Miguel de Icaza

Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft focusing on mobile developer tools. He co-founded Xamarin in 2011 and Ximian in 1999, both with Nat Friedman. Miguel co-founded the GNOME project in 1997, and has directed the Mono project since its creation in 2001, including multiple Mono releases at Novell. Miguel has received the Free Software Foundation 1999 Free Software Award, the MIT Technology Review Innovator of the Year Award in 1999, and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 innovators for the new century in September 2000. In 1997, he was interviewed by Microsoft for a position but lacked the university degree to obtain a work H1-B Visa. Today he is one of the most respected voices in Open Source. Born in Mexico, de Icaza became a US Citizen in 2015.