The day after Ada Lovelace Day I find myself on my way to the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) of Women in Computing. Look at that! Two Heroines of computer Science in one sentence!
For those of you not familiar with these two superwomen of tech…
Ada Lovelace: The Countess of Computing, the world’s first computer programmer, and the person who worked with Babbage on the analytical engine. Even though she died over 160 years ago she still inspires women in STEM with her ground-breaking projects, including her work with Babbage, which is widely recognised as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine.
Grace Hopper (or Admiral Hopper to give her her proper title): My personal heroine and the women who transformed programming into English – so we don’t need to write in 1’s and 0’s but in “if” “then” and “else”. Her list of technological achievements is really quite amazing and she even had a US Navy Destroyer named after her! It’s no wonder she was widely known as “Amazing Grace”!
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
So here I am on my way to GHC (#GHC, #CiscoGHC), an event that attracts over 12,000 young women in computing and technology to gather together for a technical conference. The theme this year is “Our Time to Lead” and it’s my privilege to encourage and mentor the young talent that I get to interact with at the event.
I have a feeling I will get to meet many more heroines over the next few days and will do my best to keep you posted via my twitter account!
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