Vista

Today is Ada Lovelace Day and to mark the occasion I’ve chosen highlight Molly Holzschlag as one of the women in technology who have inspired me to be who I am today.

Six years ago, exasperated, I typed “geeks london” into Google.  I had had enough of not being able to talk freely about the things that I felt passionately about and just wanted to find some like-minded people to chat with.  Fortuitously, like-minded people had set up a group for exactly that purpose and days later I snuck tentatively into my first Geek Dinner.

The invited speaker that evening was Molly, who had just published The Zen of CSS Design, co-authored with Dave Shea, creator of the CSS Zen Garden.  As a fan of semantic markup and separating content from style, I hope she had my full attention but, to be honest, I can’t remember for sure; I was too excited at being in a room full of geeks.  What did stick with me was that Molly was helping to shape decisions that were having an impact on the strategic development of the web at a high level.  Until then, I’d been under the impression that you needed to be some kind of boy wonder to be involved with that stuff, yet she was just a normal person, like you and me.  OK, way more knowledgeable than me (I don’t know about you) but, nonetheless, an approachable, fallible human being with all the usual fears, doubts and uncertainties that the rest of us struggle with.  Somehow that made the web feel more “ours” than “theirs” and that one day I might be able to do that too.

Since then Molly has continued to inspire me with her openness, inclusiveness, bravery and determination.  You can find her at http://molly.com/ and, more frequently, on Twitter as @mollydotcom.