of time to other projects.

I wanted to return to active application development. In my free time I worked on several applications (mainly for mobile phones, using jQuery Mobile) and now I have a wonderful opportunity to realize myself.


Starting next Monday, I will be working at Khan Academy to lead their Open Source activities and development in JavaScript. If you are not familiar with Khan Academy, then I highly recommend watching a wonderful speech by Sal Khan himself. In short: Khan Academy is trying to radically change the processes and teaching methods.

The self-education and teaching of others is my long-standing passion. I see Khan Academy as a fantastic place where I can help support learning and work on creating better learning tools and getting people involved in Open Source. Most of all I want to increase the size and activity of the Khan Academy community, involving all third-party contributors and testers in its ranks.

I’m going to start by rewriting the framework in order to avoid some problems, I will create an initial version of the application for iPad and will work on improving the Open Source activities of Khan Academy.

For me, it is very important that Khan Academy is a non-profit organization and its work is aimed at providing free and free materials (videos, exercises and applications). And I, with the help of the community, will work to ensure that this state of affairs will continue in the future.
Khan Academy is interested in working on jQuery daily and continuing to speak at conferences. Also, in the near future I will move from Boston.

I decided to stop some aspects of my professional life. I will no longer attend conferences. Until the end of the year, I am going to attend only Velocity in June, jQuery Conference in October and Fronteers in November as a presenter.

A new co-author, Bear Bibeault, was hired to help with the end of my book Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja . With his help, it should be completed this year.

I am very excited about the new opportunity and can't wait to get started. Thanks to Mozilla for support over the years and thanks to Khan Academy for taking me on board. Forward to the beautiful 2011!

ps Yesterday on Twitter, Resig promised to answer all questions on Reddit today.