Vista

Jeni Tennison is an XSLT guru who shares her expertise unstintingly on paper, at conferences and online.  If you’re an XSLT programmer, Jeni needs no introduction; she’s probably helped you out sometime or awed you with an elegantly simple solution to what you thought was a horrendously complex problem.  She has a knack for it.  And this skill for simplicity and elegance in code is something I aspire to.  And that’s easier said than done in XSLT – no sooner have you matched a “/” and before you can say value-of,  you find you’ve applied templates to the descendant of an ancestor, sorted three ways, with a mode and priorities applied.  So I salute you Jeni and will spend at least some of Ada Lovelace Day refactoring in your honour.

Research has revealed a peculiarity about role models: if you’re a woman, gender matters.  Although any (good) role model is better than none, the effect is greater for women when the role model  is also a woman. Unfortunately, during the last decade the ratio of women:men in technology has decreased or – at best – remained the same in most regions of the world, thereby reducing the pool of potential role female models.  Ada Lovelace Day is an attempt to redress the balance by drawing attention to women excelling in technology.

It’s the brainchild of Suw Charman-Anderson, social software consultant and digital rights activist – if you’ve never heard of her before, here’s your first new inspirational woman!  Not only did she react to this depressing downward trend by having a proactive idea, she acted on it by publishing a website explaining what it’s all about, created a pledge so that people might register their support and then publicised the two widely.

Today, all around the world, people will blog about women in technology – and maybe you’ll discover a new role model.