Valerie Aurora
From Geek Feminism Wiki
Valerie Aurora (Valerie Henson until 2009, most widely known until recently by her gender-neutral nickname "Val") is a Linux kernel hacker specialising in filesystem development.
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[edit] Employment
Valerie's former employers include Sun Microsystems (where she worked on the ZFS filesystem), IBM and Intel. As of August 2008 she is working part-time for Red Hat on the ext4 filesystem.
[edit] Linux work
By default, some Linux distros use the "relatime" mount option. It decreases the number of metadata writes on ext3. It turns out, Valerie created relatime because Akkana Peck discovered that Mutt couldn't tell which mailboxes had new mail when using noatime.
She's responsible for some patches that shorten the amount of time needed to fsck an ext2 partition, along one that gets a 50% improvement on RAID 5 systems with ext3 and ext4. She also worked on a new filesystem architecture called ChunkFS. The goal of ChunkFS is to deal with the fact that as hard drives get bigger, fsck times get longer. She wants to be able to fsck smaller parts of the filesystem at different times, to avoid day-long fscks in the future. And yes, she wrote a working prototype.
It's not all filesystems though. She's got patches in libc to make malloc() more efficient. She worked on the TCP/IP stack. She was the maintainer for SMP PowerPC support in Linux. Device drivers? Done that too.
She's not keeping that knowledge locked up. She's spent countless hours mentoring. She taught Linux kernel development classes at IBM, and she was even kind enough to teach kernel hacking classes for LinuxChix (on the old site). One time, she held a real-time kernel development Q&A session on the LinuxChix IRC server. She also used to writes "Kernel Hackers' Bookshelf" for Linux Weekly News
[edit] Name change
Valerie changed her legal name in 2009 from "Valerie Henson" to "Valerie Anita Aurora." She chose the middle name "Anita" after Anita Borg, a computer scientist that strove to encourage women in technology fields. Previously, the name she used publicly was "Val" instead of the full "Valerie." "Val" is a more gender-neutral name. She regretted using a gender-neutral name and contributing to invisibility and switched to the more obviously feminine "Valerie." On the topic of invisibility, she once created a fake homepage titled Val Henson is a Man talking about how hard it is to pretend to be a woman in open source.
[edit] Women in FOSS advocacy
Valerie is the author of HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux.
