Some Smart Women in Tech I Knew In Real Life

In honor of Ada Lovelace Day I tweeted props to smart women in tech I had met via twitter. Because I limited the list to only people active in tech, and not science in general, and also not those who were tech savvy but did something else, I was surprised that the list was small. I was certain I had known far more in real life, and it was a bigger percentage of the people I knew in real life.

Thus, I have set out to give some props to the women who I knew in tech that I knew outside of twitter. Again, I am going to restrict myself to women who were directly involved in some sort of computer technology. I'm also going to restrict myself to ten that particularly impressed me.

The order will be roughly chronological in my meeting them.

Paula Hultgren was a software consultant before joining HP where she worked on non-stop (fault tolerant) computers.

Judy Bamberger helped develop and teach the capacity maturity model.

Julie Lancaster developed compiler optimizers at Softech.

Debra Minard developed the debugger at Pr1me Computer before moving on to being an early developer at Rational/Clearcase.

Barbara Zino developed compilers at Pr1me before she was the co-author of Yacc++.

Wendy E. Brown was an early networking developer at Compuserve.

Sue Yeghiayan led the Unix compiler group for Digital before being an early developer at SavaJe.

I-Yu Chen ran compiler groups for Pr1me and Intel.

Ada Gavriloskva does closely-coupled networking research at GA Tech.

Michela Becchi did research on regular expressions and network security at Intel.