Tara Hernandez

Tara Hernandez is a professional software developer, and veteran open source contributor. As shown in the documentary Code Rush, she was the manager of Netscape Navigator development at Netscape Communications Corporations, and worked on the preparation of the original Mozilla code for public release, which eventually led to the development of the Firefox browser, and in turn the Chromium web browser fork on which Google Chrome is built. She has also worked as a Release Team Manager at Blue Martini software, Senior Infrastructure Engineer and Team Lead at Pixar Animation Studios, Senior Engineering Manager at Lithium Technologies, and currently works as the Director of Systems and Build Engineering at Linden Labs.

Tara began her career as part of the Release Engineering team at Borland, 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 Netcape across all platforms. During this time she was also involved in the development of projects like bug tracker Bugzilla, CVS repository browser Bonsai, 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 [Weissman] left mozilla.org".

Tara has spoken at a number of technology conferences, including Taking Flight: Career Progression for Women in Tech (2016), and Women Transforming Technology (2016).