2016 marked the second year that Red Hat, Inc. has selected two women to receive the Women in Open Source award, which honors women from anywhere in the world who have made significant contributions to an open-source project or community — or to the open-source philosophy in general. Nominations are open, and after narrowing the field down to 10 finalists, Red Hat judges allow the open-source community to pick the winners.

This year’s winners, Jessica McKellar, director of engineering and chief of staff to the VP of engineering at Dropbox, and Preeti Murthy, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University and Software Engineering Intern at VMware, Inc., sat down with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at the Red Hat Summit from the Moscone N & W in San Francisco to share a little bit about themselves and their contributions to open source.

Using open source to change your environment

McKellar began her career as an electrical engineer. She is now director of engineering at Dropbox, a secure online file sharing and storage service. Outside of work hours, she is now heavily involved in the Python software community, which she sees as a way to give back to the open-source community as a whole. She has been involved in open-source software development for seven years.

“I want people to learn how to program,” said McKellar. “Because when you learn how to program, you have this really powerful experience about changing your environment. And I want people to take that mentality and to apply it to the outside world.”

Contributing to the Linus and open-source community

Murthy got her undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in India. After working as a Linux kernel developer at an IBM technology center, she later chose to continue her education and is now pursuing her master’s degree in electrical engineering at Carnegie Melon University. Murthy feels continuing her degree will allow her to contribute further to Linux and the open-source community.

She has been an open-source contributor for more than three years. As an undergraduate, she worked on the Mono open-source cross-compiler project as part of her thesis and was actively involved in the Linux users group.

“As a young developer, I was extremely happy and impressed that the kernel community was so open to new developers,” explained Murthy. “That inspired me to give it back to the people who were driving the community.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit.

Photo by SiliconANGLE