cipherboy~

Alexander Scheel is an open-source software developer working on OpenBao and is a member of the Artaria String Quartet's Board of Directors.

Previously, he was employed at GitLab leading Secrets Management for Govern:Pipeline_Security, at Keyfactor working on Bouncy Castle, at HashiCorp leading PKI and FIPS compliance for Vault, at Canonical working on Compliance and Certifications, and at Red Hat working on Red Hat Certificate System and Compliance as Code (an OpenSCAP project). He is the former maintainer of JSS, a NSS wrapper for Java and a member of the Legion of the Bouncy Castle, a registered Australian non-profit.

He is a strong advocate for Open Source Software and Open Access research, leaving HashiCorp over the relicensing to the non-OSS Business Source License.

Alex contributes to various projects on GitHub, including to the OpenBao project (GitHub), a fork of HashiCorp Vault, where he was the TSC Chair and still serves as chair of the Development Working Group. Previously he contributed to the Fedora Package Ecosystem and the Stewardship SIG under the nickname cipherboy.

In his free time, he studies violin under Aaron Janse of the Minnesota Orchestra and Ray Shows and Nancy Oliveros of the Artaria String Quartet; his previous teachers include Hong-Yi Mo of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Boro Martinic-Jercic at Iowa State University, Aaron Janse of the Minnesota Orchestra, the Artaria String Quartet, and DeAnn Spencer.

Alex plays on a 2018 Feng Jiang Strad P violin with Zhang Ming Sheng and Ole Kanestrom bows.