About open-mike
Author
open-mike is the personal blog of me, Mike Hanson, a software architect living in Silicon Valley.
I am currently an entrepreneur-in-residence at Greylock Partners, a global venture capital firm.
My previous professional positions have included:
- Principal engineer of Mozilla Labs, the research and new product development arm of Mozilla, the company that makes the Firefox web browser. I worked on a variety of projects, organized around my interests in privacy, identity systems, and the creation of rich, integrated applications on the web. Notable projects include Mozilla Persona and the application layer of the Firefox OS.
- 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that I developed for that application grew, mostly under Netscape's care, to become a de facto standard, until it was superseded by OpenSearch.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 gmail.com