fidzu : thunderbird

Thunderbird's mascot, Roc, is a bit of an unsung hero. If you've ever donated to the project, he's the happy blue bird who thanks you for supporting our work. For the 2024 End of Year appeal, the Thunderbird team commissioned design artist Michaela Martin to broaden Roc's world. Her whimsical illustration, which is also available as a wallpaper download, shows Roc soaring through a sunlit forest as he delivers the mail to its denizens.

Likewise, we'd like to shine the spotlight on Michaela Martin, who has brought our mascot to life in what is soon becoming the Roc Illustrated Universe! She not only answered our questions about her artistic background and creative process, but also provided us some visual peeks into how she turned Roc's flight from a first draft to a finished product.

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What motivated you to become an illustrator? What was your training/education as an artist? What have been some of your favorite illustrations?

I have always had a passion for creating art; I find the process of bringing stories to life particularly fascinating and inspiring. Art can allow others to take a glimpse at what otherwise might exist only in someone's mind.

As far as training and education, I attended the College for Creative Studies in Detroit where I studied Animation, with a focus on Design (character/prop design, visual development, and color keys, for example). I learned a lot during my years in school, but I do not want to understate the value of learning from my fellow peers and colleagues, as well as resources available online (classes, software tutorials, etc).

Most of my favorite illustration works happen to be from the field of animation. The background illustrations, concept art, color keys, and character design are all elements that I find quite inspiring. The Prince of Egypt, The Iron Giant, The Road to El Dorado, and Spirited Away are a handful of films that I would say are particularly inspirational to me. Having worked on several animated projects myself now, I have a much greater sense of appreciation for these works of art than I did when I was much younger.

Tell us about your work process! How do you go from idea to first drafts? About how long, on average, does an illustration take?

I don't have a particularly exciting answer for this - I visualize and imagine various designs in my head, and I translate them onto canvas with my hand as best I can. I tend to start off with rough sketches that I can get out quickly, which allows me to explore a lot of concepts in a short amount of time.

The length of time it takes me to finish an illustration tends to vary, depending on various factors such as image size/detail, as well as client needs (revisions, adjustments, etc). Usually it takes around 1-3 months to fully complete an illustration, give or take a couple weeks.

What's in your toolkit? Do you work mostly digitally, or in more traditional mediums?

I primarily use Photoshop. I do enjoy sketching traditionally in sketchbooks (or printer paper, napkins, notepads, anything that is available). I tend to do more rough works on paper, and transfer them to Photoshop once I am ready to work on them with more detail. I enjoy the feel of working traditionally, but I also enjoy how forgiving digital mediums can be.

Tell us about how you created the first illustration, aka Roc flying through the sunlit forest? Did you have a direction from the Thunderbird team on what to illustrate, or more free reign? Can you tell us how you imagined and then created Roc's world?

I worked closely with Laurel (the team's Design Manager) on both illustrations. She provided me with some details and the main idea; Roc flying over the forest, delivering the mail to the various inhabitants (hinted at through the appearance of houses amongst the foliage). I had a decent amount of free reign for exploration, though I wanted to add some elements that I thought would work with our previously established Roc design, since we had just finished establishing that. I wanted to keep the design elements soft and friendly, similar to Roc's finalized design. There are not many sharp angles in the design of the houses or foliage, for example. I have included some very early concept art for the final illustration that shows the exploration phase and a couple of unused ideas.

In your illustration for this year's appeal, you gave us an entire group of Rocs, working together! Can you tell us more about this design and how you brought it to life?

These were initially just different pose options for Roc that I did very early in the sketch phase. I was exploring character placement, and only expected one to be picked! It was later discussed that all three poses could potentially be used together in the finished illustration - the different poses would have a very simple animation; turning visible and invisible. It would look as though Roc were jumping between different screens at his workstation.

What part of Roc's world would you like to explore in your next piece? We'd love to have a sneak peak into the greater Roc's illustrated universe!

I think that more characters would be fun to explore. Possibly Roc's family, friends, neighbors, etc. Maybe some of them can have jobs alongside Roc, or Roc delivers their mail. More exploration on Roc's little forest village would be quite fun to do as well (different styles of buildings for different species, different biomes of the forest, etc). Perhaps these explorations could reflect different features of the Thunderbird service!

Were you a Thunderbird user before you began illustrating for us? If not, have you tried us out since?

I poked around Thunderbird a bit, but I have not actually utilized it to the full capacity as of yet! I am not the best at consistently using new technology, even if it is quite helpful. I do use Firefox quite frequently, though!

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If you'd like to see more of Michaela's work, be sure to visit her website at MichaelaM Art and/or follow her on Instagram. We'd like to thank her again for answering our questions, sharing her sketches and explorations, and designing Roc's world for us and our community!

The post Illustrating Roc's World: A Spotlight on Michaela Martin appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

02 Mar 2026 8:38pm GMT

Bugs resolved in Moz-Phab 2.8.3:

• bug 2016153 moz-phab uplift should strip DONTBUILD from commit message

Discuss these changes in #engineering-workflow on Slack or #Conduit Matrix.

1 post - 1 participant

Read full topic

02 Mar 2026 4:18pm GMT

In March 2018 I started a job as a Telemetry engineer at Mozilla. Eight years later I'm still here on my Moziversary, as I was in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.

In the past year we had 1 CEO change, 14 reorgs, 12 Firefox releases¹ and 31 Glean releases².

My team is still part of the Infrastructure Org, now under a bigger organization called Core Services. Other Data Engineers however have been moved over to the neighboring Data org. I was told nothing else changes and priorities stay the same. My goals individual expectations will be adjusted accordingly. I haven't seen my team in person since Dublin, due to policy changes around work travel in and out of the US.

Despite all the company changes, the work I'm directly involved in did remain largely the same. I'm still focused on Glean, as expected. We (and by that I mean mostly chutten) moved legacy telemetry to Glean fully (we are Glean now). In the last half of 2025 I finally found dedicated time for performance work. We now have the first benchmarks on Glean and I was able to close out some performance gaps previously identified. More work remains. Early this year then I was able to revive my prototype for moving Glean to a new storage backend based on SQLite and early benchmarks are very promising. This year I will focus on finalizing that work, deploying a new Glean version with a more reliable (and faster!) client-side storage, accompanied by benchmarks we can run and rely on. Along with that I can do some refactoring and cleanups that will make our codebase easier to work with. Other work includes a better integration with other Rust components that want to use Glean directly.

The rest of Mozilla is still working on many big and small things. Leadership is still chasing the AI hype, with questionable outcomes³. I don't know where that will take the company and I disagree with some of the approaches. So far I've been spared from the worst and no one is forcing AI tools on me just yet.

Thank you

Eight years in the same job is a long time. I get to make decisions. I have to live with them. I have to live with decisions of others and maintain them. None of that however would be possible without a team, which makes it a joy to work alongside. So a big thank you to my team members Chris, Travis, Charlie and Abhishek for being the Data Collection Tools team. And also a thank you to Alessio, our team manager. There's many others across Mozilla I get to work with and chat with. Thank you!

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Footnotes:

1. Contrary to popular belief there is not a fixed reorg schedule (that I know of), there is a Firefox release schedule though. ↩

2. Now with a release song playlist ↩

3. You can disable the things you don't want in Firefox. ↩

02 Mar 2026 2:00pm GMT