Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed. What did I miss? Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments.
- Celebrating Ada Lovelace day – by recognising Kirrily Robert and the Geek Feminism blog
- Ada Lovelace Day 2010
- Quickhit: Remember Ada
- Ada Lovelace day: Women techies in the spotlight
– Hip hip hooray for the fabulous Geek Feminism blog! And Skud!
– “This Ada Lovelace Day, I want to commemorate a real life Uhura — Dr. Mae Jemison. She was the first black woman to go into space in real life”
– GeekFeminism Blog’s Ada Lovelace Day solicitation for links from commentors
– “As a techie, she was ahead of everyone in the building who wasn’t actually conversant with a programming language, and in some respects she was even ahead of those people. What that woman couldn’t do with about twenty-five intricately linked database tables and a fearsomely complex reporting tool, isn’t worth knowing about.”
And from our archive of Friday Hoyden STEM honoraries we have:
Friday Hoyden: Elizabeth Blackburn, Nobel Laureate
Friday Hoydens: Peggy A. Whitson and Pamela A. Melroy
Friday Hoyden: Rear Admiral “amazing” Grace Hopper
Categories: linkfest, technology
Ada Lovelace Day blasts from the past: the science and technology Hoydens 
Firefox Bookmarklet to help with Down Under Feminists Carnival submissions 
Hoyden About Town 
Woo!! o /o/ o/
I didn’t know about this day, but I’m gunna celebrate it, as an sometime female techie (have been waylaid by CFS and a hatred of offices). It could be pretty tough doing an IT degree as a woman. So many women dropped out after the first year, even though they got better marks on average than the men. There was quite a bit of sexism floating around, but there a specific program set up to combat it, thank goodness. But oh, that head of the department (UGHHH), M*ff*t I h@te you.
I’m pretty sure I’ve met Kirrily (Skud), I seem to remember a women in IT dinner she was at, which had a lot of women I suspected were queer talking about playing soccer together and urging me to join them. I was cripplingly shy and depressed and self-closeted, and having energy and knee/back problems already, so I couldn’t follow these intimidatingly awesome women out onto the field. In the early days of the net, Skud was the only visible queer woman (I could find) writing about S/M online (back when I just couldn’t find any other resources to reassure me, save Califia’s books – tho those seemed a billion miles away from anything I could find in Melbourne). And my god, Skud was a Perl guru too! (<3) and kept going on from strength to strength, and maybe in another, more confident youth I would have sought to make contact with her. Sooooooo glad she and other amazing women are out there, and being vocal, and challenging, and intelligent. Perhaps when/if I get more energy, I will try to find community to get back into the icy-pure joy of coding. -_-
Zoe Brain weighed in on the 26th,
It is a corker, Must Read. (The post for March 28 is a must-read as well.)