Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

Why does she get her own day & what’s this all about?

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. 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. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

Until just a few weeks ago, I knew who Ada Lovelace was, or thought I did… and then I found out she’s also Lord Byron’s daughter. Poetry & computers. Code has its own rhyme & reason, poetry like a puzzle to put together, it makes sense, in a funny sort of way.

Wikipedia’s article says of her, “She is today appreciated as the “first programmer” since she was writing programs—that is, manipulating symbols according to rules—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built.” Funny, as a taxonomist, I sometimes feel like I’m manipulating symbols according to rules for machines not yet built too… Or for machines built, but not configured, or for machines that are built, but there’s no code interface to use the work I do. Or for machines built & programs owned… but not by us… But then again, despite the potential missed, my work is used & valued, just not always very efficiently or elegantly. You win some, you lose some, you draw some.

There’s Grace Hopper too. Her wikipedia entry says, “A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I calculator, and she developed the first compiler for a computer programming language.” Woo, compiling! It’s the moment that always makes me fret while I wait to see if I did the install right… Computers are like knitting though. I can always tear it out & start over if I have to. Well, maybe I can’t always, but I certainly have often enough to know these things are possible.

Then there are the six women who programmed ENIAC in 1943-1945: Frances Elizabeth “Betty” Snyder Holberton, Betty Jean Jennings Bartik, Kathleen “Kay” McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum, & Frances “Fran” Bilas Spence. From the article:

“Because the ENIAC project was classified, the programmers were denied access to the machine they were supposed to tame into usefulness until they received their security clearances. As the first programmers, they had no programming manuals or courses, only the logical diagrams to help them figure out how to make the ENIAC work.

They had none of the programming tools of today. Instead, the programmers had to physically program the ballistics program by using the 3000 switches and dozens of cables and digit trays to physically route the data and program pulses through the machine.”

In 1995, my best friend from college sat me down and showed me the minimal basics of html. Up until then, it was Word, solitaire, & tetris. Then came M1, Bee Lavender & HipMama.com & Mamaphonic. I hand-coded all but the board at Mamaphonic until 2004 when we switched to the Drupal CMS. I did some things here & there on HipMama.com before the CMS, but that was largely coded by Bee and various other people. Not long after I started doing stuff with the mamas, I landed myself pregnant with my second & in library school. Now I know whole bundles of women doing amazing things with technology. Phoebe and her really neato stuff with wikipedia, Darci and her completely amazing stuff with Plone & Plinkit, Lynn to whom we are ever thankful for helping us with Drupal at the HipMama.com sites, and hordes & hordes of other women doing awesome, amazing, excellent work as well.

Ada & Grace & all the rest of you, so many that I missed, thanks for blazing a trail for us!

What got me thinking about this was actually making the dough for the bread I made this morning. I made it last night & as I was drifting off to sleep, I thought about the role of food in community, fitting as it’s a recipe from a hipmama. It’s important to “break bread” and share meals with the people who share your life. My favorite recipe book is a book written by the woman who made & my wedding cake. With Love & Butter (oof — guess we won’t be buying that for my brother & his lovely bride’s anniversary!). Summer wasn’t summer for years upon years of my life where there were no Holly B’s cinnamon rolls. At camp, we’d wait for the counselors to return from their morning or day off. At least once in the summer, someone would bring back the much beloved Holly B’s cinnamon rolls. That might have been my favorite summer food of all time. Certainly it tasted the best. And it was a shared treat, an unspoken ritual.

In my life, I’ve found making and/or sharing meals a good way to bring people together into a community. Music is another bonding experience, but it tends to be somewhat limiting — not everyone is a musician, but everyone eats something, has a favorite dish. Whether potlucks, ice cream socials, dinner with friends, picnics… I don’t entirely know where I’m going with this, but, as of two minutes ago, it’s past midnight, & I don’t really have to because this is my lj… I’d like to flesh it out a bit & maybe make a “exec producer’s piece of mind” part of at least this issue…

So in other news, I read this article by Matt Haughey of metafilter about stuff he’s learned about running communities. The one that hit me was actually a sub-point of one of his primary points. It was this one:

Be the best member of your site. Lead by example by participating as much as you can in your own community. This is a good way to attract other well-intentioned members of your site and also reminds everyone a real person is behind it all and building the best community they can for everyone. Speak honestly and be supportive of other members. When I think of all the communities I’m a part of, the ones I love are the ones I see the creators using everyday.

I’m consistently impressed with his participation, and Jessamyn’s, and now Cortex’s participation on the metafilter sites. I remember back to when we were moderating the hipmama sites (though we never really required moderating so much at mamaphonic) & it seemed like the mods really were lightening rods for attention & attacks, in addition to having to figure out a really hard line of how & what required moderation on some topics that were in and of themselves lightening rods for dissent & disagreement (abortion? Israel/Palestine? racism? Those are some hot hot hot buttons for folks, and not without reason). Mefi is moderated, but in comparison, it’s much less moderated I think… I’ve learned a lot about [online] community & just how much dissension & what kind of dissension a community can take. I think both mamaphonic & hipmama have done pretty spectacularly < knocking on wood > in terms of not requiring a/multiple nannies to watch over the discussions since we reopened hipmama… But I have to admit, I haven’t been particularly an active participant. I’m there & I’m watching over stuff on both sites, but I don’t pop in & participate as a regular jane so much.

