Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
There's plenty of info on Ada Lovelace at the link below, but the short version is as follows:
Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron (the poet whom many of us have heard of) and she contributed work to a project called the Analytical Engine, a theoretical machine whose design anticipated modern computers. Her notes on calculations and other operations that could be performed by the Analytical Engine are, in essence, the world's first computer programming and software.
I was alerted to the celebration of Ada Lovelace Day by flourish , who posted about her friend Michelle who is a kick-ass programmer and web designer. You can read flourish 's post about Ada Lovelace Day, because it is very lovely.
Ada Lovelace Day is to honor women's contributions to technology and to recognize female role models in technology. So, to celebrate this day, I'd like to mention my co-worker K.
[I've asked her if she has a blog or website I can link to--something to showcase her a little more publicly. I hope to add more soon. But even if there doesn't turn out to be something to link to, I still want to celebrate her here. This story is a valuable one, even without offsite links.]
My company does cross-platform programming for mobile devices. We have several iPhone Apps on iTunes right now, but our software originated with Palm Pilots and other old school PDAs and has kept pace with mobile technology since then.
K is one of our three software engineers. She is the lead programmer for our software on BlackBerry, which, for our small company, means that, when you use our program on BlackBerry, she's the one who wrote it.
Like flourish , I'd never known a female computer programmer before knowing K. It just changes your picture of the world, knowing that women can do things like this--techy computer things, today's pinnacle of hard science--and knowing it personally, not just as a theoretical possibility. I think it reveals something powerful about how sexism works, that (for me) without knowing a female programmer personally there would still be something unthinkable about it. This is not in my conscious mind, mind you, but still there nonetheless. So it makes a huge difference on that level for me to know and work with K.
The other thing about K is that she really does a brilliant job of being a role model. (I don't know how much of this is conscious for her, but she does it anyway.) She lets me ask her questions all the time and never laughs at me, even when I make really novice mistakes. She is always generous with her time when I have techy questions and she never treats me like I'm too dumb to understand it*, even though I have NO TRAINING IN PROGRAMMING WHATSOEVER, LIKE, NONE AT ALL.
The thing I found most touching about Flourish's post was her "Moral of the Story," that we can learn these things too--we, all of us, the girls, the non-techy people, the young people, the older people, everyone. Not everyone is going to be a computer programmer by trade, but you can be like me and learn enough to create the things you want to create, even if they're not professional-grade. Or you can learn just enough to realize that there isn't anything magical or inevitably opaque about technology or computers or programming languages, so you don't have to feel that tinge of panic when you worry that something "too technical" will be required of you.
Computers are part of our new language, and we can all learn to speak it. We can do it, all of us, and especially the women**.
*And maybe, just maybe, that attitude toward me and the capacity of my understanding is not companywide, so it makes it even more special to me that she answers my questions and appears to take them completely seriously.
**My mother has a PhD in Nuclear Engineering. You might think that I'd have already learned that women are as good in these "masculine" fields as men are, but somehow I haven't. That's why reminders like Ada Lovelace Day mean so much to me.
Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron (the poet whom many of us have heard of) and she contributed work to a project called the Analytical Engine, a theoretical machine whose design anticipated modern computers. Her notes on calculations and other operations that could be performed by the Analytical Engine are, in essence, the world's first computer programming and software.
I was alerted to the celebration of Ada Lovelace Day by flourish , who posted about her friend Michelle who is a kick-ass programmer and web designer. You can read flourish 's post about Ada Lovelace Day, because it is very lovely.
Ada Lovelace Day is to honor women's contributions to technology and to recognize female role models in technology. So, to celebrate this day, I'd like to mention my co-worker K.
[I've asked her if she has a blog or website I can link to--something to showcase her a little more publicly. I hope to add more soon. But even if there doesn't turn out to be something to link to, I still want to celebrate her here. This story is a valuable one, even without offsite links.]
My company does cross-platform programming for mobile devices. We have several iPhone Apps on iTunes right now, but our software originated with Palm Pilots and other old school PDAs and has kept pace with mobile technology since then.
K is one of our three software engineers. She is the lead programmer for our software on BlackBerry, which, for our small company, means that, when you use our program on BlackBerry, she's the one who wrote it.
Like flourish , I'd never known a female computer programmer before knowing K. It just changes your picture of the world, knowing that women can do things like this--techy computer things, today's pinnacle of hard science--and knowing it personally, not just as a theoretical possibility. I think it reveals something powerful about how sexism works, that (for me) without knowing a female programmer personally there would still be something unthinkable about it. This is not in my conscious mind, mind you, but still there nonetheless. So it makes a huge difference on that level for me to know and work with K.
The other thing about K is that she really does a brilliant job of being a role model. (I don't know how much of this is conscious for her, but she does it anyway.) She lets me ask her questions all the time and never laughs at me, even when I make really novice mistakes. She is always generous with her time when I have techy questions and she never treats me like I'm too dumb to understand it*, even though I have NO TRAINING IN PROGRAMMING WHATSOEVER, LIKE, NONE AT ALL.
The thing I found most touching about Flourish's post was her "Moral of the Story," that we can learn these things too--we, all of us, the girls, the non-techy people, the young people, the older people, everyone. Not everyone is going to be a computer programmer by trade, but you can be like me and learn enough to create the things you want to create, even if they're not professional-grade. Or you can learn just enough to realize that there isn't anything magical or inevitably opaque about technology or computers or programming languages, so you don't have to feel that tinge of panic when you worry that something "too technical" will be required of you.
Computers are part of our new language, and we can all learn to speak it. We can do it, all of us, and especially the women**.
*And maybe, just maybe, that attitude toward me and the capacity of my understanding is not companywide, so it makes it even more special to me that she answers my questions and appears to take them completely seriously.
**My mother has a PhD in Nuclear Engineering. You might think that I'd have already learned that women are as good in these "masculine" fields as men are, but somehow I haven't. That's why reminders like Ada Lovelace Day mean so much to me.