About Hayden Barnes
I am Hayden Barnes. I am an open source person.
I am a Microsoft MVP with a focus on Windows Subsystem for Linux.
I am also an Arm Ambassador.
As an Arm Ambassador, I contribute to the Windows on Arm ecosystem with 15+ Arm-related PRs across projects including:
- Maintaining a fork of the GitHub Actions Runner with Windows Container support on both x64 and Arm
- Helping port Scoop, the Windows package manager, to Arm
- Arm build support for Pengwin and wslu RPM packages
- Docs and build clarifications for microsoft/onnxruntime-genai on Windows Arm
- Tracking Arm app readiness via is-windows-on-arm-ready
I am passionate about:
- Sustainable open source
- Cross-platform/cross-architecture development
- Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
- Old UNIX
I also:
- Blog about WSL, .NET, Linux, and cross-platform development
- Write about .NET security, CVE research, and open source sustainability at HeroDevs
- Speak at conferences
- Founded and organized WSLConf - the first community conference dedicated to WSL
- Previously co-hosted the Linux Downtime podcast
- Appear on podcasts and streams about Linux, open source, and .NET
- Lead the WSL Community Telegram
- Contribute to open source projects across the ecosystem
Selected writing:
Selected Writing
- Pro Windows Subsystem for Linux (Apress) - Author
- HeroDevs Joins the .NET Foundation to Secure and Grow the Open Source Ecosystem
- HeroDevs Joins .NET Security Group: Securing the Future of the .NET Ecosystem
- Critical ASP.NET Vulnerability CVE-2025-55315 Reported: Upgrade Now
- A Practical Decision-Maker's Guide to Responding to CVE-2025-55315
- FAQ About CVE-2025-55315: The 9.9 Rated CVE in ASP.NET Core
Personal Projects
My personal projects include:
- maintaining awesome-wsl and awesome-unix
- helping port Scoop, the Windows package manager, to arm64
- developing wslinternals, a set of tools for WSL power users
- creating Pengwin, the first bespoke Linux distribution optimized for WSL
- later creating Fedora Remix for WSL and Pengwin Enterprise
Work
At HeroDevs, I lead Never-Ending Support (NES) for .NET, providing long-term security patches for end-of-life .NET versions.
I was previously the Senior Open Source Community Manager at Determined AI and Pachyderm, two open source AI/ML and big data projects acquired and backed by HPE AI.
Prior to my work on AI/ML at HPE, I was a senior engineering manager at Rancher Labs, where I focused on internal DevOps, support for Windows Containers on Kubernetes, and documentation.
Before that, I was a developer advocate at Canonical where I focused on Ubuntu on Windows Subsystem for Linux.
I have experience in:
- building and leading effective results-oriented community teams
- building and leading groundbreaking engineering teams
- Windows dev and administration
- Linux dev and administration
- DevOps and MLOps
- containers and virtualization
- with open source compliance and supply chain security