Today is International Women's Day. Who has stories about women who helped them to become a better programmer?
Ask HN: Stories about women who helped you to become a better programmer?
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Re: Ask HN: Stories about women who helped you to become a better programmer?
#2Great topic no answer :(
Re: Ask HN: Stories about women who helped you to become a better programmer?
#3I have 2. One was a computer teacher in elementary school, she started a computer club for a handful of nerdy kids to do some BASIC programming. We never had enough time for it to stick, really, so it was just something to mess around with. Nonetheless, a good fun start.
Next was a high school teacher. She taught Java. The class was excruciatingly boring and we were essentially being taught to the test. She was not a programmer and pretty much just recited from the textbook. How did that help me become a better programmer? Since the class was trivial and she wasn't much of a disciplinarian I had 45 free minutes a day to mess around on my own in Python.
Re: Ask HN: Stories about women who helped you to become a better programmer?
#4I would not have been able to learn code without my girlfriend's support. I started teaching myself how to code in 2013 and got a job in June 2015. Although I mostly learned code in my spare time after work, my girlfriend offered massive support, encouragement and motivation. She didn't raise eyebrows when I spent money on books, online courses or spent my time practicing.
There was never any arguments about what I was trying to do (which at the time, I thought was impossible). She worked towards her career goals and I worked on mine.
It would be more macho to say I taught myself Software Development and did it all by myself but the truth is I would not have the job I have now without her.
Re: Ask HN: Stories about women who helped you to become a better programmer?
#5Ages ago I was working with codes, writing error detection and correction, and also writing programs to find the probability of undetected error for a given code. I wanted to read the literature for myself and write my own code in order to understand what was going on.
I was inspired to find some of the very smart people whose methods and books I used, assuming they were men, were in fact women. Jesse MacWilliams worked at Bell Labs and developed the MacWilliams identity (which made my life easier for computing the properties of a cyclic code.) Vera Pless is another that worked in coding theory and authored some classic texts.
These are some of the women whose works I relied on and who were inspirational during a formative period in my career, where I was trying to level-up and gain deeper insights.
Re: Ask HN: Stories about women who helped you to become a better programmer?
#6First, there was my mother. She was a programmer back the days when opcodes were programmed in octal. She thought life was great when she got an assembler. She had one CPU she worked on where the instruction set could be changed with patch cords! Then she moved on to neural net programming. (That is, she became a stay-at-home mom and raised my brother and I, which I'm pretty sure was a harder task than programming.) She had a master's degree in math. Growing up, she helped with learning to think in a mathematical way - not so much by "teaching", but just by life.
The second was my first manager, Mary Deyo. During the interview, she said "I don't see very many computer classes on your transcript". It's true. I majored in math and physics, and was largely self-taught in computers. I figured that was the end of my job prospects there. But she had a masters in math (like my mother), and was largely self-taught in computers. She hired me despite my (lack of) transcript. My whole career (probably) comes from her taking a chance on me.
Re: Ask HN: Stories about women who helped you to become a better programmer?
#7In college, we had to do a senior project in order to graduate. For CS, this consisted of building something and writing a 15-30pg paper about what you built and the technologies it uses. The other people in my class all chose to build things using technologies they were taught in our CS classes and how no problem finding professors to consent to their project and be their mentor during the process. I wanted something challenging, though. I wanted to build an iOS app using Objective-C (pre-swift), which was not something taught at my college.
After I came up with the app idea, I went around to the different professors I had classes with (some male, some female) and not one wanted to sign off on the project. Some simply said no, some tried to talk me into doing the same app in HTML5 or another language that we covered in class. I spoke to one of my peers and they referred me to a teacher I had never taken a class with. I went to her, expecting to be rejected, but instead, she happily agreed to sign off on the project. The one condition was that I TA her CS2 class the next semester in Python. I told her I never used Python before and she said: "Well you have 3 months to learn enough to TA the class". With her guidance, I learned enough Python to TA. With her guidance, I learned enough Objective-C to build the App. With her guidance, I graduated. This one professor taught me to push my limits and not let anyone hold back my pursuits of knowledge, and for that, I am extremely grateful.
Re: Ask HN: Stories about women who helped you to become a better programmer?
#8Hands down, my mum and my grand mother.
My mum was a self-professed luddite - as in the traditional term where she hates technology. However, knew I was good at maths and could see how computing was going to be a big part of the future. So she'd buy me every book on computing she came across in second-hand book stores. It didn't matter what they were on, she'd get them for me (still does too). So back in the pre-internet days and even before I had my own computer I'd read and re-read them constantly. And I'd try my hand at writing programs on paper and tracing them out in my head.
My grandmother bought a brand new Commodore 64 because she could afford it, and played some games but not much else. She did however show me how to run BASIC. So whenever I went over she'd let me on there, and I'd transcribe my programs into the computer and finally get a chance to run them and see if my thinking was right.
Re: Ask HN: Stories about women who helped you to become a better programmer?
#9I credit women with almost every significant step in my career progression.
* My first official programming teacher was a woman at my high school who was kind enough to accept me and two friends into her class two years early. She also encouraged me to apply to a college-level programming competition, which gave me both a sense of humility in knowing how much more I had to learn, and whetted my appetite to learn more. She also let me spend class time on software that did my calculus homework :)
* I landed my first professional job thanks to the encouragement of Dr. Mary Dayne Gregg and her class in COBOL, which got my foot in the door of a large company doing Y2K fixes. I can't say it was my favorite gig, but she prepared me well for my first job.
* My wife: not a programmer but as an ardent and patient feminist she's helped me be less of a pain in the ass for my coworkers.
Re: Ask HN: Stories about women who helped you to become a better programmer?
#10My first programming teacher was a delightful lady who encouraged me when I added all sorts of frills to my turbo Pascal assignments. I also acquired my first kitten from her. (my girlfriend convinced me that my pig needed a friend)