{"id":2398,"date":"2012-01-06T11:49:11","date_gmt":"2012-01-06T19:49:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/webdev\/?p=2398"},"modified":"2012-01-06T11:49:11","modified_gmt":"2012-01-06T19:49:11","slug":"better-know-a-webdev-mike-morgan-a-k-a-morgamic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/webdev\/2012\/01\/06\/better-know-a-webdev-mike-morgan-a-k-a-morgamic\/","title":{"rendered":"Better Know a WebDev: Mike Morgan (a.k.a. Morgamic)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our group has grown a lot<\/a> over the past few years, as we’ve taken on new projects and done a whole lot of amazing new things. Naturally, as we’ve grown we’ve become a group of more diverse backgrounds, skills and interests\u2014everything from awesome JavaScript developers to our growing Hadoop expertise.<\/p>\n

So this is the first post in a new series, Better Know a WebDev<\/a>, where we’ll introduce everyone, and hopefully get to know each other a little better!<\/p>\n

We’ll start with the big man, the head honcho, Mike Morgan, a.k.a. morgamic, one of the original Mozilla web developers and now Director of Web Development.<\/p>\n

\"Morgamic<\/a><\/p>\n

What do you do at Mozilla?<\/h3>\n

I’m the Director of Web Development. My job is to help people in webdev achieve great things and grow as engineers\u2014and hopefully as people. I spend a lot of time on recruiting, but one of my unwritten jobs is serving as the “glue” between strategy and operations. I help everyone understand why projects are important and how strategic goals break down into day-to-day tasks. Mostly, I try to maintain a great culture for our team<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Any fun side projects you’re working on?<\/h3>\n

I spend most of my free time playing basketball or dabbling in photography. I’m pretty notorious for taking way too many fisheye photos<\/a>.<\/p>\n

How did you get started in web development?<\/h3>\n

In March of 2001 I taught myself HTML, CSS and PHP because I was bored during Spring Break and didn’t have any money to go anywhere. In 5 days I created a blog, picked up HTML and CSS. My first blog didn’t have tables, which was pretty frustrating because I quickly discovered all the crazy bugs with IE 5.5 and IE 5.1 (Mac). From there I started working part time on websites and just fell into web development.<\/p>\n

How did you get involved with Mozilla?<\/h3>\n

My first Mozilla project was redoing bugzilla.org<\/a>, which is why I’m still on the developers page<\/a>. The bulk of my work came later in 2004 and 2005 when I got involved with addons.mozilla.org<\/a>, Bouncer (download.mozilla.org)<\/a> and aus2.mozilla.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One of my most exciting times at Mozilla was the Firefox 1.0 launch. I wrote a blog post about it back in 2004<\/a>. From there I just kept working on web services and sites for Firefox, going on to build and scale a lot of the original Firefox services. Since I was pretty busy, I usually looked like this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"morgamic,<\/a><\/p>\n

What’s one mistake or funny fail story you’re willing to share?<\/h3>\n

Honestly, I can’t share the best fail stories publicly. But I’d say that accidentally wiping a production database with a bad DELETE statement is probably my biggest screw up. Don’t do that. Ever. There is no excuse and it’s embarrassing. Though if you do it once I hope you’re smart enough to never do it again. Just do it with a stage database.<\/p>\n

What’s one thing coming up that you’re excited about? What’s exciting about it?<\/h3>\n

I want to play with camera and sound APIs in JavaScript. To have this all freed from Flash is a liberating and exciting concept. We are stepping into a time in our history where the web can literally do anything we can imagine. It’s so damn exciting\u2014it’s just a wonderful time to be alive.<\/p>\n

Mozilla is taking on proprietary app stores, identity and the mobile market. What a year 2012 will be. Tackling apps\u2014freeing so much great content and capabilities currently locked down by one or two companies\u2014it’s very exciting. When Mozilla gets this right, and I believe we will, it will be a great thing for everyone who uses the web on a desktop, phone, tablet, car, plane, refrigerator, etc.<\/p>\n

What’s one question you’d like to be asked but haven’t been?<\/h3>\n

I guess I’d ask what I was most proud of, or what motivates me. Honestly, it’s pretty simple: my teammates. I’m surrounded by brilliant people who teach me something just about every day. The favorite part of my job is seeing them reach their goals and knowing I had a small part in it.<\/p>\n

\"Webdev<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our group has grown a lot over the past few years, as we’ve taken on new projects and done a whole lot of amazing new things. Naturally, as we’ve grown we’ve become a group of more diverse backgrounds, skills and … Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1438,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13604],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"yoast_head":"\nBetter Know a WebDev: Mike Morgan (a.k.a. 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