Tara Hernandez


Tara Hernandez is a professional software developer, and veteran open source contributor, who developed procedures and tools at several Silicon Valley companies. She was an early promoter of what came to be known as the Continuous Integration revolution. As shown in the documentary Code Rush, she was the manager of Netscape Navigator development at Netscape Communications Corporations, and worked on the preparation of the original Mozilla code for public release, which led to the development of the Firefox browser. She has also worked as a Release Team Manager at Blue Martini software, Senior Infrastructure Engineer and Team Lead at Pixar Animation Studios, Senior Engineering Manager at Lithium Technologies, Senior Director of Systems and Build Engineering at Linden Lab, and currently works as a Senior Engineering Manager at Google.

Career

Tara began her career as part of the Release Engineering team at Borland, working mainly on development kits for C++ and Delphi. After moving to Netscape, she was "the first build engineer hired for the Client Engineering team" for Netscape Navigator, and was later promoted to managing the teams working on Netcape across all platforms. During this time she was also involved in the development of projects like bug tracker Bugzilla, CVS repository browser Bonsai, and pioneering continuous integration server Tinderbox.
After these projects were taken over by the Mozilla project, she served as a Project Owner for Bugzilla and Bonsai, and is credited with "keeping Bugzilla development going strong after Terry left mozilla.org".. She is currently an associate code member for the non-profit organisation 'Women Who Code'

Conference speaking

Tara has spoken at a number of technology conferences: