Allison Randal
Allison Randal is Program Chair for O'Reilly's Open Source Convention. Her first geek career was as a research linguist in eastern Africa. But eventually her love of coding drew her away from natural languages to artificial ones. Allison is the architect of Parrot (a virtual machine for dynamic languages), on the board of directors of The Perl Foundation, and founder and president of Onyx Neon. She co-authored Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, and has edited various O'Reilly books on dynamic languages including Perl Hacks and Programming PHP.
Publishing Renaissance
I just got a stack of copies of Gravitas, the first book published by my company (Onyx Neon Press). I was amused to see it tagged as "Chick Lit" on Amazon, since it's written by a guy, and entirely from the perspective of the lead male character. Maybe they thought "S. Christopher" is something like "Samantha Christopher". The "Fight Club"…