Valerie Aurora

Valerie Aurora
Born	Val Henson United States
Residence	San Francisco
Alma mater	New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
Occupation	Feminist activist
Known for	Founder of the Ada Initiative
Awards	O'Reilly Open Source Award
Website	Official website

Valerie Anita Aurora was the co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization that sought to increase women's participation in the free culture movement, open source technology, and open source culture. Aurora is also known within the Linux community for advocating new developments in filesystems in Linux, including ChunkFS and the Union file system. Her birth name was Val Henson, but she changed it shortly before 2009, choosing her middle name after the computer scientist Anita Borg. In 2012, Aurora, and Ada Initiative co-founder Mary Gardiner, were named two of the most influential people in computer security by SC Magazine. In 2013, she won the O'Reilly Open Source Award.

Aurora was raised in New Mexico, and was home-schooled. She became involved in computer programming when she attended DEF CON in 1995. She studied computer science and mathematics at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

She first became involved with file systems when she worked with ZFS in 2002 at Sun Microsystems. She later moved to IBM where she worked in the group of Theodore Ts'o, where they considered extensions to the ext2 and ext3 Linux file systems. While working at Intel, she implemented the ext2 dirty bit and relative atime. Along with Arjan van de Ven, she came up with the idea for ChunkFS, which simplifies file system checks by dividing the file system into independent pieces. She also co-organized the first Linux File Systems Workshop in order to figure out how to spread awareness of and raise funding for file system development. As of 2009, she worked for Red Hat as a file systems developer as well as a part-time science writer and Linux consultant.

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