About Me

Hello. I am Hayden Barnes. I am a senior technical program manager, partnership creator, community builder, developer relations pro, and de-facto engineering manager. Today I am Senior Technical Product Manager at HeroDevs, where I lead Never-Ending Support (NES) for .NET, as part of the NES Incubator. I also serve as technical lead on the HeroDevs Open Source Sustainability Fund.

I am a six-time Microsoft MVP (2020 to 2026) with a focus on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and cross-platform, cross-architecture development. I am also an Arm Ambassador.

What I do at HeroDevs

At HeroDevs I lead .NET Never-Ending Support (NES), providing long-term security patches for end-of-life .NET versions. I write about .NET security, CVE research, and open source sustainability. When a CVE matters, I dig into it: I built a tool that reproduces CVE-2025-55315 in ASP.NET Core. I can't release repro's for them all.

Where I have been

  • I founded Whitewater Foundry and created Pengwin, a bespoke Linux distribution optimized for WSL. Pengwin was featured in the Windows Terminal demo at Microsoft Build 2019 and covered by ZDNet and The Register.
  • I was Developer Advocate and Engineering Manager for Ubuntu on WSL at Canonical, where I grew Ubuntu on WSL from 40,000 to 100,000 weekly installs.
  • I was Senior Engineering Manager at Rancher Labs (acquired by SUSE), working on Windows containers on RKE2, docs, compliance, DevOps, and IBM/Z coordination.
  • I was Community Lead for Determined AI (acquired by HPE), where I did AI/ML at scale stuff before it was cool.
  • I am a lawyer. Yes, really. I hold a JD from the University of Baltimore and I am still admitted to practice.

WSL

WSL is where I have spent the most time. I created the first custom Linux distribution built for it, organized WSLConf, the first community conference dedicated to WSL, and I maintain the WSL Community Telegram.

I am a contributor to microsoft/WSL. The first community pull request merged into the project was mine, and I have engaged on 245 or more issues. I keep an awesome-wsl list, and an awesome-unix list for the old UNIX I love.

What I care about

Writing and speaking

I blog here about WSL, .NET, Linux, and cross-platform development. I wrote a book, Pro Windows Subsystem for Linux (Apress). I co-hosted the Linux Downtime podcast, and I still appear on podcasts and streams about Linux, open source, and .NET from time to time.

Find me

You can find my code on GitHub, connect on LinkedIn, or follow me on Twitter, Bluesky, and Mastodon.

Say hello anytime.