Ana Hobden is a Rust and Nix-focused technical lead with 11 years of experience building resilient back-end systems, CI infrastructure, and observability tooling. Currently Ferrocene Technical Lead at Ferrous Systems and owner of Hoverbear Consulting, she combines hands-on engineering—contributions to high-profile projects like Vector and TiKV—with leading qualified compiler releases and cross-team coordination. Her work spans distributed databases, rDMA/NVMeoF, declarative systems, and performance-sensitive build/release automation, with notable contributions to the Determinate Nix Installer used by millions. Based on Lək̓ʷəŋən territory in Sooke, BC, she brings community-focused outreach experience and a track record of mentoring and STEAM engagement with Indigenous and underrepresented groups. Pragmatic and curious, she pairs systems-level thinking with developer ergonomics—improving build pipelines, platform support (including Windows and aarch64), and reproducible builds. Outside work she’s likely debugging a Rust bug while walking her golden retriever, Nami.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree Computer Science, Bachelor's degree Computer Science at University of Victoria
Install Nix and flakes with the fast and reliable Determinate Nix Installer, with over 7 million installs.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Contributions:381 reviews, 329 commits, 600 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Ana expanded the codebase for the Determinate Nix Installer, adding functionality for managing system users and groups. They implemented features for creating and managing build users with specific IDs and group memberships. The user's work also involved setting up and configuring directory structures and environment variables, indicating a focus on system configuration and deployment aspects of the project.
Contributions:7 releases, 229 reviews, 363 commits in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Ana primarily contributed to the `cargo-pgx` tool, focused on building PostgreSQL extensions with Rust. Their work involved fixing bugs related to version fetching and schema generation. They implemented features such as adding aarch64 support and integrating a Nix flake, improving the build process. Moreover, the user's contributions included dependency updates and code formatting.
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Ana Hobden - Ferrocene Technical Lead at Hoverbear Consulting