Red Hat Announces Winners of Women in Open Source Awards

Red Hat has announcedthe winners of its Women in Open Source Awards. The AcademicAward goes to Kesha Shah, a student at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute ofInformation and Communication Technology, and the Community Award goes to SarahSharp, embedded software architect at Intel. Opensource.com has interviewswith both women.

KeshaShah: "Last year, I was a mentor in Season of KDE and GCI again, with BRLCAD and KDE. Now, I am currently working on testing automation of Ushahidi with Systers, an Anita Borg community, as a part of GSoC. During my journey, I had seen several of my peers enter the domain, succeed, and fail in equal measure. So, I took up the challenge of mentoring newbies.One of my biggest achievements is that I have personally guided about 20-22newbies into the world of open source through mentoring programs like GCI,SoK, Learn IT girls, and through conducting hands-on workshops andenlightening talks on open source. Those efforts converted them to regularcontributors."

SarahSharp: "My second proudest moment is the very first round whenthe Linux kernel participated in the Outreach Program for Women (now called Outreachy). A lot of kernel maintainers complained about how newcomers would send them mangled patches, and grump about how the newcomers should really just RTFM and look at our patch submission guidelines. Of course, it turned out the manual was lacking or out of date, and there were a lot of steps to set up tools for Linux kernel development, so I spent a week and created a step-by-step tutorial.It was really gratifying to see those first applicants go through my tutorial and send well-formed patches. I've loved watching those interns move onto bigger projects, and even get hired to work on the Linux kernel, and I'm really proud I was able to help people get involved in Linux kernel development."