And then there is the case of Lars…
To look at him, you’d think he’s some character from a biker bar on the bad side of
town. However, speaking with him dispels that image in favor of, perhaps, some mystical wizard from the pages of Tolkien. A moment later, though, he’s just a bumbling old man with no clue as to what mayhem all you young folks are up to on his lawn. There is little doubt, Lars is one of the more memorable characters that you’ll encounter in your life.
With a forty year career in the software industry, Lars is an eccentric, skeptic and heretic. Lars embraces complexity, shows no fear in the face of threading, prefers recursion over iteration, and thinks dependency injection is the solution to everything. Lars believes that there are parallels between software and the basic structures of nature and mathematics. Building on the idea that we live in a recursive universe with infinite layers of indirection, he believes software
should mimic the structures of the world that it models. “Fail gracefully” is good, but “recover” is better.
Lars has had a diverse career in many industries. He’s written software in many
languages ranging from the old workhorse Fortran, the exotic APL, the pedestrian Pascal, the sharp swords of C & C++, the tragedy of Java, the plucky Python and the most revered Lisp. Ask him about working on Wall Street in a Harley T-shirt and torn jeans.
Lars’ work was the genesis of the Rogue Wave C++ database abstractions in the ‘90s. Those libraries built “the Uncommon Rose”, a software package in the form of an online nursery specializing in roses. Running a nursery lead to adoption of a more agile implementation language, Python. Python lead the way to Mozilla.
Lars started working with Mozilla while employed at Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) in '05 and moved to full time with Mozilla in '08. Lars is the principle engineer behind the Firefox crash reporting system, Socorro.
Lars lives a yurt on organic farm in the Willamette Valley of Oregon with his partner, four cats, and eight greenhouses. Never having understood or experienced the word “bored”, Lars hacks hardware, restores old pin ball machines, draws mazes, makes 3D printable designs and rides a noisy Harley.