Hi, I am Valerie Anita Aurora (formerly Henson), a writer, speaker, and corporate trainer. I am founder and principal consultant at Frame Shift Consulting, which provides ally skills training to tech companies. I wrote an advice column, Dear Ally Skills Teacher, and a book on code of conduct enforcement. I was co-founder and Executive Director of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit to promote women in open technology and culture. Before that, I was a Linux kernel developer specializing in file systems for about a decade. My Wikipedia bio is occasionally correct (and sometimes conflicts with my Wikidata entry).
Random fun stuff I wrote
Ball lightning: the coolest thing you've never heard of The ultimate physical limits of computation Hiking Mt. Whitney My visit to the Honeywell Kitchen ComputerMaking the world a better place
How to Respond to Code of Conduct Reports (and some training) The Al Capone Theory of Sexual Harassment No more rock stars: how to stop abuse in tech communities Suicide and society: Where does responsibility for preventing suicide lie? DEFCON: Why conference harassment mattersTech stuff
Debugging satellites, nuclear explosions, and giant space lasers My favorite operating systems debugging story Linux Weekly News articles including the Kernel Hacker's Bookshelf series The "rainbow chart" of cryptographic hash function lifetimesSelected press
A look at Square's first diversity report and ally training for employeespublished in TechCrunch in 2017 This Anti-Lean In Pioneer Is Teaching Men How to Behave in the Workplace
published in New York Magazine's The Cut in 2016 Smashing the Silicon Valley patriarchy: anti-Lean In strategy puts onus on men
published in The Guardian in 2016 Google's 'bias-busting' workshops target hidden prejudices
published in USA Today in 2015
Contact info
For questions relating to corporate training, please email valerie at frameshiftconsulting dot com. For everything else, please use valerie dot aurora at gmail dot com.