Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day and Women in Technology

March 24th has been designated as Ada Lovelace Day and is an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of women in science and technology. FindingAda.com is encouraging women to blog about this today.

I've not paid much attention to her aside from being aware of her and knowing she's the namesake of the Ada programming language, but I've benefited tremendously from her contributions and the contributions of other women in technology for most of my life.

I read up on Ada at Wikipedia and learned this bit of trivia today, "she was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke."

I won't spend a lot of time dwelling on her interesting life, because Wikipedia does that far better than I could, but I'll take this opportunity to make mention of some current-day pioneering women in technology, the women who are advocating and teaching other women about Linux, computers, and other free software via LinuxChix.

LinuxChix is a community for women who like Linux and for anyone who wants to support women in computing. We are an international group of Free Software users and developers, founded in 1999 with the aim of "supporting women in Linux." Founder Deb Richardson described it as an alternative to the "locker room atmosphere" found in some online technical forums and gave LinuxChix two core rules: "be polite" and "be helpful." LinuxChix is now many things to many people, but it remains primarily a group for supporting women in computing, specifically in Open Source/Free Software/Software Libre computing.

If you're a woman in need of help or able to offer some help to others, check out LinuxChix!