Major Hayden
Special guest
Major Hayden is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, where he works Red Hat Enterprise Linux. He's spent more than two decades in open source, with stints architecting infrastructure at Rackspace during the early OpenStack days and serving in multiple leadership roles within the Fedora Project, including the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee and Fedora's Cloud SIG.
A Texas Linux Fest regular, Major has previously spoken on Ansible automation and the realities of building RAG systems in production. When he's not deep in Linux internals, he's running, chasing contacts on amateur radio (W5WUT), or nerding out over financial markets.
You can find his blog @ https://major.io/
Major Hayden has been a guest on 1 episode.
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Imposter Syndrome: The OODA Loop Framework from Fighter Pilots with Major Hayden
July 16th, 2026 | 40 mins 13 secs
ai coding assistants, alan cox, artificial intelligence, career advice, code review, developer mentoring, devops, engineering leadership, fedora linux, g research, gr-oss out podcast, imposter syndrome, jay faulkner, linux kernel, major hayden, ooda loop, open source contribution, open source software, rackspace, red hat, red hat enterprise linux, rhel, systems administration, technology
Major Hayden — longtime Fedora packager and Red Hat engineer, formerly of Rackspace — joins host Jay Faulkner to talk about imposter syndrome in tech, and the framework he's used for over a decade to work through it: the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act), originally developed for fighter pilot decision-making.