I think some of this is residual to what went down on hipmama when we decided to take it down. Some of it, I think, is that I’ve learned some of my limits better in terms of how much energy & time I have to give to actually engaging in online stuff. I’m online a ridiculous amount of time, but I don’t get sucked into hot button discussions like I used to & I tend to think that’s a good thing for me personally. I used to think that I needed to get better at presenting my points on matters, but I think really… in the end, I don’t think I ever convinced anyone to change their mind, although at times I have changed my mind on some things I’ve discussed with folks (though nothing comes to mind at the moment). My life feels saner, somehow for not being so heavily involved in the day to day discussions (or any as I spend a ridiculous amount of time on the metafilter sites, but don’t contribute substantially there either), although I am, behind the scenes, an active supporter of the hipmama communities. I don’t know really where I’m going with this.

One thing I’ve been trying to avoid (besides losing my “life/online-life balance”) might be being visible & known as “the admin” who has to step into disagreeances. Folks are going to disagree with each other. Sometimes they’ll flame out & leave the site in a huff. Or just rabble about. I don’t want to step back into “moderating” that sort of stuff. And I also don’t like feeling conspicuous when I step into a conversation, like I’m being looked at to set out some sort of “how it should be”… That might just be my weird perception & not reflected in reality though. It can be hard too, to put oneself out there when you’re already invested, so some of it is just self-protective, I guess… But I guess I do feel like I maybe should be “around” more, which is why that particular point resonated with me. I dunno.

I went through a phase last summer where I was trying to decide where I was with the whole producer thing. I think I reached the point where I felt like I had “paid my debt” to the site/s for carrying me through my girls’ early years, and for the benefits I received in learning about web stuff & organizing info stuff that helped me through library school… I looked it in the eye & came to the conclusion that I really believe in what these communities are supporting & that I can, in good conscience continue to do what I’m doing, I just needed to shift my perspective from one of feeling like I had repaid a debt of gratitude to one of this is a cause I believe in & I’m proud to be a part of it (and, of course, “my” mamas make it easy to be proud of them!).

I also got some weird email this week. Basically a “partnering” opportunity where I would get my mamaphonic mamas to sign up & write for thier site & then I’d get an $8 kickback for each one of them that started writing on that site. It makes me a little queasy to think about, really. Like I’d pimp folks out? Um, what? If people like the site, why are you offering to pay *me*? Why don’t you give *them* $8 for signing up? I dunno. It was one of the odder things that’s come across my plate in a while. I don’t think you can sell/buy community that way.

So anyway. Life has been wackily transitioning away & I have reached a plateau in my guitar stuff &… I guess maybe that’s ok since so much else is going on, but I’m tired of some of what I’m doing & want to do something new… but I don’t have the energy to sink into something new, especially since I seem to have drifted off practicing as rigorously as I was what with being worn. the. fuck. out. I guess that just means there’s one thing stable in my life, eh? I’ll take it. Here’s to an occasional plateau in a time of transition!

So how cool is this — who else would have a module like this? Encheferizer — The ultimate novelty filter: translates any content into Muppets-style mock Swedish. Should probably be an optional input format…

From really not liking Drupal at all, I’ve come around. I would really love to implement Drupal on a site where I could get to play with a lot more of the toys it has available to play with. FUN! Yummy yummy yummy.

Who ever is on Stephen Colbert right now, just defined geeks & nerds as “Geeks get it done, nerds don’t.” Heh.

I wonder if there’s some way I can bill my fun this evening to professional development. Two & a half hours of in depth CMS research? Come on, it totally fits with what I do. I bet no one would even blink.

Starting my felted/fulled ballet slippers. I hope I made/have enough yarn spun for them. I think. I do. I *hope* I do.

Found out our little (ok, not so little) group is moving at work. Other tower, up a floor. It’ll be a much less cramped space, N/NE facing, so it’s a little darker, but apparently it’s a temporary move until we have enough space with the rest of our division back in the S tower. Maybe. Having wandered through there, I don’t know where we’d fit, but I guess that’s not really my concern.

Mythbusters is on tonight. Yay. Which means I should call my mom now so I’m not trying to talk with her while being distracted by geeks. Heh.

Trying to figure out how to document a taxonomy project w/o getting folks’ dander up at work… besides which, we didn’t really document anything per se… we had a lot of meetings to bash stuff out. Alas, it was really a significant process for me as it was the first time I really grokked the full scope of what we were doing with our taxonomies & how it all fit into a bigger picture & what all the funky semantic issues that end up with people weeping in the bathtub over Wittgenstein & the philosophy of language trying to figure stuff out… Can you believe we actually had a detailed discussion on the implications of the difference between “manager” and “managers” (one was a job role & one was multiple individual instances… or something…). And “organization”. I think we talked that one to death. Anyhoo.

Then there’s this funny tickle in my throat. I want it to go away. Maybe I should try not staying up until after midnight tonight. Which means I should stop procrastinating on this portfolio thing. Heh. 11 weeks until graduation as of tomorrow… < tick, tick, tick, tick... >