I tend towards the verbose, and if you stick around to this blog (and I manage to write in it) then you will probably become familiar with this.  (This is the end of the only nod to the apologetic I will ever make for my writing style.)

Questions are welcome.  If at any time you are curious about how something works or why something was done in a certain way, ask.  I will do my best to answer.  If you want to chat, you can find me on the Mozilla IRC network (irc.mozilla.org) as xb95.

For introduction: my name is Mark Smith.  I am a computer handyman of sorts, with previous experience doing things such as Perl programming for Danga Interactive and Six Apart, infrastructure design and construction from silicon up to app (again for Six Apart), .NET and Python programming for CCP Games, and plenty of my own projects on the side.  I generally consider myself more of an engineer than an admin, but my experience lends me many skills that find themselves well applied to Keeping Things Running and Making Things Run Better.

My interests are solidly on scale.  How do you take something and make it run for millions of users?  Working at Danga and later Six Apart was a really great environment for this, as I’d been with the LiveJournal project since 2001-ish (starting as a volunteer, moving to become an employee in 2004).  Working with the great people at these companies really helped me to understand many of the problems around Scale and some of the solutions to them.  The year I spent in Iceland working for CCP was good for showing me more solutions.  Their vastly different approach was fascinating, and I think the time I spent there was well spent.

I started here at the Mozilla Corporation (MoCo!) last week on Monday as a member of the IT team.  Responsibilities will include anything and everything, with a specific ear towards database (MySQL) related work, issues of scale, and wherever else I can be of use.  I’ve already done some work on one of the databases, and then ended up submitting a patch for Tinderbox.  This promises to be a very interesting job and a great learning experience.  Plus, being able to work on something that affects so many people in such a meaningful way … wow.

That’s about all of the introduction that is useful, I think.  Again, please find me on IRC should you need me (I think I’m on all of the major networks; Perl, Freenode, Mozilla, …) and always as xb95.

An actual informational post will be forthcoming sometime later today or tomorrow.  So I don’t flood you … yet.