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 ''Code Rush'' is a 2000 documentary following the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers Netscape's last year as an independent company, from their announcement of the Mozilla open source project until their acquis ...

'', she was the manager of

Netscape Navigator Netscape Navigator was a web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in ...

development at

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was onc ...

Communications Corporations, and worked on the preparation of the original

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, wi ...

code for public release, which led to the development of the

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...

browser. She has also worked as a Release Team Manager at Blue Martini software, Senior Infrastructure Engineer and Team Lead at

Pixar Pixar Animation Studios (commonly known as Pixar () and stylized as P I X A R) is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer animated feature films. It is based in Emeryville, Californi ...

Animation Studios, Senior Engineering Manager at

Lithium Technologies Khoros, formerly Spredfast + Lithium, is a global customer engagement software company that provides online community management, social media marketing, social media analytics, digital care, and content management software and services to ent ...

, Senior Director of Systems and Build Engineering at

Linden Lab Linden Research, Inc., doing business as Linden Lab, is an American technology company that is best known as the creator of ''Second Life''. The company's head office is in San Francisco, with additional offices in Boston, Seattle, Virginia an ...

, and worked as a Senior Engineering Manager at

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

. Tara is currently employed by

MongoDB MongoDB is a source-available cross-platform document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and licensed under the Serve ...

as Vice President of R&D Productivity, where her role is to lead the development of engineering CI/CD systems, builds of various MongoDB software on 40+ platforms, and the performance tooling team. Tara is a member of the board for

Women Who Code Women Who Code (WWCode) is an international non-profit organization that provides services for women pursuing technology careers and a job board for companies seeking coding professionals. The company aims to provide an avenue into the technolo ...

and created the �
WWCode podcast”
to inspire women to undertake and excel in technology careers.

Career

Hernandez graduated from the

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California syste ...

, in

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

in 1993. She began her career as part of the Release Engineering team at

Borland Borland Software Corporation was a computer technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was the development and sale of software development and software deployment product ...

, 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 Netscape across all platforms. During this time she was also involved in the development of projects like bug tracker

Bugzilla Bugzilla is a web-based general-purpose bug tracking system and testing tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project, and licensed under the Mozilla Public License. Released as open-source software by Netscape Communications in 1998 ...

, CVS repository browser

Bonsai Bonsai ( ja, 盆栽, , tray planting, ) is the Japanese art of growing and training miniature trees in pots, developed from the traditional Chinese art form of ''penjing''. Unlike ''penjing'', which utilizes traditional techniques to produce ...

, and pioneering continuous integration server Tinderbox. After these projects were taken over by the Mozilla project, she served as a Project Owner for Bugzilla (2000-2002) and Bonsai (1999-2006), and is credited with "keeping Bugzilla development going strong after Terry eissmanleft mozilla.org". From 2002 to 2013, Hernandez worked as Senior Infrastructure Engineer and Team Lead at

Pixar Animation Studios Pixar Animation Studios (commonly known as Pixar () and stylized as P I X A R) is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer animated feature films. It is based in Emeryville, Californi ...

, where she also worked as Perforce administrator and became Apache admin and MySQL DBA for Studio Tools infrastructure servers. From 2018 to 2022, Hernandez was an Engineering Leader at Google, overseeing teams building Kubernetes developer tools, API client libraries, and technical learning content for Google Cloud Platform. She then moved to MongoDB in May of 2022, where she currently works as Vice President of R&D Productivity.

Conference speaking

Hernandez has spoken at technology conferences: * Taking Flight: Career Progression for Women in Tech (2016) * Women Transforming Technology (2016) * AWS re:invent 2017: How Linden Lab Built a Virtual World on the AWS Cloud (GAM311) (2017
video
* Project Sansar Brings VR to Second Life by The New Stack Makers (2018
video
/nowiki>] * It’s a people thing: tech’s hardest problem - North America WTM Ambassadors Summit 2019 Austin (2019
video
* GeekWire Cloud Summit 2019 * DevOps World , Jenkins World 2019 - Tuesday Keynote (2019
video
* Emcee Code Jam 2019 World Finals live stream (2019
video
* Keynote Fireside Chat with Nicole Forsgren on the SPACE of Developer Productivity (2020)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hernandez, Tara Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American women computer scientists University of California, Santa Cruz alumni American computer scientists Netscape people Mozilla people Pixar people Google people