Allison Randal

Allison's first geek career was as a research linguist in eastern Africa, but her love of coding led her away from natural languages to artificial ones. In over 30 years as a developer, she has worked on everything from games, linguistic analysis tools, websites, and shipping fulfillment, to compilers, hypervisors, database replication systems, deployment automation, mobile apps, and talking smart-home appliances.

She is a board member at the Open Source Initiative, board member at the OpenStack Foundation, board member at the Perl Foundation, and co-founder of the FLOSS Foundations group for open source leaders. At various points in the past she has served as chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, board member at the Python Software Foundation, chairman of the Parrot Foundation, Open Source Evangelist at O’Reilly, conference chair of OSCON, Technical Architect of Ubuntu and Open Source Advisor at Canonical, Distinguished Technologist and Open Source Strategist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Distinguished Engineer at SUSE. She collaborates in the Debian and OpenStack projects, and is currently working on a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge.