Today is Ada Lovelace day and alongside a lot of other people I pledged to write a blog post about a woman in technology I admire.

I’ve thought long and hard about who to write about on this occasion and I thought it not enough to talk about a single woman in this post. Instead I will give a list of women that inspired me and I had the privilege to work with in the past and now.

Jeri Ellsworth

First up is an inspiration of mine, Jeri Ellsworth a female alpha geek who built the Commodore One – a reverse engineered Commodore 64:

During development, it evolved into a re-configurable computer, a new class of computers where the chips do not have dedicated tasks any more. The two main chips carry out different tasks, depending on the needs of the program. The technology used is called FPGA - field programmable gate arrays. These chips can be programmed to do the tasks that the chips of the C-64 or other computers have done. It’s no emulation, but it’s a re-implementation of the chips that are no longer available since many years.

Try to out-geek that, boys!

Nicole Sullivan

I’ve talked earlier here about Nicole Sullivan and I have to repeat myself in saying that I am very inspired by her work with CSS and taking it to a new, technical level rather than getting lost in creating pretty things using this technology.

Working with Nicole is a joy as she is very outspoken, loves to stand her ground and bring up very good reasons for her course of action but also listens to you when you throw a spanner in her works. She presents very well at conference in English and French and in general is a very pragmatic and interesting person to have to throw ideas around.

Sophie Major

Sophie is my counterpart in the dynamic duo that is the Yahoo Developer Network outside the US. As such, she helped me get and do a job that is my passion and makes me not realize that I am working while I am clocking a lot of hours bringing Yahoo goodness to the people. I’ve covered Sophie in detail on the Ada Lovelace blog post on the Yahoo Developer Network blog so head on over there for more details.

Meltem Kogelbauer

I have worked with Meltem in my previous company, Netdecisions (now Agilisys) and seen her move from being a web developer to becoming a manager/architect in a short period of time. She is amazingly fast at taking up new technologies and ideas and validating them before coming up with a great new way of looking at them. What impresses me most about Meltem is that she is a fighter. When one of her absolutely adoring daughters died of cancer she took on the challenge and started a charity that tries to help parents in the same situation and raise awareness of how this special kind of cancer can be battled. You can find all the information about this charity and her sterling work in this area at Monty’s Corner.

Cindy Li

If you spend some time going to conferences about web design, you’ll be hard pushed not to come across Cindy Li sooner or later.

Cindy is not only a great designer but first and foremost a good spirit of the conference circuit. If there is some volunteering to do, if you need someone who knows everyone and has an open ear and friendly smile that is not glued on, Cindy is your woman.

A very pragmatic designer with a great eye for CI and wonderful humour (I has an open oAuth kitten) she partners with the right people to build great looking and working sites rather than trying to do everything herself. Thanks for being around, Cindy!

Emily Lewis

I’ve run into Emily for the first time at webmaster jam session in Atlanta last year which is almost a crime. This lady has been developing web sites for almost as long as I have and has a tremendous insight into what makes sense to use and what doesn’t.

When we met she was up in arms about forcing people to follow web standards or GTFO. A few chats later I managed to convince her to use this tremendous knowledge and charms for good and catch flies with honey rather than vinegar and now she’s getting more and more traction and just started writing a book explaining microformats for mortals. You go girl!

Niqui Merret

Niqui Merret is a fighter for accessibility in the world of flash development. This makes her amazing and rare enough but when you meet her and see the enthusiasm she puts into driving her cause forward there is no way you can avoid being dragged along.

Fresh in thought, outspoken a,d technically very knowledgable niqui represents a rare mediator between the fancy world of flash and the more down to earth world of web standards. Together these two worlds can create amazing products which is why having her around is priceless.

Cathy Ma

Cathy Ma arrived in the London office of Yahoo and took the place by storm. With a background of herding cats at Wikipedia her passion and deep knowledge lies in building, fostering and caring for online communities. Her positive attitude is contagious and not even the vast challenge of herding Yahoo groups and Answers made her despair.

As developers we always forget that large groups of users mean a lot of work and that ‘our community will moderate itself’ is largely a dream and far from reality. If you have bundles of positive energy like Cathy to rely on to tackle this job, you come out laughing.

Stephanie Troeth

From the first moment I met Stephanie Troeth I was mesmerized. Her dedication to make the web a better place for all, her focus on teaching good practices from the get-go and her work for the WaSP is admirable.

