Laura Thomson

Laura Thomson
Senior Director of Engineering, Mozilla Corporation

Laura Thomson is Senior Director of Engineering, Firefox Engineering Operations at Mozilla, and is on the board of ISRG, the non-profit behind Let’s Encrypt. Laura has worked in various engineering roles at Mozilla for the last ten years, and previously worked in jobs including Principal/VP at OmniTI, engineer, consultant, and computer science academic. She has written several books on various open source technologies, including “PHP and MySQL Web Development” (with Luke Welling, her husband). Laura is from Melbourne, Australia, but now lives with her family on a rustic horse farm in Maryland, USA, where she relaxes by indulging in manual labor and other rural pursuits.

Sessions

3:30pm Tuesday, 07/26/2011
Moving Day: Migrating Your Big Data from A to B
Data: Scaling
 Location: C121/122
Tags: postgresql, management, nosql, hadoop, devops, migration, smoke_testing, scaling_geek
Laura Thomson (Mozilla Corporation), Josh Berkus (PostgreSQL Experts), Corey Shields (Mozilla Corporation), Justin Dow (Mozilla Corporation)
Average rating: **...
(2.75, 4 ratings)
If you've ever had to move from data center to data center or to the cloud, or from old hardware to new hardware, you know that it's even more painful than moving house. In this presentation, survivors will tell you how to stay sane (and how to get it right) with a case study from Mozilla: moving 30TB of crash reports with no downtime in data collection. Read more.
11:00am Friday, 07/29/2011
How Not to Release Software
Programming
 Location: Portland 252
Tags: management, programming, humor, release_management
Laura Thomson (Mozilla Corporation)
Average rating: ****.
(4.19, 16 ratings)
Review worst practices for releasing software: how to destroy scope in a single meeting; "death sprints" (more agile than death marches); how to avoid testing; how to make your software impossible to configure; and finally, when pushing out a webapp release, how to make your ops team hate you. This tongue in cheek session will review things learned painfully and late at night. Read more.