Ada was a Lady

Augusta Ada Lovelace was arguably the first tech writer, and almost certainly the first computer geek groupie. Some folks arranged an international Ada Lovelace Day Blogfest today to call attention to Women in Technology, and I agreed (some time ago) to participate.  Probably I would have spaced it, but a handy nag just came up in Facebook (...see? FB is good for something besides re-finding your 7th grade boyfriend afterall...).

Okay, here's a blurb about a woman in technology who I very much admire:

This is a picture of Allison Randal (taken by the wonderful James Duncan Davidson...the original is hosted here on Flickr). 

I think Allison is the bomb...seriously.  She's served as the President of the Perl Foundation.  She's long been one of the program chairs for OSCON.  She's a code contributor to CPAN, the Parrot project and I suspect some other projects as well...*and* she still manages to be quite beautiful and poised through all her geekiness.  She's fun to hang out with (although now that she lives in South Africa I'm not seeing her so much around the playground).  Have to say I admire that whole "I'm moving to South Africa" thing too...I remember being that brave at some point in my life.

So, there you have it.  My Ada-Day heroine is Allison.  Who is yours?

Comments

[dave shields]

Danese,

The Ada programming language is named in her honor. I was on the team that built the world's first validated Ada compiler, when I was at NYU. I also did the port to the IBM PC.

Ada's mentor Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Analytical Engine, was also the inventor of the cow-catcher.

I see you are named afer an Alfa-Romeo. During my SPITBOL days I worked with someone whose name I have forgotten. All I remember is that he went from Amdahl to Sun, was one of Sun's earliest employees, and that he drove an Alfa-Romeo. Do you know his name? I would love to get in touch with him, for I'm doing some work on SPITBOL these days, the first time I have done so since 1983, and I expect he would be interested.

thanks,dave

[dave shields]

Danese,

I am forming my a Summer of Code in honor of the late Jack Schwartz, my friend, colleague and thesis advisor. I will be working with students from the age of 12 to 21. So far they are all male and I would to correct that imbalance, so any help on your part would be appreciated. We are, among other things, going to build a Python compiler from scratch that, I am confident, will result in a runtime that will be at least five times faster than CPython.

thanks,dave

Fran Allen is also a lifelong friend, so I take it as a given that you are involved with the Systers. I knew Anita Borg, the woman in whose honor it was founded, when she was a grad student at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

thanks,dave