Tag: adalovelaceday

It's Ada Lovelace day, a day when we celebrate women in technology. This year I'd like to mention a group of people who make the biggest difference in the tech life of any minority: the allies.

It's Ada Lovelace Day. If you don't know what that is, you can read more about it here: http://findingada.com/. Go ahead, I'll wait.

While being a woman in tech can be isolating, the women I meet along this journey make the experience what it is. I have fabulous male friends and mentors also, but today I'm focussing on the women around me. They are the modern-day equivalent of the cousins that you grow up with, share stories with, laugh and cry with. They have shared the personal and the professional, the joy and the fear. Today seems like a good time to call out some of the women that I'm so glad to have around me.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day! Today I'd like to take the time to write about a technical woman who has influenced me this year, and someone whom I imagine will be surprised to read this. Her name is Donna Benjamin, but you may know her as @kattekrab.

Donna's been a virtual friend for a few years; I "intermet" her when I was preparing to host the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam, in 2010. I had some great role models from the PHP community to show me how to "ringmaster" at a big conference, but I was unsure how it would look on a woman. Having already done a similar role for PHPNW, I'd had negative feedback about being teacherish (something that I still get complaints about), and I wasn't sure how else to wear that role. Lots of things work well for men but not for women (silly things, swearing on stage (this differs between cultures), asking for a pay rise, falling out of bed into whatever free conference shirt you were given yesterday ....) and I was determined not to turn myself into a decorative but ditsy hostess.

My good friend Kathy Reid talked through my anxieties with me, and sent me a link to a video of Donna introducing an even more major conference: Donna organised Linux Conf AU and the video showed her introducing it with equal helpings of excellence, approachability, and entertainment. Confident that I wasn't alone, I stopped worrying and gave that conference my best shot.

Happy Ada Lovelace day! Technically that's in about half an hour as I write this in the UK but as I'm speaking at FOWA tomorrow morning, I will post this now before I get distracted. Ada Lovelace day is a day of celebrating women in science and technology, and one …

This is a post in celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, recognising women in science and technology. Last year I wrote about Kathy Sierra for Ada Lovelace Day; this year my subject is someone much closer to my own life.

I'd like to write about someone who influenced me greatly - in …

In honour of Ada Lovelace Day, this is a blog post about a woman I admire in technology: Kathy Sierra.

I've been a big fan of Kathy's site for a number of years, hers was the first site I saw where eloquent prose was wrapped around technical and relevant content …