Finding Ada

Several months ago I signed a pledge that I would publish a blog post today about a woman in technology whom I admire. Well, when writing this post yesterday, I came to the conclusion that it's very hard for me to pick just one specific woman to talk about. So I am talking about more than one, and they're all rockstars—even the ones that I am not mentioning, you know who you are.

In the PHP community there are quite a few ladies that are actively involved. On the C-side of things (not pun intended) there's Sara Golemon and Elizabeth Smith . Sara works at Yahoo! doing search engine things, and is the master of writing interesting, but dangerous extensions to PHP. She's also the author of the only dedicated book on PHP's internals . Elizabeth ( in her own words ) "enjoys doing very perverse things to Windows using PHP" and is generally known as the person who among other things, fixes things on Windows, maintains the PHP-GTK bindings. She also occasionally fixes my code .

With Sara and Elizabeth we also end up at phpwomen . Together with Ligaya Turmelle , Elizabeth Naramore , Kathy Reid and Lorna Mitchell they run this organization to "provide a network of support and mentorship to women, help women become more involved with PHP, increase our numbers at conferences as speakers and attendees, and provide a “female friendly” atmosphere." With their effort, I am sure we'll see more involvement in the PHP community from the other currently unknown female PHP types adding to the diversity of our community.