In celebration of Women’s Day, this March we salute yesterday & today women’s contribution to the development of the technology and IT fields. Follow #famousITwomen to find interesting stories. They might motivate and encourage you to do something out of the ordinary in your career.
#1. What’s your professional story?
Please share with us about your journey in the IT field.
#2. What would be a lesson you’ve learned so far as practitioners in this field?
As developers, we have a profound influence on our society and people’s everyday lives. How we write software and what we write has an impact and with great power comes great responsibility. And how people act when developing software has a great influence on how that software turns out. For example, a team that does not have a good team culture or a lacking relationship with the business will most probably have code quality problems that stem from misunderstandings and lack of communication. And sometimes products are developed just from a developer’s perspective without the user’s needs in mind when the teams are too homogenous. This is something that should definitely be changed.
#3. Whom do you admire as a women IT practitioner? Why?
Please share with our audience about great women you think they make a difference in this domain.
The Pioneer of OOP: Barbara Liskov
The week to celebrate women in IT continues with Barbara Liskov’s story. Let’s bring upfront the stories of #famousITwomen who’ve made breakthrough contributions along the history.
At the dawn of the software revolution, engineers were struggling. It wasn’t clear at that time how to organize code so that it was optimal, easy to understand and easy to change.
The solution proved to be finding the right abstractions. Barbara Liskov was an active participant in the conversation, publishing papers, implementing programming languages, database systems and operating systems. In one of these conversations, she came up with what is now known as the “Liskov Substitution Principle”, one of the 5 key principles of software design (the L from SOLID principles).
In 2004, Barbara Liskov won the highest award for computer science, the John von Neumann Medal for “fundamental contributions to programming languages, programming methodology, and distributed systems”. She also received the 2008 Turing Award for her work in the design of programming languages and software methodology that led to the development of object-oriented programming.
Watch the story of Object Oriented Programming in her keynote “The Power of Abstraction”, published by our partners from InfoQ.
Hope Barbara Liskov’s story aroused your curiosity to learn from history more about IT famous women.
This week, stay tuned for the upcoming stories and win an invitation to I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2015.
World’s first computer programmer is a woman: Ada Lovelace
The week to celebrate women in IT kicks off. Let’s bring upfront the stories of #famousITwomen who’ve made breakthrough contributions along the history.
Did you know that the world’s first computer programmer is a woman? Ada Lovelace. Our first source of inspiration. She was an English mathematician and writer. Her best recognized work is on Charles Babbage’s early in 1842 mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. This was monumental in paving the way for the modern day computers.
Her notes on the Analytical Engine are considered the first algorithm ever used to implement on a computer. She also developed a vision on the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching.
“The Analytical Engine, on the contrary, is not merely adapted for tabulating the results of one particular function and of no other, but for developing and tabulating any function whatever. In fact the engine may be described as being the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity…”– Lovelace, Ada. Notes upon L. F. Menabrea’s “Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage”. 1842.
“One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation.”– Lovelace, Ada. Notes upon L. F. Menabrea’s “Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage”. 1842.
Hope Ada Lovelace’s story aroused your curiosity to learn from history more about IT famous women.
This week, stay tuned for the upcoming stories and win an invitation to I T.A.K.E. Unconference 2015.
The week to celebrate #famousITwomen
The week to celebrate women in IT kicks off. Let’s bring upfront the stories of #famousITwomen who’ve made breakthrough contributions along the history.
This week savour your coffee with 3 minutes inspirational stories that should be known by anyone in the industry. See how women paved the way to computers and software as we have them today. Here’s the first story.
Follow the upcoming stories on the I T.A.K.E. Unconference blog. They might be motivating and encouraging for you to do something out of the ordinary in your career. Stay tuned, as you may also find a win between and let yourself surprised by the contribution of #famousITwomen.