Contact

Summary

File systems developer with 9 years industry experience in Linux/UNIX kernel development
Located in the San Francisco Bay area

Objective

Short-term, high value-add consulting engagements
Occasional travel outside of San Francisco Bay area acceptable

Education

B.S. Computer Science, New Mexico Tech, Socorro, New Mexico, May 1999
B.S. Mathematics, New Mexico Tech, Socorro, New Mexico, May 1999

Experience

Founder and Principal Consultant
VAH Consulting, LLC
5/07 to present

• Key role in the design and development of startup flagship products
• Debugged hardware corruption on compact flash devices
• Improved performance of ext3/4 file system check by 50% on RAID-5
• Root-caused performance problem with directory fsync on ext3
• Developed chunkfs, a new Linux file system designed for swift repair

• Designed and began development of chunkfs, a new Linux file system
• Organized first ever Linux File Systems Workshop
• Wrote and merged to mainline patches for file systems, VFS, and glibc
• Wrote the ebizzy benchmark to test performance of multi-threaded memory allocation and VMA lookup
• Published papers and gave talks at Ottawa Linux Symposium, Linuxconf AU, O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Hot Topics in Dependability, and many Linux users' groups
• Wrote "Kernel Hacker's Bookshelf" series for Linux Weekly News
• Maintained Tulip ethernet driver

• Supported large IBM Linux customers remotely and on-site
• Root-caused silent data corruption bugs in SATA disk driver and GPFS clustered file system
• Debugged hardware failures in some of the world's largest Linux clusters
• Tuned performance of customer applications in competitive evaluation environment
• Taught Linux kernel development classes
• Profiled and tuned Linux for customer applications

• Key developer and architect for ZFS, a new file system for Solaris
• Worked on Solaris operating system on SPARC, x86, Opteron
• Root-caused and fixed long-standing UFS and VxFS directory bugs
• Wrote and published technical papers on ZFS and other topics
• Mentored and supervised other developers
• Led women in engineering activities

Senior Software Engineer
Synergy Microsystems
2/01 to 6/02

• Maintained Linux kernel port for SMP PowerPC platform
• Brought up Linux kernel on new hardware platforms
• Debugged and fixed serial and network drivers
• Root-caused SCSI disconnect problem caused by BIOS bug
• Fixed and shipped patches for showstopper bugs within hours or days
• Wrote and debugged code for:
  • Interprocessor communication
  • Interrupt request service routines
  • Memory management
  • First stage bootloader
• Mentored and supervised other developers

Software Engineer
Essential Communications
1/00 to 2/01

• Designed and implemented a Linux-based network appliance
• Measured and improved network performance
• Wrote new code and bug fixes at every level of Linux TCP/IP stack
• Ported gcc-based compiler to i960RN processor
• Mentored and supervised other developers

Software Engineer
Applied Physics, Inc.
6/99 to 12/99

• Maintained real-time signal processing software on 4-node UNIX cluster
• Fixed long-standing mathematical errors in signal processing code

Selected publications

• A File Systems Reading List, appeared in Linux Weekly News.
• /dev/hello_world: A Simple Introduction to Device Drivers under Linux, appeared in O'Reilly Linux Dev Center.
• The 2006 Linux File Systems Workshop, appeared in Linux Weekly News.
• Chunkfs: Using divide-and-conquer to improve file system reliability and repair, appeared in USENIX Hot Topics in Dependability 2006.

Projects and activities

• Founder and chair of Linux File Systems Workshop, program chair for StorageSS Workshop '07
• Served on program committee for USENIX Technical Conference '04, FREENIX '05, Ottawa Linux Symposium '04 and '05, StorageSS Workshop '06, and 2007 and 2008 Linux Storage and File Systems Workshop
• Write and speak about women in computing (especially Linux)
• Write and collect questions for the TCP/IP Drinking Game
• Maintained Gemini (PowerPC variant) Linux port
• Wrote interprocessor communication routines for new interrupt controller
• Wrote fully transparent TCP proxy using Linux packet filtering
• Designed and implemented an FPGA-based pipelined microprocessor