Murthy wins the Red Hat Women in Open Source Academic Award
Preeti Murthy, an ECE master’s student, has won the 2016 Red Hat Women in Open Source Academic Award. The award recognizes women who make important contributions to an open source project or the open source community.
As an undergraduate, Preeti was part of a team that introduced students to open source. After graduating with her bachelor’s degree, she worked for three years as a Linux kernel developer, where she contributed code, documentation, tutorials, open content, and other communications. Preeti has nearly 60 commits and reviews in the area of CPU power management. She also volunteered as a co-mentor for the
“Technology is affecting the lives of people in their day-to-day tasks in a big way,” says Murthy. “People from all across the world are able to do their tasks so much more efficiently and effectively, so I wish to contribute in my own little way to this wonderful transformation that I see all around me.”
Watch Murthy’s interview with the Red Hat Summit hosts at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA:
Q&A with Preeti Murthy from opensource.com
Let's start at Carnegie Mellon. As an undergrad, where you involved in open source?
During my undergrad education, a group of us were involved in encouraging students to use Linux on personal laptops as a start to working with open source technologies. I was part of the Linux User Group (LUG), where students used open source tools for hobby projects.
For my undergraduate thesis, I worked on building a code optimizer for Mono, which is an open source framework to build
At what point did you decide to tie electrical and computer engineering together with open source?
I worked as a Linux kernel developer in the areas of scheduler and power management. It was fascinating to gain a deeper understanding and contribute to development in these areas. After a while, I felt the need to gain more breadth in my understanding of computer systems. A holistic view would not only help me better contribute to
At IBM, you began working on the Linux kernel: What surprised you? What frustrated you? What made you happy?
It surprised me to see how well the open source community orchestrated the development of a big project such as the Linux kernel. It was fascinating to see the discipline and passion with which the developers were driving the community.
It made me really happy to see the encouragement and guidance that the community offered to new developers.
Nothing really frustrated me in particular, but a lesson that most kernel developers take back is to learn from our mistakes quickly. It tests the time and patience of the kernel maintainers to repeatedly correct the same errors in code or documentation.
Now you're back in school earning a master's degree from Carnegie Mellon to study a class of devices called energy harvesting systems. What is that?
Energy harvesting devices are an emerging class of embedded devices which are used in
What would a world without open source look like? Can you image it?
Open source has provided more avenues for developers. The cooperative development that governs open source technologies can lead to better solutions. Besides, by discussing problems in the open, one can know if they are already solved or if they are worth solving, thus leading to
What's your dream job?
I would like to work in a place where developers are encouraged to work together to solve common problems affecting a wider population in the world. I also don’t suppose there is something like a dream job because all jobs have phases of excitement and monotony. It is important to me personally to be able to give a job my best effort possible.