It's still 24 March in Honolulu!
I've been tickled pink reading ada day blog posts over the past day and a bit. I've smiled as I've read posts by my friends, and posts about my friends, and I wanted to just add another chord to the rousing chorus of celebration of Women in Technology that has been the inaugural Ada Lovelace Day. Also Hip Hip Hooray to Suw Charman for dreaming this, and making it so.
Tech Women - who do community too - Brianna, Claudine and Jacinta.
Brianna Laugher is a software engineer by day, and a fabulous community manager by evening, night and weekend. She's an extraordinarily capable communicator, finding ways to clearly explain technical concepts to a wide audience. I've been particularly impressed by her ability to ask a good question and her relentless pursuit of new knowledge. She's President of Wikimedia Australia, which she founded and is building in to a strong organisation by leading her team and adopting good process. Brianna also blogs on cool stuff and wrote a FLOSS manual on wikimedia commons.
Claudine Chionh is a software developer, historian and serene soul. Claudine brings quiet with her, and this I find very soothing in the general hubub of Melbourne geekery. I met her when she was the convenor of the Melbourne LinuxChix chapter, but have since grown to appreciate her unique perspective and commitment to everything she engages with. Claudine's recent focus on digitising the humanities is inspirational - bringing geektech to history is a noble pursuit indeed.
Jacinta Richardson is a software trainer and small business owner, a community manager, and a facilitator of Good Things. She's an invaluable contributor to the Perl, LinuxChix, OSDC and SAGE-AU community organisations, and more than willing to step up for other open source software mobs when occasion requires. Jacinta's work in the Perl community was acknowledged last year when she was awarded the White Camel at OSCON. I know I can count on Jacinta because when I ask for her help she says no when she can't and over delivers when she can.