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, Acked by Realtek’s kernel maintainer, merging into wireless-next. patch on lore.
• wireless-regdb — five country regulatory-database patches across South Africa, Hong Kong, Korea, Russia, and Ukraine, verified against primary sources (SCRF, MSIT, OFCA, ETSI). patch series.
• morrownr/rtw89 PR #76 — out-of-tree backport of the RTL8922AU fix.
• 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

This site is built with Astro and hosted on Cloudflare Pages. The source is public at github.com/louis-kotze/louiskotze.dev — MIT on code, CC BY 4.0 on content. No analytics, no cookies, no trackers.