Furthermore, she does it all with a sweet and very calm and understanding disposition that I’d love to have from time to time. Stephanie is one of the unsung superstars of the web standards movement and has a lot of great things to teach us.

She is also one of the warmest and most friendly people out there, technically very savvy and good at explaining complex matters in ways that people understand. A mix that is hard to find, thank you for being around, Steph!

Denise Stephens

Denise Stephens is a wonderful example of someone who doesn’t take fate for granted but takes action to change things that seem immovable at first but mushroom into something wonderful if you take on the challenge.

Denise has MS and realized quickly that her life and surroundings are changing. However she was very unhappy with the current state of affairs and doesn’t agree that just because of your body having new needs that your flat should look like a hospital.

Therefore she started enabled by design, a self-help site for people with MS and a showcase for functional and pretty living aids. She’s been recently featured in the guardian
and ebd is going to be a great resource bridging the gap between product design and accessibility. And for that and the fact that she makes me feel terribly good when we meet for coffee I admire her.

Antonia Hyde

Antonia Hyde is a non-technical project manager who tries very hard to make the accessibility world understand the power of technology. She also pushes the envelope of the accessibility world by advocating for support of learning disabled users instead of thinking to cater primarily for blind users. Her wish-list of a video player for learning disabled users presented at Accessibility 2.0 last year inspired me to develop Easy YouTube and we’ve been working on more and more ideas like that over the following month. Antonia knows she is a mediator between people who need technical help and geeks that can give technical help and she does a great job doing that.

Kath Moonan

I love Lucy meets the full monty – that’s Kath Moonan. The visuals give a first clue, and as soon as the Liverpool accent and the lack of hindering filters kicks in you know this is a lady you can’t mess around with. Kath works for Abilitynet, organized the Ability2.0 conference and in general is a refreshingly outspoken specimen of the accessibility world.

Kath is not the most technical but once she gets excited about a solution there is no stopping her advocating it and telling others that their outdated solutions are for museums.

We need more forces of nature in accessibility, so thanks for being here, Kath!

Jenny Donnelly

Jenny is part of the Yahoo User Interface library and does things full of awesome like the data table and the data source utility. She is also an evangelist for the YUI and does a tremendous job advocating it to developers out there.

What I admire most about Jenny is her attention to detail and willingness to add changes to the things she developed. She is also very patient with code and data structures, something that drives me nuts as I am much more happy to build things that create interfaces and interactivity.

Jenny is also a force of nature when it comes to organizing company internal front-end meetings and conference, something I am very thankful for. It is great to have her as a part of the YUI team.

And there are many many more

This is just a small sample of the female techies I work with that make me love my job. I wrote all of this on the blackberry so I stayed brief. I am sure that the female numbers in tech are rising and I’d say it is high time for this. The more diversified our workplaces are the better our products will become.

I case you wondered about the lack of posts here lately, I am currently on holiday in Dallas, Texas meeting some friends and lounging in the sun.

I’ll be back next week!

Chris

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Denise Stephens, keynoter extraordinaire from Scripting Enabled is featured in the Guardian
• SlideShare released the slideshare mobile version using Yahoo BluePrint – this was a hack on Open Hack Day Bangalore
• The JavaScript Workshop released an interview with me
• Open Hack Day is coming back to London! Sign up now
• If you want to use the command line more, here’s a good list of most useful unix commands
• Finally a nice introduction to PHP and cURL
• The folks at flickr are doing strange and mental things again: fast client side search explained
• If you ever wondered how addons.mozilla.org battles XSS attacks, here’s how

And lo and behold, the Open Hack Day returns to London. On the 9th and 10th of May we have space for around 200 hackers to show us what can be done when you let European geeks run wild and feed them with yummy yummy data and APIs to mix and show this data in ways never before imagined.

As we have limited room you have to get a ticket and give us some information about yourself. We want hackers, not campers and the only way to stop the normal 200 tickets gone in 30 seconds is to ask you to show commitment and woo us with your interests.

However, in order to also cater for the non-hackers there are tickets available for people who only want to come to the tech talks in the morning.

• Sign up for your ticket on Event Wax now

See you in May in London!

I am a massive fan of Steve Krug’s “a common sense to web usability” book called “Don’t make me think” and want to write a book that fills the same gap for developers.

