Alex Bayley, best known as Skud in online and technology circles, has been involved in open source and more recently open culture, data and similar areas as a open source developer, advocate, and community manager. In the past she has been active in the Linux, Perl, and Freebase communities and a number of other projects. In recent years she has disassociated herself from the open source community, preferring to refer to her area of interest as "open stuff".[1]
In 2011, she quit full time work in the IT/tech industry, planning to study sound engineering.
Technical
From the late 1990s to 2007 Skud was an active Perl developer, employed mostly as a backend website (LAMP) developer for various employers and working on open source projects as a sideline. She wrote a number Perl modules, including WWW::Automate, the foundation for the very popular WWW::Mechanize. She is the founder of Melbourne.pm and the originator of the Perl Survey.
Skud worked on open data and open source projects for Freebase, and was employed by Metaweb and subsequently Google as the Freebase community manager for four years.
In 2011, she founded the Save Australian Music project, an attempt to use crowdsourcing and techniques/technologies from open source and related movements to increase knowledge of and access to independent and hard-to-find Australian music.
In 2012 she founded Growstuff, a project to build a website for food gardeners to track and share information about their edible gardens.
Geek Feminism and other activism
Skud is the founder of both the Geek Feminism wiki (in 2008) and Geek Feminism blog (in 2009).
In 2009, she spoke widely at a number of Open source conferences on the subject of women in open source, with a talk called Standing out in the crowd.
In 2011, as she was leaving employment at Google, she became heavily involved in activism against [Google+ name policy debates|Google+'s so-called "real names" policy] and ensuing Nymwars, and founded the website My Name Is Me (now defunct, formerly at http://my.nameis.me/) to advocate for the wide variety of people who have legitimate needs for Pseudonymity.
Since 2010, she has served on the advisory board of the Ada Initiative.
Former name
Until 2011, when she changed her name to Alex Bayley, Skud was sometimes also known by her former name "Kirrily Robert".[2]