Ada Lovelace Day 2019 - Julia Evans

For this year's post I'm writing about Julia Evans. She makes really well produced zines about programming - so Linux, HTTP, networking etc. She's gone full-time to do this and recently she posted about the revenue she gets from it, which is useful, because I rarely see how much people make from side-projects and former side-projects.

Ada Lovelace Day 2018 - Dr Hannah Fry

I've not done posts for Ada Lovelace Day since 2015, for no good reason I can think of. This year I'm highlighting Dr Hannah Fry.

Her book, Hello World, was released recently, so she's quite active on Twitter at the moment promoting that.

My hand is still hurting three days later & by the end my name had morphed into 'Hammah Fly', but the good news is that there are signed copies of Hello World up on the Waterstones website: https://t.co/KMCwbvRzPa #HelloWorld pic.twitter.com/19pV10rerc

— Hannah Fry (@FryRsquared) August 6, 2018

I've picked her because she's a good broadcaster and explainer of maths. I particularly enjoy the Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry, a 10 minute radio programme where they answer questions put by listeners. Each episode seems much longer as they pack so much in. The podcast version is a lot longer, so worth listening to in preference to the radio show.

You can see a list of other programmes she's done on her media page. I've enjoyed all of those that I've seen. This is my favourite tweet she's done (because I get the joke):

I baked a tau. pic.twitter.com/QTrtS7OdlV

— Hannah Fry (@FryRsquared) October 10, 2017

My previous Ada Lovelace Day posts are here.

Ada Lovelace Day 2015 - Lorna Jane Mitchell

This year my Ada Lovelace Day post is about Lorna Jane Mitchell. (The brief: to write about a woman who's achievements you admire.) I appreciate her knowledge of the deep things of PHP, and I mentally file away her blog posts on the subject as "if/when I really get into a lot of PHP this will be useful". She talks at conferences, writes books and makes videos (similarly filed away) and is also involved in the joind.in website. I admire all this sharing of knowledge that she does.

Previous posts: 2014 Rachel Andrew, 2013 Kathy Sierra, 2012 Aleks Krotoski.(The picture comes from Sydney Padua.)

Ada Lovelace Day 2014 - Rachel Andrew

I was reminded by this blog post by LornaJane that it's Ada Lovelace Day. This year the woman whose achievements I admire is Rachel Andrew. (2013 Kathy Sierra, 2012 Aleks Krotoski) That picture above isn't her, but comes from Sydney Padua.

• She is, together with Drew McLellan, responsible for writing Perch, a small and neat content management system that I probably haven't written about enough. It is very impressive for being just enough for a small website, whilst also now having a bigger sibling which doesn't detract from the original. I dived into the code a while back to write my own plugin and I was very impressed by its inner workings.
• She's also written books, none of which I've actually read. However from the extracts published on her blog if I wanted to make a profitable side project I know I'd buy her Handbook on the subject.
• She shares knowledge through conference talks, articles on other sites and most recently helping freelancers with the changes to VAT rules. All of this is good for the webby business.
• (Update:) she has technical editing skills.

My heroine for Ada Lovelace Day - Kathy Sierra

My heroine for Ada Lovelace Day this year is the "programming instructor and game developer" Kathy Sierra. I've written about her return to blogging previously, but the thing that made me admire her even more was reading parts of one of the Head First books that she co-authored recently. It really focussed on making sure that the knowledge and wisdom got from the authors' heads into your own. I'd seen her thinking in the Creating Passionate Users blog, but here was the thoughts applied to a particular topic, Design Patterns in the case of that particular book and I was very impressed. You can find her on Twitter as @seriouspony.

(Picture by Ed Schipul. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.)

Ada Lovelace day - Aleks Krotoski

As today is Ada Lovelace day I'm responding to the request on the Finding Ada website to "Write about a women in science, technology, engineering or maths whose achievements you admire".

I've chosen Aleks Krotoski. She's just good at so many things:

• She's an academic. She's got a PhD and when she writes about things it's pretty well researched and not just a blogger's opinion.
• She's good at broadcasting, including the BBC's Virtual Revolution programme, Radio 4's The Digital Human and the Guardian Tech weekly podcast. As those are group efforts I don't know how much she is involved in the compilation of these programmes, but if the stuff she's written with her...
• ...journalistic skills in the Untangling the Web column is anything to go by, a lot of it is her work. As the research is done in plain view on her blog it's interesting to see what's gone into making up the final words.

Anyone of these would be admirable, but to have all three in one person is more so.