Dave Townsend
Principal Engineer at Mozilla
Charnwood, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDave Townsend is a Principal Engineer with 19 years of experience leading cross-functional teams at Mozilla and shipping software used by hundreds of millions of users. He excels at balancing product risk and reward, shaping release decisions, and setting technical direction for large-scale browser features and platform experiments. His work spans front-end UI, application services, telemetry, and delivery systems—driving adoption of ESLint, storage consolidation, and signed add-on security for Firefox. An active open-source contributor, he has improved Mercurial-to-Git conversion tooling and made telemetry improvements in gecko-dev, showing a knack for low-level interoperability and data integrity. Based in Charnwood, England, he combines deep technical craftsmanship with product-minded leadership and a history of building tools that simplify maintenance and deployment.
19 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Engineering (MEng) Electronics with Computing Science, Master of Engineering (MEng) Electronics with Computing Science at Swansea University
Github Skills (17)
git10
javascript10
python10
git-submodules10
firefox-addon10
version-control10
mercurial10
telemetry10
addon10
sharedpreferences9
user-preferences9
preference9
system-preferences9
fileio9
file-access9
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
mozilla/addon-sdk
May 2010 - Sep 2016
DEPRECATED - The Add-on SDK repository.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:306 commits, 69 PRs, 92 pushes in 6 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Dave primarily contributed to the Mozilla Add-on SDK project, which involved tasks related to Firefox add-on development and related tooling. Their work included modifying preferences files to enable or disable certain add-on features. Other commits involved refactoring JavaScript files to improve performance. Several commits indicate involvement with low-level tasks like making sure files can be read correctly.
add-onsdkabandoned
mozilla/gecko-dev
May 2011 - Jan 2023
SUPERSEDED by https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox. Read-only Git mirror of the Mercurial gecko repositories at https://hg.mozilla.org
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:658 commits in 11 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Dave's commits focus on enhancing the telemetry system within the Gecko development repository. These commits involve adding functionality to save and load profile group IDs, incorporating the profile group ID into telemetry pings, and updating the TelemetryController to handle these new identifiers. Furthermore, the user modified the code to include the profile group ID to legacy telemetry pings and also improved the handling of client IDs. These changes suggest a focus on improving data reporting within the Firefox browser.
firefoxgit-mirrormercurialmozilla-firefox
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