11 Facts About Valerie Aurora

Valerie Anita Aurora is an American software engineer and feminist activist.

Valerie 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.

Daughter of Carolyn Meinel, Valerie Aurora was raised in New Mexico, and was home-schooled.

Valerie Aurora became involved in computer programming when she attended DEF CON in 1995.

Valerie Aurora studied computer science and mathematics at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

Valerie Aurora first became involved with file systems when she worked with ZFS in 2002 at Sun Microsystems.

Valerie Aurora 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.

Valerie Aurora 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.

Two years later, Valerie Aurora founded Double Union, a hackerspace for women, with Amelia Greenhall and Liz Henry.

In 2013, Valerie Aurora provided a comment to The Verge about the Electronic Frontier Foundation's involvement in the legal defense of Andrew Auernheimer, who was in prison for hacking and had previously harassed Kathy Sierra.

Valerie Aurora condemned the threats sent to the woman and stated that Anonymous, by using large numbers of computers, was "distorting social pressure".