March 24th is Ada Lovelace day, which in the words of a good friend of mine, “[reminds] us all that ‘Girls can’t handle programming’ isn’t just wrong and stupid, it’s historically hilarious”.

It’s a day when many of us in the computer industry set aside some time to recognize our female colleagues and comrades who inspire us and help us along the way.

There are two women I’d like to recognize today for making my computing life all the more pleasant:

	Lyz Krumbach, along with the other members of the Ubuntu PA team, helped me to come out of my shell on IRC and make contributions to discussions as well as (meager, yet proud contributions) to the Ubuntu Project itself. She is a Linux sysadmin by day and devotes much of her spare time to the Ubuntu and Debian projects as a software packager, educator, and advocate.  Her name has been appearing in the blogs of many, on this day of recognition, in the Ubuntu and Debian projects and beyond, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to add my name to the list.
	It would be criminal of me to discuss the women in tech who have influenced my life without mentioning my blushing bride-to-be, Emily Oleksyk. We worked at the same company a few years ago where I was instantly impressed with her easygoing manner and confidence in a company full of stodgy old men (and a stodgy young me). And this was before we were even introduced! She’s ten times the programmer I’ll ever be and she’s even gracious enough to let me think she doesn’t know it.
	I should also mention that Emily comes from an impressive tech pedigree. Her mother’s cousin, Isabelle French, was National President of The Society of Women Engineers from 1964-1966 and was actively involved in the organization long before and after. She was also the first woman to graduate with a degree in radio engineering from Tri-State College in Angola, IN in 1944. With someone like that to look up to it’s easy to see why Emily rocks as hard as she does.

Ada Lovelace Day by ssweeny.net is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.