Women in Advanced Computing (WiAC)

Amy Rich has been a UNIX sysadmin for over 20 years at a variety of companies, has owned her own consulting business, helped organize multiple sysadmin conferences, and written professionally on the topic of UNIX systems administration. She currently works at the Mozilla Corporation and plays the part of both of sysadmin and manager of the Release Engineering Operations IT team, providing the infrastructure which performs automated builds and tests for Firefox, Firefox OS, and Thunderbird across all of the platforms that Mozilla supports. She is a member of USENIX and the LISA SIG, and is a founding member of LOPSA.

Deanna McNeil started out as a mom who had to work part time and discovered a knack for systems administration. Now she pursues technology for the love of always learning.

Amy Forinash was born and raised in Prince George's County, MD, and is a happy product of the public school system there. After studying physics at the University of Maryland at College Park, she went on to become a system administrator in the mid-'90s, a job she still holds and has expanded to meet the IT security needs of her customer. In her personal life she enjoys long distance hiking, dressage with her Lippizan, and consuming adult beverages with other system administrators.

Deirdré Straughan has worked in technology for 25 years, on documentation, training, UI design, marketing, open source community management, event management, social media, video, and more. She tends to operate at the interfaces: between companies and customers, technologists and non-technologists, marketers and engineers, and anywhere else that people need help communicating with each other about technology. Much more about her life and work can be found at beginningwithi.com.