Hi, I am Valerie Anita Aurora (formerly Henson), a writer, programmer, and feminist activist. I am principal consultant at Frame Shift Consulting, a diversity and inclusion consultancy. I am a co-founder and former Executive Director of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit to promote women in open technology and culture, and also a co-founder of Double Union, a feminist makerspace in San Francisco (notice a trend?). I was a Linux kernel developer specializing in file systems for about a decade. My Wikipedia bio is occasionally correct. I also write, speak, and generally make trouble.
Random fun stuff I wrote
My blogBall lightning: the coolest thing you've never heard of
The ultimate physical limits of computation My LASIK story
Hiking Mt. Whitney
My visit to the Honeywell Kitchen Computer
Making the world a better place
Suicide and society: Where does responsibility for preventing suicide lie?DEFCON: Why conference harassment matters
The dark side of open source conferences
HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux
HOWTO Negotiate Your Salary and Benefits - for women
A book scholarship I created for "Women Don't Ask" (now superseded by Ask for it)
File systems, operating systems, networking, cryptography, etc.
The TCP/IP Drinking GameLinux Weekly News articles including the Kernel Hacker's Bookshelf series
The "rainbow chart" of cryptographic hash function lifetimes
How to use cryptographic hashes for data comparison safely
Tips for developing with User-mode Linux (UML)
Chunkfs: Using divide-and-conquer to improve file system reliability and repair
Repair-driven File System Design
Some code I've written
Contact info
For questions relating to diversity and inclusion in technology, please email valerie at frameshiftconsulting dot com. For everything else, please use valerie dot aurora at gmail dot com.