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Montana Mendy

Montana Mendy (born June 26, 1990) is a American software engineer who currently holds several board of director positions at small grade startups in the San Francisco, Bay Area (South of Market in particular). Montana first gained notoriety particularly for submitting various "Kernel patches" at such a young age (15) that solved a lot of wireless issues as well as submitting some of the first fixes to help solve the "ndiswrapper" issues that were occurring in late 2008.

Notoriety in 2008

Montana gained some universal attention in the Linux/Tech community by releasing 2 kernel patches, a ndiswrapper patch, a CompizFusion and an Emerald patch all in one big release which he called The Fab Five Tar Ball. Montana was interviewed by some of the high ups at Ubuntu, and was commended on his work and commitment to the Linux community.

Ndiswrapper issues in 2008

In early 2008 there were some issues regarding installing drivers via Ndiswrapper on some of the LTS releases of Ubuntu Linux. Particularly the Broadcom chipsets were the culprit, for weeks people went without wireless and were trying numerous fixes, none of which seemed to solve the issue. On March 9th, 2008 Montana released the first patch, which resolved the issue completely. One of the threads he wrote for the ndiswrapper fix can be found here.

Startups

Montana has been apart of various different startups in the San Francisco, Bay Area. Some of the notable startups he was apart of (submitted no code, just conversed/gave ideas in early stages) were Path, Involvio and Fabsie. Montana is currently working on Prowl which is a hybrid between various startups, Montana is currently providing open source code to the public and still keeps some proprietary with his latest project.

His current startup Prowl, Montana has told the Linux community he is working with Arduino, and plans to release the code for the drivers he writes. Montana currently has said, in a thread discussing music oriented startups that 'Prowl isn't competing with these companies, we are expanding the idea of discovering music'.

In a recent thread on the Ubuntu/Gentoo forums, Montana has confirmed a WebOS version of his application, Prowl. Montana has stated "There will be no version of Prowl for the Windows Phone"

For the webapp, Prowl is mostly using Django, and Adobe Flex, storage will be using Amazon S3. Web App is set to release in 2014.

Personal life

Mendy was born in Hayward, California and lived in Newport Beach, California before his family moved to Fremont, California where he spent most of his time learning how to program in Pascal. He dropped out of High School at the 11th grade in the hopes of finding a career in tech, within this, he found The Ubuntu Forums. With the knowledge of reading, and the forums, he was able to make his first tech startup at the age of only 16.

Forum career

Montana was also featured on CrunchBase (owned by TechCrunch). Read the article here.

Notable contributions

• Submitted various kernel patches, that fixed a lot of the wireless problems, especially for 64-bit users.
  Solved one of the original ndiswrapper issues in 2008, made a HOWTO thread, and it fixed a lot of user problems.
  Considered by some in the forums, the leader in fixing wireless issues in 2008 (linuxwizard, dmizer).
  5800+ posts in the community, with over 4000 wireless problems completely solved.
  

Montana's current goal for Ubuntu/Linux

• Everything working in synch. "I don't care how many patches I have to throw out".
  Ways to benefit everybody with EVERY piece of information that hits the forum.
  Montana would like to see more IRC participation in freenode.
  

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