17th Feb 2025

i don't belong and my beloved neither do you

The women who laid the foundation of tech

EDIT: I noticed that this post ended up being reblogged by terfs. If you're transphobic this post is not for you to reblog. I want to celebrate everyone who is not a cis man in this industry, including trans women and nonbinary people in tech, and it was my mistake to only include cis women in this post when there are so many trans women and nonbinary people who have done great things in tech as well. Trans women are women and just as important.

Here you can read about trans ppl in tech, and please do:

https://www.thecodingspace.com/blog/2022-03-01-six-trans-programmers-who-shattered-the-lavender-ceiling/

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/transgender-tech-visibility-obstacles-remain/story?id=76374628

The morning of women's day i attended a super inspiring seminar about being a woman in tech at a large tech company in my city, and now I'm inspired to share what I learned with all of you!

I didn't have time to finish this post on women's day, but it's not too late to post now: every day is a day to celebrate women!

Women actually laid the foundation for a lot of the tech industry.

For example, the first computer, ENIAC, was programmed completely by women! While men were the behind the scenes engineers, it was women who did all the actual programming of ENIAC.

The women who made up the team responsible for programming it were called Jean Bartik, Kay McNulty, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Wescoff, Frances V. Spence and Ruth Teitelbaum.

I think one woman who is finally getting her overdue recognition is Ada Lovelace. She was a mathematician (also often referred to as the first programmer) who created the first algorithm in 1842, which wasn't recognized until 1953! However, since none of her machines were ever completed it was never tested in practice during her time.

She has since been celebrated by giants such as google, and she has given name to a programming language (Ada). She was also the first person to write about what is today known as AI. Back when she was practicing, computers were simply thought of as calculators. But she had an idea that if computers can understand numbers, then that can be translated to letters, and in turn that can lead to computers being able to handle words, and eventually even write, draw and create music.

Hedy Lamarr was a famous Hollywood actress in the 40's, but she was also an inventor who laid ground for what we use today for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS services.

During WW2 she wanted to contribute positviely to the military efforts against the Nazis, and she tried to figure out how to radio control torpedoes. In 1942 she patented her technology "Secret Communications System", also known as frequency hopping, which laid the foundation for the technology we use today for Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth. It wasn't until 1962 that it was first used for its intended purpose, during the cuban missile crisis.

Grace Hopper invented the first compiler, called A-0, in 1955, and was also part of the Univac team, which was the company also responsible for building ENIAC. She also initiated work on the COBOL programming language.

She was also the one to coin the term "bug" in 1947. Computers back then had lights to visualize their working process (which was also a womans idea to implement btw) and bugs would be attracted to the lights, but usually that was no issue - until a bug made its way into a tube which caused the computer to stop working. Hopper taped the bug to a piece of paper and logged what caused the crash - a bug.

Dorothy Vaughan (left), alongside colleagues such as Katherine Johnson (middle) and Mary Jackson (right), was a mathematician at NASA (called NACA when she started) who worked on the orbit for the first ever manned spaceflight and later also on Apollo 11 that would take humanity to the moon!

When Vaughan started at what was then called NACA, segregation was still prevalent in the US and she was not allowed in the same areas in the office as her white colleagues. Another department was formed for the black staff, and when the director of said department unexpectedly died, she was appointed as the new director and thus became the first ever black woman at that position at NACA/NASA. In 1958 when NACA becomes NASA segregation is forbidden, and that is when Vaughan and her colleagues Johnson and Jackson started working on programming the orbit and later also Apollo 11.

Continuing on the same track of NASA and space, Margaret Hamilton was the Apollo project's first actual programmer. Hamilton became the director of software engineering at NASA in 1965, and she was also the person to first coin the term !

In the image above, she stands next to all the handwritten code that was used to send humanity to the moon. During the early stages of the project when she would speak of "sofware engineering", software development was not taken as seriously as other forms of engineering, and it wasn't regarded as a science, either. She wanted to legitimize software development as an engineering discipline, and overtime the term "software engineering" gained the same respect as any other technical discipline.

And lastly, if you're a woman in STEM, I want to highlight and celebrate you! Being a woman in a male dominated industry is not easy, we often suffer from sterotype threat and are not seen as our own individuals, but rather "the woman" in a room full of men. But just as these women, I'm sure you will achieve greatness!!

Here are some additional resources if you'd like to learn more:

nytimes.com

The Secret History of Women in Coding (Published 2019)

Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong?

en.wikipedia.org

Women in computing - Wikipedia

https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-so-it-was-paid-less-and-undervalued

https://digitalfuturesociety.com/programming-when-did-womens-work-become-a-mans-world/

And this was mainly my source for this post, but it's unfortunately only available in Swedish:

Internetmuseum

Datadamer | Internetmuseum

Teknikhistorien är full av kvinnliga pionjärer. Vi lyfter fram kvinnorna som gjort världen lite mer digital.

Thank you for reading ✨

software engineer diaries 👩‍💻 project presentation day 📝

this is the biggest project and the most involved i've been in a project from beginning to (hopefully) end and i need to pitch my execution plan to our engineering team today. i've done these kinds of presentations many times before and prepared thoroughly, so i'm not nervous about the meeting itself, just about the scope, scale, scheduling and responsibilities i have for this project in general. i just have to remind myself that at a certain point it becomes a little too unproductive to think too many steps ahead. i'll take my time and put it together piece by piece 😌

🎯 agenda today:

📝 team check-in meeting

💻 presentation meeting

👩‍💻 follow-up tasks (notes consolidation, further research)

🤝 meeting with my mentor

📝 ticketing (task breakdown for actual execution)

🗓️ send out follow-up schedules

June 1st, 2024 | Day 6 of 100 day productivity challenge

I’ve been taking a bit of a social media break in an effort to break my phone addiction and it’s worked a little bit. Slow progress is still progress. Today I decided to do some self care and dilly dally at the bookstore and work on some writing I’ve been doing in my free time to reset my brain. Definitely helping. 📖💻

Happy pride month 🏳️‍🌈

20.05.25

last weeks of spring semester: energy drinks, coffee on top of that, two hours of sleep, doing a whole semester's worth of work in one night, two exams in one morning, sunny afternoons, chilly mornings and evenings, counting the days until the summer break

physics grind RAHHHHHHHHH

April 10, 2025

16/03/25 || Sunday

Have I ever shown my desk during the day? It looks really cozy today haha.

May 3rd, 2025

Beautiful spring days... I've spent a lot of time outside this week and this changes everything. Life is so much more beautiful with sunshine, green leaves and movement outside. I'm trying to make things that make me happy and it's working well.

Yesterday, I spent an hour reading and the day before I went on a 5h hike. I bought a pottery wheel and hopefully I'll try it out tonight.

a&p2 is slightly kicking my butt, but I’m determined to improve on my future exam scores! currently learning about the lymphatic and respiratory system ⭐️

gingermedic