Self-Introduction: David Miller

[David Miller]

I was kind of figuring on doing one of these, too, after reading the
description of it on the wiki, before I saw Max do it even. :)

Full Name:
  David D. Miller

Location:
  Jamestown, Michigan, United States

Profession:
  System Administrator and Webtools Developer at Mozilla Corporation

What do you want to help out with?

  I'm currently the project leader for the Bugzilla project, mostly
whatever I say goes.  Although I love coding, and working on Bugzilla
code is what got me involved with Bugzilla to begin with, my role has
mostly been an administrative one for the last few years, as my day jobs
have tended to keep me busy enough to not have much time for code or
reviews.  This is kind of a downer, but that's the way it goes.  Most of
the general day-to-day stuff is delegated to Max (mkanat) or Fred
(LpSolit) these days.

  I try to stay on top of general architecture related things and make
sure folks don't go overboard or get too far off-track of our mission
(which is to produce a kick-ass *bugtracker*, not a
do-everything-for-everyone system).  On the other hand, I love seeing
people make Bugzilla do all kinds of things, and for that reason I
really want to see some expansion and simplification of the plugin
architecture for Bugzilla, so that the core Bugzilla can remain simple
and specific, and people who want the extra cool features can add them
easily.



Historical Qualifications

  My first computer was an Apple //e back in 1983, and later an Apple
IIgs.  I started out programming in Applesoft BASIC, and eventually did
a fair bit of 6502 and 65816 assembly before getting out in the world.
I'm still somewhat active in the Apple II enthusiast world, even though
I no longer have any physical Apple IIs that aren't packed in a box
somewhere, and was active in the design and maintenance of Syndicomm
Online (which was a major Apple II enthusiast hangout modeled after the
old GEnie online service, and all written in Perl!) until it closed down
this last year.

  I did major in Computer Science in college, but the computer science
program at my college was in the process of falling apart while I was
there, and because of that and otherwise getting involved in real life
and real jobs before I should have, I never did graduate.  I'm told they
managed to revive their program a few years after I left.  But shy of my
Data Structures class, and some of the upper level advanced concepts
stuff where we mostly played around with the mainframe (yes this was
that long ago -- I'm dating myself again), almost all of my programming
and computer experience has been self-taught.

  Most of what I know about Perl I learned from hacking on Bugzilla.
That in itself is a fairly scary concept when you consider what Bugzilla
looked like when I started hacking on it.  I personally credit Bradley
Baetz for teaching me good Perl coding practices so I could avoid
continuing to propagate the mistakes of the early Bugzilla code base.

  I have a fairly good understanding of networking, email, databases,
object-oriented design, Linux, Mac OS X, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL,
Python, Perl, Asterisk, Bash scripting, RPM, and anything generally
related to Linux and Mac OS X sysadmin type stuff.  I'm apparently
pretty good at the sysadmin end of things because Mozilla won't let me
do anything else for fear of losing the use of my firefighting skills or
something.  I get a great thrill out of fixing things that are broken
when under pressure.  I am a Red Hat Certified Engineer and a Digium
Certified Asterisk Professional.


Anything Else You'd Like To Say

  My blog is at http://www.justdave.net/dave/

-- 
Dave Miller                                   http://www.justdave.net/
System Administrator, Mozilla Foundation       http://www.mozilla.org/
Project Leader, Bugzilla Bug Tracking System  http://www.bugzilla.org/