Audrey Tang is a Taiwanese free software programmer, who has been described as one of the "ten greats of Taiwanese computing.”
Tang was born as Autrijus Tang on April 18, 1981. Tang showed an early interest in computers, beginning to learn Perl programming at age 12. Two years later, she dropped out of high school, unable to adapt to student life. By the year 2000, at the age of 19, Tang had already held positions in software companies, and worked in California's Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur.
In late 2005, Tang began to transitioning her gender identity as a trans woman, including changing her English and Chinese names, citing a need to "reconcile her outward appearance with her self-image". Taiwan's Eastern Television reports that she has an IQ of 180.
Tang is best known for initiating and leading the Pugs project, a joint effort from the Haskell and Perl communities to implement the Perl 6 language; she has also made contributions to internationalization and localization efforts for several Free Software programs, including SVK, Request Tracker (for which she also wrote a large portion of the code) and Slash, as well as heading Traditional Chinese translation efforts for various open source-related books.
On CPAN, Tang initiated over 100 Perl projects between June 2001 and July 2006, including the popular Perl Archive Toolkit (PAR), a cross-platform packaging and deployment tool for Perl 5. She is also responsible for setting up smoke test and digital signature systems for CPAN. In October 2005, she was a speaker at O'Reilly Media's European Open Source Convention in Amsterdam.