Audrey Tang

Biography

Tang's parents are Tang Kuang-hua and Lee Ya-ching. 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 transitioning to female, including changing her English and Chinese names, citing a need to reconcile her outward appearance with her self-image. When her gender transition is brought up, Tang has said, "I've been shutting reality off and lived almost exclusively on the net for many years, because my brain knows for sure that I am a woman, but the social expectations demand otherwise".
The television news channel of Republic of China, ETToday, reports that she has an IQ of 180. she is a vocal proponent for autodidacticism and individualist anarchism.

Free software contributions

Tang is better 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 (a version-control software written in Perl for which she also wrote a large portion of the code), Request Tracker, 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.

Political career

Tang was named a minister without portfolio in the Lin Chuan cabinet in August 2016. She took office as the "Digital Minister" on October 1, and was placed in charge of helping government agencies communicate policy goals and managing information published by the government, both via digital means. Tang was quoted saying, "My existence is not to become a minister for a certain group, nor to broadcast government propaganda. Instead, it is to become a "channel" to allow greater combinations of intelligence and strength to come together." Tang was given this role in the Taiwanese cabinet, as a minister without portfolio, to bridge the gap between the older and younger generations. Tang is currently working on the development of free software, for the public to access, and show that the new Taiwanese sharing economy, is in fact a working system. At age 35, Tang became the youngest minister without portfolio in Taiwanese history.