Ada Lovelace Day is “an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.” The site goes on to note:
“Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines.”
I’m excited to take part in the event! I want to call out Audrey Tang, one of the most impressive programmers I’ve heard of and, thankfully, had the privilege to meet and even hack with.
Audrey is a natural leader. Not the sort of person that says, “come on, follow me” but rather leads by example. She’s so charismatic that you have no choice but to find out what she’s doing because it’s going to be interesting and you’re going to want to be involved. What I love best is that if you want to be involved that’s enough. You’ll get a commit bit and encouragement to JFDI™. Her character makes her work compelling.
As if that weren’t enough her work truly is compelling. She was the first Perl programmer to publish more than 100 CPAN modules. Good ones, too, like PAR, Module::Install, and YAML::Syck. Then she started playing around with Haskell and wrote the first functioning Perl 6 implementation, Pugs. This was mind blowing work and her speed was awe inspiring. Now she’s designing Haskell itself as a member of the Haskell-Prime committee.
At YAPC::NA 2006 I stuck around for a hackathon afterward. I was given a task by Audrey, to implement “try ruby! (in your browser)” for Perl 6 / Pugs. I couldn’t do it. She was nice about it, though, and encouraging. What’s so fantastic about Audrey is that she found someone else who could and got them excited enough to do it. That’s leadership.
I don’t want her face to go unrecognized. Chances are if you run into Audrey she’ll be posing something like this. I’ve seen her code on the walk to dinner four blocks away.
Audrey, thanks for being so awesome!
I agree with you about Audrey. Even though she’s brilliant, she never makes anyone feel bad for being less able. Instead, she inspires you to do what you can (which is often more than you thought you could do).
at 1:20 pm on March 24th, 2009I completely agree. Audrey is an amazing source of inspiration for our team - we are super lucky to work with her on a daily basis. She’s always positive in her communication, always lifting people up and moving forward. She inspires everyone to do their best.
I think also what is so lovely about Audrey is that she doesn’t put any problem up on a pedestal. Nothing is too hard, just start doing it and learn as you go. This attitude has spread through our team.
Audrey we love you!
at 1:53 pm on March 24th, 2009[...] West honors Audrey Tang, who should need no introduction. Casey’s blog post gives the briefest of summaries of some of Audrey’s amazing [...]
at 1:28 am on June 15th, 2009You do understand that “she” has a penis, right?
at 10:15 pm on June 15th, 2009A very weird, and incorrect, choice if you are trying to honor female programmers.
Fact Finder your post is quite ignorant.
I recommend you research the topic. This is a great place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender
To quote the article: Transgender is the state of one’s “gender identity” (self-identification as woman, man, or neither) not matching one’s “assigned sex” (identification by others as male or female based on physical/genetic sex).
I find it wierd that while we are deep into the year 2009, we still have people in our community that are not aware of this. We are supposed to be the ones leading the global culture into the future, not lagging behind with comments like this.
Furthermore I forgive the comment, and I hope Audrey would as well. I would really appreciate if you would not use the words wierd when talking about her or any other trans-person again.
Do you really think this is a choice someone just wakes up and decides? It takes a lot of bravery for someone to come out and live in this situation and thats why I think it’s important for us to support trans people. There are people just like Audrey who feel the same way, but are afraid to tell people and truly be themselves because of comments like this.
at 12:47 am on June 28th, 2009To feed the reaction formational troll:
Are you bothered by BuckAngel’s vagina, which exists in a representational bitmap?
Are you bothered by AudreyTang’s penis, which exists in a quantum superposition?
Are you bothered by love-laced women who are excellent programmers at all?
Are you bothered by of gender identities, independent yet intertwined with organs designed for sexual copulation?
If you’re hot because you feel bothered, that’s good, since it’s a positive sign that you are alive and is full of libido.
There is no need to shelf that libido under the framework of facts, or under the act of finding. That’s life, and celebrate it!
at 8:04 am on August 19th, 2009