I am Magdalena.
I like to be outside in the sunshine, chat with my
friends, go out, I like to go shopping, and hate to start my
computer at night after a days work. I love beautiful things, art exhibitions and music, as a kid I went horse
riding and played the flute, I hated physics and chemistry at
school, and loved languages, in a shooter game my
character dies after 3 secs, I like to laugh, I played with dolls,
I am just a normal woman.
I am physicist, I love the beauty of the standard model, I
like to search for the structure behind things and understand it. I would hang a bubble chamber particle signature on my wall. I did write programs which run on
computers with thousands of processors, I love to think
about challenging and complex problems, solve
puzzles, I work as a software engineer, my
favourite os is linux, I love to design programs which are
elegant and match their purpose well. I am still a normal
woman. I am a geek.
when I go to work, there are mostly
men around me. So where the hell are
all my female co-geeks?
programming is about…
design, style and elegance
creativity
Hedy Lamarr, actress and co-inventor of spread spectrum communication, 1941
programming is about…understanding the world we live
in…
get to the core of things,
understand the fundamentals,
be it in business or in science,
or…
Lise Meitner, first theoretical explanation of fnuclear fission, 1939
it is about …
taking part in our modern world… don’t stay at the edge, move it, transform itSheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook
…and about
teamwork!
you have been hanging together on your laptops to get started with Rails, discussing on how to go further encouraging, and helping each others out… that’s what we do every day!
Michelle Cueni, Jacqueline Gasser, Ellen Sprunger, Lea Sprunger , Leichtathletik EM 2012 Helsinki,6 th place
….it is also about…
communication
– most bigger project don’t fail because of technical pitfalls, but because… to Alice it was not clear what Bob wanted and to Bob it was not clear that Alice didn’t know what he wantedRuth Metzler-Arnold, Eveline Widmer-Schlump, Tag der Wirtschaft 2011
… all these require skills in which women are strong…
Angela Merkel, physicist, German Chancellor since 2005
it’s a women’s world
the first computer program ever was written by a woman, long before the first machine that could run it was builtAda Lovelace, 1842
programmers at the world’s first real electronic computer were all ….…. Women
Only later the guys joined, because they realized that the girls were doing something cool there…
Kay Mc Nulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snycder, Marly Wescoff, Fran Bilas, Ruth Lichterman, Programmers at ENIAC, 1943
where to go from here?
you have already started today, dig deeper
don’t be afraid of new stuff
be pertinacious…
don’t let yourself be discouraged easily, especiallynot by a geek with fatty pizza fingers who knows the exact spec of the latest generation graphic cards and keeps talking about it…… you might design the cooler game than he… you might write cleaner code than he… you might understand much better which are the really important features
code, code, code
programming is not for geniuses, it is a craftsmanship the more you do it the better you get and the more fun it is.…. so code, code, code
books - find out which ones the favourite books for you favourite programming language, find out whether they suite you
tutorials – many programming languages, environments - like Ruby and Rails- are free.You can find tutorials on the web to help you
blogs - there are millions bloggers who write about programming and its surrounding biosphere, your favourite
programming language, find the ones you like courses - register in a course at https://www.coursera.org/
get in touch - find your favourite tech local tech meet up on http://www.meetup.com/, new faces are always welcome and being a girl might earn you a bonus…