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.

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.