Program Committee

Jonathan Corbet is the kernel documentation maintainer, co-founder of LWN.net, a member of the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board, and the lead author of Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition.  He lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Carles has been a firmware developer at several hardware, semiconductor and software companies for over 20 years, with a focus on microcontrollers. For the last 10 years he has worked at Nordic Semiconductor, where he was part of the team that brought to market Nordic’s first ever Bluetooth Low Energy chip, and has remained a member of the software development team since. During this time at Nordic he has also co-authored a book on Bluetooth LE and contributed to different areas of the software development effort, driving an internal push to contribute an existing proprietary Bluetooth LE Controller implementation as an open source component to the Zephyr project. With the controller now part of the Zephyr codebase, he widened his focus beyond Bluetooth Low Energy, helping ensure that Zephyr becomes the best possible open source all-purpose RTOS available.

Jake has been wrassling with computers since he first laid eyes on a TRS-80 lo these many years ago. After graduating with a Computer Science degree and a brief dabble in grad school, he did systems programming for a (too) long list of startups, mostly in Colorado. He wrote software for around 20 years and, since 2007, now he writes about software — Linux and free software, in particular — at LWN.net. He lives with his wife and a loony dog near the beach in Baja California Sur.

Kathy Giori has spent her career of more than 30 years working in technology companies in the SF Bay Area. Her current focus to pay that career success forward is to spend much of her time supporting MicroBlocks, as head of Global Partnerships and Outreach. MicroBlocks is a non-profit STEM organization that has developed the first truly “live” open source physical computing tool for programming microcontrollers.

As part of her industry career she was most recently Director of Product Engineering at ZEDEDA, and held numerous executive and product roles at Mozilla, Arduino, Qualcomm, Etak/Sony, SRI, and four startups, two of which she co-founded and led as CEO. Kathy volunteered as a TechWomen professional mentor for the last 4 years and continues to collaborate with fellows. She has given numerous talks at Linux Foundation and other industry events, has organized technology workshops, and is often promoting the benefits of open hardware and software to industry, since bridging open communities with industry drives faster innovation. She received her bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, and her master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford.

Maureen Helm is a Distinguished Engineer in the Software Engineering Solutions Group at Analog Devices, focusing on embedded microcontroller software. She is an upstream maintainer in the Zephyr Project and former chair of the Technical Steering Committee.

Greg is among a distinguished group of software developers who maintain Linux at the kernel level. In his role as Linux Foundation Fellow, he continues his work as the maintainer for the Linux stable kernel branch and a variety of subsystems while working in a fully neutral environment.

Sasha helps maintain the Linux Kernel Stable and LTS trees. He is currently employed by Google where he helps make Linux better. Previously, Sasha was employed by Microsoft and the Ksplice team in Oracle.

Nicole has worked in different projects developing safety relevant embedded software before starting as an independent safety assessor. With now more than ten years of experience as a functional safety expert, she supported several customers to show their compliance with ISO 26262 and/or other safety standards. Currently she is utilising her experience regarding the development of highly reliable software to enable both closed and open source solutions to be used in critical products, focusing on safety, security and licence compliance.

Steven Rostedt currently works for Google on the ChromeOS baseOS performance team. He is the main developer and maintainer for ftrace, the official tracer of the Linux kernel, as well as the user space tools and libraries that interact with the Linux tracing interface. Steven is also one of the original developers for the Real Time patch (PREEMPT_RT) and still helps maintain the stable releases of the Real Time patch set. He also develops ktest.pl (in the kernel) and created the “make localmodconfig” option.

Nithya A. Ruff is the Head of Amazon’s Open Source Program Office. Open Source has proven
to be one of the world’s most prolific enablers of innovation and collaboration and Amazon’s
customers increasingly value open source innovation and the and cloud’s role in helping them
adopt and run important open source services. She drives open source culture and
coordination inside of Amazon and engagement with external communities. Prior to Amazon,
she started and grew Comcast and Western Digital’s Open Source Program Offices. Open
Source Program Offices are a critical part of a company’s digital transformation and innovation
journey.

Nithya has been director-at-large on the Linux Foundation Board for the last 5 years and in
2019 was elected to be Chair of the influential Linux Foundation Board. She works actively to
advance the mission of the Linux Foundation around building sustainable ecosystems that are
built on open collaboration. She is a passionate advocate and a speaker for opening doors to
new and diverse people in technology and can often be seen speaking and writing on this topic.
Nithya graduated with an M.S. in Computer Science from NDSU and an MBA from the
University of Rochester, Simon Business School and is an aspiring corporate board director and
governance enthusiast. You can follow her on twitter @nithyaruff and you can find her
on https://www.linkedin.com/in/nithyaruff/

With a passion for community building and a focus on developer happiness, Shilla Saebi champions using open source and empowers technologists to create innovative solutions while collaborating with upstream open source communities. As the Sr. Director of Comcast’s Open Source Program Office, Shilla, drives the company’s open source strategy and advances collaboration within the broader tech ecosystem. Shilla has a wealth of experience in the open source world. Her commitment to open source extends beyond her work at Comcast, as evidenced by her role as a CNCF Ambassador and a member of the TODOGroup Steering Committee since 2021. She was involved with OpenStack for over five years, serving on both the User Committee Board and the Superuser Editorial Advisory Board, and is a maintainer of several open source projects. Shilla enjoys good music, traveling, coffee, outdoor activities, and art when she’s not working.

As a Lead Developer Advocate at Dell Technologies, Laura Santamaria loves to learn and explain how things work to bridge the gaps in engineering disciplines. She is the curator for A Minute on the Mic, a cohost for The Hallway Track podcast, and the ex-host of Quick Bites of Cloud Engineering on YouTube. As a community member, she co-hosts Austin DevOps and Cloud Austin, taught Python for Women Who Code Austin for many years, organizes DevOpsDays Austin, is a member of the PyTexas Foundation, and has been a returning program committee member for Open Source Summit’s Cloud Open track. Outside of tech, Laura runs, plays with her dogs, throws discs, and watches clouds—the real kind.

Kate Stewart is a Senior Director of Strategic Programs, responsible for the Open Compliance programs encompassing the SPDX, FOSSology, OpenChain, and other compliance-related projects. Kate was one of the founders of SPDX, and is currently the specification lead. Since joining The Linux Foundation, she has also launched Real-Time Linux and Zephyr Project.

With almost 30 years of experience in the software industry, she has held a variety of roles and worked as a developer in Canada, Australia, and the US and for the last 20 years has managed software development teams in the US, Canada, UK, India, and China. She received her Master’s in computer science from the University of Waterloo and her Bachelor’s of computer science (co-op program) from the University of Manitoba.

Elena Zannoni is an Senior Director of Linux Engineering at Oracle, with focus on Toolchain and Tracing. Elena has presented at many Linux Foundation conferences on various development related topics, like Tracing, BPF, DTrace, CTF, and more. Elena has been part of the LPC committee, and part of the OSS/LinuxCon Program committee for several years.