Right now the books available for developers are very technology centric and make you learn a lot about a certain job but nothing about how your delivery meshes with the rest of the team. This makes developers a needed asset but nothing that people listen to a lot when it comes to architecture or future progression. Those books sell well and make us feel good as we have improved our technical skills. However as human beings and professional employees we need to break out and get access to calling the shots where our expertise is needed. Our own navel-gazing and non-interest in matters outside our remit prevents that.

Over my career as a developer I found that most improvements of products don’t happen because of top-down decisions but because of geeks on the ground putting things in that will make their lives easier in the future changes that will inevitably come. Our work environment changes constantly and the only way to really build products that are good for us and the people we want to reach is by doing things right the first time and not un-do what we’ve done beforehand or tack extras on in a second step.

I want this book to be a helper to read through in a short period of time before starting a new job or project. I don’t want to give truths or examples that are outdated by the time the book is out but instead want to make developers aware of the power that they have if they work smart instead of delivering only what is needed.

Proposed book outline

1) One of your best assets is your laziness

This chapter will talk about being cleverly lazy – working in the right way upfront to make sure your workload will become less and less the longer the product will be under way. It will cover using the right tools, finding the right resources and organizing your time the way you feel most comfortable and become the most effective.

2) Don’t build for yourself but for those taking over from you

This chapter is all about clever developers aiming for making themselves redundant to the process over time. As a clever developer you want to improve and deliver demanding products and not get stuck in doing the same work over and over again and get stuck in maintenance of products you don’t feel enthusiastic about any longer.

3) Clever recycling is the key

One of the biggest obstacles you find as a developer is to fight your urge to deliver everything yourself. This keeps us from improving as a professional group. All of us have a clever idea to contribute but instead of merging them and finding consensus we all take our small idea and blow it up and stick some feathers on it to make it appear as the best thing since sliced bread. This chapter will talk about how using and building on top of existing solutions will make you a better developer and profit your profession as a whole making it easier to earn more money in the future.

4) Build what is needed and keep it modular

As developers we tend to think in finished products, not in smaller, re-usable components. When we develop something we are very much inclined to put in feature after feature and considering edge cases instead of delivering a solid foundation and add edge-case extensions when and if they are needed. The danger with this is that we deliver products over and over again that over-deliver on the feature front but lack the one single feature an implementer needs – the basics are not covered. This chapter will explain how to avoid this.

5) Aim for excellence

One thing that makes us stop progressing is that over time people are so disillusioned about what they can achieve in a professional environment that “making things work” is the main goal. This is terrible and the only way out is to challenge ourselves to deliver the best product out there and aim for excellence. Only if we challenge both ourselves and the people we work with we’ll be able to deliver products that change people’s lives. This includes planning bigger from the beginning. A product that is built with bad accessibility and no internationalization options might as well not be built.

6) Your product is defined by your users

This is a very important chapter for me and overlaps a bit with the feature-fetish of the previous chapter. The main ingredient of a successful product is how it fares with the audience it is intended for. Our users – regardless of ability, location or sophistication are what make and break our products. We need to know who uses our product and how they want it to work. A great example is Twitter. The use of Twitter has changed massively since its conception and its success is largely based in looking at its users and enabling them to do things they want to do.

7) Your biggest challenge is communication

This chapter will deal with how you communicate best with others, how you get seen, heard and listened to in a world as disconnected as IT is right now. Developers are considered the doers, implementers, not the ones with the overall plan. As developers however we feel exactly the other way around and many a time find ourselves saying that if we had had the chance to stop a decision before it happened the product we build would be much better. There is truth to that, but also a lot of prejudice. The right communication is built on consensus and knowing the deliveries of each of the people involved in the product.

8) Your biggest weapon is enthusiasm

The main point about being a good developer is being enthusiastic about what you do. If you build something you have no connection to you won’t be delivering an excellent job – no matter what you do. Enthusiasm is one of the most contagious things on the planet – if you do it right. This chapter gives you ideas and explains ways how I got myself enthusiastic about products even when on first glance they looked like a drag to do.

This is the main idea for the outline. I am planning to write a small book that can be handed over to new developers, heads of department and consulted at the beginning of a new project.

Delivery considerations

I have a few publishers interested and I am thinking about the format right now. One crazy idea I am having – and considering my very full agenda this year is a very good idea is to deliver the chapters as a series of talks and write the chapters as a follow-up after feedback from the audience. These talks could become part of a download package with the book.

What do you think?