About open-mike
Author
open-mike is the personal blog of me, Mike Hanson, a software architect living in Silicon Valley.
I am a principal engineer in Mozilla Labs, the research and new product development arm of Mozilla, the company that makes the Firefox web browser. I work on a variety of projects, organized around my interests in privacy, identity systems, and the creation of rich, integrated applications on the web.
My previous professional positions have included:
- Principal engineer in the datacenter technology group at Cisco, working on application-level networking, secure messaging, WAN optimization, and dynamic provisioning of datacenter resources.
- Founder, director of new ventures, and chief architect of Reactivity. Reactivity started its life as an incubator for startups; during that time I developed technology for the launch of Zaplet, a now-defunct interactive-mail company, and CenterRun, a datacenter provisioning and automation company that was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2003. Reactivity was acquired by Cisco in 2007.
- Scientist-engineer (yes, that was really my title) in Apple's Advanced Technology Group. Author of Sherlock, an Internet search tool integrated into MacOS 8.5. The Internet "search plugin" format that I developed for that application grew, mostly under Netscape's care, to become a de facto standard, until it was superseded by OpenSearch.
I studied computer science at Stanford in the early 90's and hold a BS and MS from the Computer Science department. My graduate work was in the Digital Libraries group.
During college, I was also involved with game development for the MacOS. I wrote Asterax, a Mac shareware game that had a small but intense fanbase in the Mac gaming community, and wrote the Physics Model Editor for Marathon, the Mac-only first-person shooter written by Bungie before they went on to Halo greatness. This editor, later productized as Anvil, was a fun little hack that enabled some very creative community-constructed levels.
The opinions expressed on open-mike are mine. My employer, and no other party, necessarily agrees with them.
Should you wish to contact me, send mail to mhanson at mozilla.com