I live in beautiful Asheville, NC, a small, artistic city surrounded by national forest land in the Blue Ridge Mountains. You may know me from my youth in Georgia, from the University of Chicago, or from my work at Red Hat, GNOME, litl, or Typesafe. In the past I've lived in Chicago, Boston, and Chapel Hill.

Professionally, I'm an expert software developer, especially if you want to know about building Linux-based operating systems, desktop environments, and user experiences, or designing and implementing UI toolkit APIs. I wrote or was involved in planning huge chunks of this stuff, including GTK+, two versions of GNOME and the from-scratch litlOS UI. I've done a lot with the Clutter OpenGL toolkit and I invented, designed, and implemented the widely-used D-Bus IPC system. I was also the creator of gjs, the JavaScript runtime used in both GNOME 3.0 and litlOS. My software is used on all major Linux distributions and in numerous consumer products based on Linux.

But I've done and can do all kinds of things. For example, I spent a couple years implementing a FriendFeed/Facebook-live-feed style web site (before those came out). This was a Java, Hibernate, and JavaScript project with a touch of Windows C++ coding and some Adobe Flash. Over the years I was an inventor on lots of software patents at Red Hat and more elsewhere that aren't public yet.

Often I work as a technical director or lead, doing a lot of coding while coordinating technical decisions with design, product, and business teams. I am not so much a project or people manager, though I have filled those roles at times, including hiring and managing a team of 25 at Red Hat. I have pitched VCs, but I'm happy to just write code, too. The usual INTP personality description describes me well. I love design thinking, interaction design, and brainstorming ideas.

Some non-software areas I've dabbled in are linguistic anthropology (from college) and personal finance (I passed the certified financial planner and chartered financial analyst level 1 exams, two pretty tough tests). My Dad loved the outdoors and I have a basement full of equipment for every kind of outdoor adventure — which even gets used from time to time. I can navigate boats, fires, firearms, axes, tents, horses, and what have you. Inelegantly, but well enough to stay alive so far.

Since everyone asks: yes my name is Havoc Pennington. Havoc is my middle name, but I have always gone by it since childhood. Dad appreciated the following passage:

And Caesar's spirit, raging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

Not sure what this was supposed to say about me.

By the way, having a memorable name has been a huge positive in life — something counterintuitive enough that some countries make it illegal to name kids wacky things. If you don't have a chance to name a kid something memorable, at least name your company or product well. It's OK for names to be "negative," what matters is whether people can remember them.

I have more resume-type information on LinkedIn and if you Google my name you can see tons of code I wrote, technical discussion I was a part of, etc.

I'm happy to meet people in the tech industry doing interesting work.

Find me on email, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, GitHub