Who? What?

I am Dave Townsend, though if you’ve seen me online on forums, IRC etc. then you’ll probably know me better as Mossop.

Some things to know about me:

I was born in the UK. I spent much of my youth in England in the midlands and then left home to go to university in South Wales (Swansea). Later I moved to America where I met my wife and 12 years later I have moved back to England.

After university I spent a couple of years running a small IT company. I built a content management system that we sold to a number of customers that I think still has a better customer experience than a lot that is currently out there but alas it was not to be.

Since May 2007 I have worked for the Mozilla Corporation mainly on Firefox.

I am I guess what the kids these days would call a full-stack engineer. I’m not totally sure what that is meant to mean outside of the context of web applications which seems to be all anyone cares about these days but I am happy to go work wherever in the platform the problem is. If that means digging in to the C++ code that handles application startup I’m there. If that means tinkering with the JavaScript that renders a button then that’s me too.

In my spare time I tinker a little with some side projects but and occasionally get time to do some photography but mostly I am run off my feet looking after the kids.