Laura Thomson Email and Phone Number

Appointed by IETF to serve as a Trustee on the Board of the Internet Society for the term 2020-2023.

Author of the bestselling "PHP and MySQL Web Development" (now in 5/e) and "MySQL Tutorial". Tech reviewer of "PostgreSQL Developers Handbook".

Lead team of ~120 engineers responsible for development, data, operations, and security of services, systems and tools to support Firefox, plus release engineering and automation. Systems we're responsible for include: production engineering, back end services, data science and telemetry systems, crash reporting, machine learning and intelligent systems, CI, prototyping and continuous delivery systems for Firefox. I report to the VPE, Firefox, and contribute as part of the Firefox strategic leadership team. I am responsible for a budget of approximately 60m.

Lead engineering teams responsible for development, operations, security, and QA of cloud services, systems and tools to support Firefox, as well as all our release engineering and automation, management, and developer tools and productivity. This also includes development and operations of our data platform and telemetry systems, crash reporting, machine learning, geolocation, tracking protection services, product delivery, and prototyping and continuous delivery systems for Firefox ("Go Faster"). We also do production engineering for Firefox Accounts, Sync, Test Pilot, and a host of other projects.

I am responsible for vision, direction, and management of teams that do web development and release engineering at Mozilla. Specifically I look after Release Engineering, Release Operations, Developer Services, Web Engineering, and SUMO and Input Engineering.On the Web side, our projects include crash reporting capture and analytics, code search and static analysis, performance monitoring and graphing, l10n management, CDN and mirror management, Air Mozilla, support.mozilla.org, and input.mozilla.org. We catch three million crash reports a day, index the Mozilla codebases, and support half a billion users world-wide.On the Release side, our product is the build pipeline that delivers feature releases to end users every 6 weeks on desktop and mobile. Beta builds are released every day. We average about 16 code pushes/hour, or almost 8,000 pushes/month, each one initiating a build-and-test cycle on our pool of over 4,700 machines, real and virtual. It's Big Fun.

My team looks after web apps and systems at Mozilla that help to ship Firefox and other Mozilla products faster and better. This includes crash reporting capture and analytics, performance monitoring and graphing, l10n management, CDN and mirror management, Air Mozilla, and various other systems. We are responsible for more than 30 systems over a variety of platforms, many with complex infrastructures and high availability requirements.The web engineering team works with big data in HBase, concurrent Python, visualizations and dashboards in Python, PHP, and JavaScript, big PostgreSQL and MySQL databases, and other datastores like ElasticSearch.If it needs to be done, we'll do it. We live the "Dev" in DevOps.The team spans Webdev, Ops, Metrics, and QA, and our customers are the Engineering teams, QA, Release Engineering, Localization, and these days, more end users.I also manage one of the two Release Engineering teams. Ours focuses on release operations and day to day shipping of Firefox.

* Tech lead / manage engineering for Socorro, the Firefox crash reporting project. We catch and process 3 million crashes a day. Our infrastructure is based on Python (backend), PHP (frontend), Hadoop/HBase, and PostgreSQL. I manage a cross functional team.* Lead developer on support.mozilla.com, the help destination for Firefox. SUMO was written in PHP using TikiWiki, and is now written in Django. Scaled SUMO for the launch of Firefox 3. Implemented Sphinx for searches.* Worked on the addons.mozilla.org API, tools.mozilla.com, and a number of other projects.

ISRG operates Let's Encrypt, a free and open certificate authority.

* Consulted to internet companies about scaling, security, and development issues* New business development and client management* Managed development teams for various webapp projects

* Worked on and managed various web-based projects for clients* New development, taking over maintenance, consulting in scaling and security for existing systems, and project management* Technologies used on projects: PHP, Perl, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, PostgreSQL

* Worked on various webapps, largely in PHP.* Led development on the web UI for what is now the Message Systems MTA* Led development on an email campaign management tool

* Develop and deliver courseware, mostly to Masters students, in the area of Internet and Web Technologies* Taught PHP, C++, and Java, web related topics, database theory, software engineering, and machine learning

Partner in web development consultancy specialising in building complex dynamic sites using Open Source tools, especially the LAMP suite.

Multidisciplinary research team funded by Telstra and RMIT University. Developed strategic plans for implementation and use of new services and technologies inside Telstra.

Develop strategy, particularly IT strategy for Fortune 500 corporations.

Contract position. Developed software (in C) to support research in the area of speech querying of text databases.