About

Senior full-stack engineer and Linux kernel contributor, based in Stilbay on the southern coast of South Africa. Ten-plus years across FinTech, automotive, and pharmaceuticals. Currently leading a team at iOCO Digital delivering data-visualization platform features for Takeda, while shipping patches upstream to the Linux kernel and the wireless regulatory database.

How I work

I started with Agile/Scrum a decade ago and ended up internalising the principles more than the ceremonies: transparency, regular reflection, iteration over perfection. That frame has travelled everywhere since, into engineering management, upstream contribution, even my personal productivity. Most of what I write here is about applying that discipline in new contexts, including with AI as a working partner.

The writing is where the detail lives.

Open-source & upstream

• Linux kernel (linux-wireless): RTL8922AU USB RF-calibration fix, merged into Ping-Ke Shih’s rtw-next tree in April 2026 with five independent Tested-by tags across USB chipsets. Patch on lore. Also a cfg80211 MLO group-key error-message grammar fix, Accepted by Johannes Berg (patch).
• wireless-regdb: five country regulatory-database patches (ZA, HK, RU, KR, UA) verified against primary sources (ICASA, OFCA, MSIT, SCRF, ETSI), all merged into wens/wireless-regdb in April 2026. Plus a Reviewed-by on a community-submitted RU 6 GHz 320 MHz patch, applied to wens/wireless-regdb master on 2026-04-30: six total commits across five jurisdictions in one month, including first review credit on someone else's regulatory analysis. Patch series on lore.
• morrownr/rtw89 PR #76: out-of-tree DKMS backport of the RTL8922AU fix, merged April 2026.
• Filed Fedora bug 2458629 with reproducer and root-cause analysis for a wpa_supplicant MLO reassociation race.

Contact

• Professional & general: louis@louiskotze.dev
• Kernel & upstream work: loukot@gmail.com (the address my kernel patches are attributed to on lore.kernel.org.
• GitHub: github.com/louis-kotze
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/louis-kotze

Verify my commits

Every commit I push from my primary machine is signed with an SSH (ed25519) key. GitHub shows a Verified badge on the commit when the key below is on my account.

Public key

ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIOKAYsuKIn3ngx+0CpvawsAZVLR7dY4pHA8BPAkzRM5d loukot@gmail.com

Fingerprint

SHA256:AlxMiAoC8XMhauBqgjZr3tN8VKo9neq8DJIPwxH1whM

To verify a commit locally: add the public key above to your allowed_signers file, point git at it with git config gpg.ssh.allowedSignersFile <path>, then run git log --show-signature on a commit from this repository.

Elsewhere

I run Prolific Studio as a small consultancy. If my open-source work has been useful to you, consider supporting it via Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee.

Colophon

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