Merry Blogholiday

in Musings

It’s still Ada Lovelace Day for a few more hours, and I want to get something posted, but it’s been a long day and it ended with an evening class, and I have this thing where evening classes sort of liquefy my brain. So I will present you with a wee link roundup of awesome ladies doing awesome stuff with awesome computer tech.

Lady Ada is the lady behind Adafruit Industries, where I have purchased some of my capstone Arduino supplies. They’re doing a big Ada Lovelace Day series on their blog.

Another MIT media lab/Arduino link: Leah Buechley created the LilyPad Arduino that I would love to play with.

Gina Trapani is basically awesome at everything on the internet. I particularly like ThinkTank, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished I could see all replies to a tweet someone else made.

I think any discussion of women in computing would not be complete without mentioning that fact that women used to be be computers, back When Computers Were Human. This is one of those books I’ve been thinking for years that I ought to get around to reading. Unfortunately my attention span for nonfiction is short, so unless it gets released in audiobook form as like a 45-minute weekly podcast or something, I’m unlikely to ever get through it.

I’d like to end with a thank you to my undergraduate CS adviser and mentor, Janet Davis. She was my professor, academic adviser, summer research adviser, and the prof I TA’d for. I first discovered HCI as a field when I heard the department was hiring a new faculty member and looked her up. Then when I was in one of the first classes she taught at Grinnell, I mentioned my interest, and we started having conversations about it. She’s a great teacher and was always wonderfully supportive of me. I cannot think of any other single person who has had a greater impact on my education, and I honestly do not know where I would be in my life without her.