LinuxChix North

Melanie Rhianna Lewis (aka Cyberspice)

Melanie jokingly refers to herself as a Jet-setting Software Engineer. She is a Software Consultant for Red Embedded Consulting specialising in embedded Linux. Her code is in many many set top boxes around the world. In the past she has been a Chartered Accountant and a Physicist playing with gravitational wave detectors.

She first programmed far too long ago and has programmed many systems. She was an Acorn fan girl in the 80s and 90s, developing the first comprehensive ARM Linux distribution, and now is sadly a bit of a Mac fan girl. Recently she has gotten in to Web 2.0 development (this is her server) and is a member of PHP Women and DevChix. She also plays with micro-controllers and occasionally gets projects on HackADay.

Apart from a geek Melanie is also a beader, belly dancer, biker, climber, goth, guitarist, herpetologist, knitter, pianist and skater. Her personal blog is “Spice World”.

Christine Caulfield

Chrissie is a Principal Software Engineer with Red Hat and a lead developer on Linux clustering software including corosync, Distributed Lock Manager and clvmd. Prior to this she has worked in a variety of places including Yorkshire Post Newspapers, British Aerospace, and Tarantella.

She is also the main developer on the Linux DECnet project (and has the VAX to prove it) which has both userspace and kernel components, but she tries to bother the kernel developers as little as possible.

Her main driving passion though is music – the stranger the better. Composing and playing violin (orchestral and electric) are her main non-work activities. So if you want geeky chat the best subjects are audio software, sampling techniques and sound-card latencies.

Music links:
Sinfonia of Leeds
CoMA
Some of her music

Zoë Stephenson

Zoë is a Research Associate at the Department of Computer Science, University of York specialising in software assurance for safety-critical systems. She is also one of the LUGMasters of the York Linux User Group and runs the annual York Linux Installfest.

Coming from a long line of engineering, photography and electronics geeks, Zoë found programming at an early age on her dad’s Sinclair Spectrum and graduated from there through many architectures and programming languages. She is still active in the Atari ST retro scene and has a strange fascination with 3.5 inch floppy disks.

In addition to the general software geekery, Zoë is also a card-game geek (and a NetRep for Magic: the Gathering), a video-game geek (especially on Nintendo), a puzzle-game geek (currently addicted to Hashi and Slitherlink), a typesetting geek and a linguistics geek. She blogs at daeghnao.com.

Molly Fletcher

Molly is a Unix systems administrator and support person. She is partner of Melanie and also works at Red Embedded where she looks after the servers, provides support to a load of software engineers and is in the process of virtualising the server infrastructure.

After first getting into computers when she got a ZX81, Molly got into making computers talk to each other early, connecting to BBSs with a TRS-80 Model 100 and a 300 baud acoustic coupler. Later she ran her own dial up BBS. Molly got into unix via SCO and A/UX before discovering linux in ’94. She has since used many other types of unix while working as a sysadmin for Bath and York Universities.

When not doing things with computers Molly likes to got out dancing, mostly to psy-trance and techno. She has eclectic music tastes and listens to music constantly but has little talent for music production. Molly is also an airbrush artist working mostly on t-shirts.