Blake Ross is an insanely interesting person. His creation of Mozilla Firefox, the web browser, has helped push the technology behind the Internet forward. Even when he was a child, he had a penchant for computers. His interest in computers was furthered when Netscape, a leading company in Internet browsers, released the open source codes for their Navigator browser, and asked developers to critique and improve it. Ross jumped at this opportunity and began to send in revisions for the Netscape code. Not too long after, Netscape offered him an internship position, despite Ross only being 14 years old. Through his internship, Ross realized that the browsers of the day, Internet Explorer and Navigator, weren’t fulfilling the need that people wanted. He saw them from an outsiders perspective: frustration. Although both offered many features and such, neither were able to make the experience cohesive and smooth for the customers. Realizing this, Ross teamed up with David Hyatt and they worked at night to develop a better browser system. They started from scratch, and developed what became Mozilla Firefox. When the duo approached the bigwigs at Netscape, Firefox was rejected because it didn’t offer nearly as many features as Navigator, while basically the same interface. For Ross, however, that was the point. Eventually, the project was relegated to the Mozilla Foundation, where Firefox was first published. Ross made sure to make it open source as well, thereby allowing users to create add-ons and other useful patches. After the success of Firefox, Ross started a company called Parakey, whose primary focus was to integrate the web with the desktop interface. In 2007, Parakey was bought by Facebook, and Ross was promoted to director of product at Facebook. He worked there for 6 years, and resigned in 2013. Blake Ross is definitely a premier programmer and given he is only 29, he is probably going to be a huge part of the programming future in years to come.