Designing for Failure

Presented by Dan Callahan
Wednesday 9:15 a.m.–10 a.m.
Target audience: Developer

Abstract

I joined Mozilla five years ago to work on Persona, a decentralized authentication service designed to replace passwords on the Web. Mozilla cancelled development three years ago, and plans to turn off the servers one month before LCA.

I'd like to talk about what it means to shut down a project like Persona. What did we learn? Where did our plans fail? Is it even possible to design software that gracefully degrades even beyond the point of its own death?

Presented by

Dan Callahan

Dan Callahan is a staff software engineer in Mozilla’s Developer Relations team, where he focuses on Firefox add-ons and the Servo parallel browser engine project. Dan previously worked on the Mozilla Persona project, an attempt at replacing passwords with user-friendly public key cryptography built on open web standards. Dan tweets as @callahad and swears he has every intention to blog at https://dancallahan.info.

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