Our Kind of Holiday: Ada Lovelace Day

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and it involves two of our favorite things: honoring women in tech and...blogging about it, of course!  Ms. Lovelace is credited as the world's first programmer, and, honestly, who doesn't want to blog about that?  With our shiny new Search API's, we looked up the posts on the subject spanning our whole blogoverse, and more than a few of them are worth sharing.

danablankenhorn wrote a lovely post honoring his coder wife, Jenni, and donna_ekart put the spotlight on her Aunt Karen, an engineer of launch pads. Salesforce honored their own while Alice highlighted the amazing talents of gamer Margaret Robertson. One author shared snippets about Ada-inspired women from his upcoming book celebrating global innovators. A Journalism instructor at the University of West England declares the phrase "I'm rubbish at computers" just plain unacceptable.  Mike Gil's post included the fabulous photo you see here -- and he receives double bonus points for using the phrase "Enchantress of Numbers" in a sentence!

Even the honorees got into their own Ada-blogging: Mrs. MaltaGirl wrote about her own adventures in tech, and CherylMcKinnon gave a whole lot of thanks to professional mentors, role models, and supporters over the years.

Six Aparters acknowledged the day with posts of their own.  David reblogged Gina's encouragement to Code Something Meaningful, and as a lover of all things meta, I posted code for a widget showing TypePad's latest Ada Lovelace posts.

This holiday may only be one day a year, but it's not too late to get credit for it in our books: fire up your Compose editor, and share your own Ada posts here in the comments.  We're more than willing to keep this movement rolling year-round.

Comments

[kimmi8]

Love It!

[Nima Badiey]

Kudos to our own Women in Technology: Natalie, Liz, Kimmie, .tiff, Claire, et al.

[Account Deleted]

I actually wrote three posts for Ada Lovelace Day this year. This links to the other two: http://www.acidforblood.net/2010/03/ada-lovelace-day-women-in-the-games-industry.html

[Claire Alcock]

Thanks for sharing this Brinstar! Ada has many admirers, I see. Do read the link to Dana Blankenhorn's post if you get a chance. It's wonderful.

[Claire Alcock]

Thanks Nima! :)

[Mike Gil]

Claire, thanks for the shout-out. You got the pic and the link to my blog right, but who is Craig Matsuda? Happy ALD10!

[nataliepo]

My apologies, Mike. I updated the post and now the glory is all yours!

[Mike Gil]

Thanks, Natalie. While it's an honor to be even temporarily/typographically confused with a writer of Craig's caliber, I appreciate the attribution. :)

[Craig Matsuda]

Thanks for the kind words. Here's to Ada! And for all of us scribblin in our pj's, any attention is nice, eh?

[Obaitori]

Thank you Ada Lovelace for the Love & inspiration.

[Lily Iris]

happy lovelace everyone :) yay

[Bill Van Loan]

What a wonderful celebration. Women are first again. Ada is a hero...

[tmirchan]

Thank you for the link ..I am the author you identify above with the upcoming book. a small correction - I am actually male and always looking for more women tech role models to inspire my teenage daughter and other young women. I profiled many in my book but clearly lots more to do.

[nataliepo]

Apologies as well for the mixup; I've updated the post.

Thank YOU for sharing on Ada Lovelace day AND for searching for more female tech role models. Sarah Lacy made a list for Business week in 2008 here: http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/07/0731_women_in_tech/ and I hope she makes another soon!