---
title: My Life Lessons and Photo Album
osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2017/program/proposals/405
beginning: '2017-10-06T09:30:00.000-07:00'
end: '2017-10-06T10:30:00.000-07:00'
keynote: true
resources:
  internet_archive_identifier: seagl2017-nithya-ruff-20171006
presenters:
- name: Nithya Ruff
  osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/users/382
  gravatar_id: ce222bad8c9414f8179edde0cfad0b76
---

Nithya has been a passionate advocate and a speaker for opening doors to new people in Open Source for many years. She has also been a promoter of valuing diverse ways of contributing to open source such as in marketing, legal and community. You can often find her on social media promoting dialogue on diversity and open source. She has spoken at multiple conferences such as LinuxCon, OSCON, All Things Open, SCALE, Grace Hopper, OpenStack and Red Hat Summit on the business and community of open source. In recognition of her work in open source both on the business and community side, she was named to CIO magazine’s most influential women in open source list. And most recently, the O’Reilly Conference awarded Nithya the 2017 Open Source award for exceptional contributions to open source software. You can follow her on twitter: @nithyaruff
