Wednesday, March 24, 2010

She moves in mysterious ways...


Today is Ada Lovelace Day... an opportunity to blog about a woman in technology and computing whom you admire. Back when this project was announced, I vowed to blog about my favorite woman in computing. What they didn't know was, lucky me... I have two!

Way back in October 2001, I met Alice. I have written about her before... She is my business partner with HostingParis.com and LetsBounceBack.com, and the best friend I could ever have.

We met at the American University of Paris. We both signed up for the Web Design and Site Management course... it was two nights a week for several months and covered 90 hours of instruction. We started with basic html coding and learned the intricacies of forms the hard way and, in the end, produced working websites. I convinced her to take the follow-up Flash course and also roped her into a digital photography course at Parson's Paris. (We love to learn!)

We built our little web business slowly, word of mouth within the Anglo/Non-profit orgs/Artist community in Paris; and we are still growing. Our turning point came when we learned about Mambo, an open source content management system, which has since taken us to Joomla!, also an open source content management system.

Alice is my techno-geek chica. She loves the tech side of things... where she can spend hours Googling and figuring out something in PHP and MySQL, I can can spend hours making it look pretty with CSS and graphics. We have a mind meld that works. Our mantra has always been "two heads are better than one". We have another mantra: The Circle of Love. The Circle of Love is composed of those folks who impress us so much with their love of what they do: their passion, their intensity with which they give and their downright goodness. Which brings me to Alice's daughter, Catherine... who, might I say, is AWESOMENESS extraordinaire! Believe me, I smile when I say AWESOME! :-)

I am going to pull text from a proud mom's blog... (also posted on our recent project: LetsBounceBack.com, take a look!

"...Catherine is a first year PhD student in Computer Science. Her specialty: Human and Computer Interaction (HCI) and User Experience (UX).
She was a Computer Science major at a small, all-female liberal arts college, and her combined research experiences, and the mentorship of a family friend who is also an HCI matriarch, amongst others.
Despite her young age, she has numerous research experiences under her belt, has attended and presented papers at many conferences (including Grace Hopper and CHI), and continuously forges a broad and strong network in her field. She holds her own in this highly male-dominated sector, and is an enthusiastic advocate for women in computing, never missing an opportunity to encourage women to consider a career in technology.
Last summer Catherine was a contributor on the G-Nome Surfer project, a genomic information visualization program for a table top interface."

Woof! May I say again, WOOF!!

Catherine was very patient one evening around the kitchen table as she tried to teach me and her mom basic java scripting... frustrating for her, I am sure, but a fond memory for me! Her patience and her Eureka! moment as she figured out something she was working on made the evening. Catherine is a woman to watch. I am honored to know her, and her mom. Two special women worthy of Ada Lovelace's admiration.

It's all right, it's all right, all right...