The first computer in the house was my father’s. It was a TRS-80 Model 1. He had bought it to learn computing and because he realised computers were the future. I used it a lot learning to program in the BASIC language and then in Z80 assembly language (the language of the
microprocessor that ran the computer).

I was also interested in electronics (thanks to my Uncle who taught it in schools) and around the same time I saw an advertisement for the
Acorn Atom in an electronics magazine and I wanted one. I started saving but the BBC Microcomputer (“The Beeb”) came out before I could afford one. My Parents offered to help buy a Beeb by way of multiple combined Birthday and Christmas presents and the deal I would not use it until after my ‘O’ levels which I mainly complied with. I remember the excitement of going in to the store to purchase my Beeb.

I learnt to program that machine from top to bottom. I had the reference manuals and the data sheets for all the chips. I loved how you got the full circuit diagram with the Advanced User Guide (it was a print of the one hand drawn by Acorn). I learnt BBC BASIC and 6502 assembly language. I learnt how to add to the operating system and how to do clever things by directly programming the chips in the machine. It taught me a lot about programming, such as interrupts, concurrency, race conditions, dead and live locks, and so on. Programming did become my first love and superseded electronics but I wouldn’t be the programmer I am today with out it!

I didn’t just program. I did play games with my favourites being Chuckie Egg and Elite! Elite was a complete time sink. No game following sucked me in as much as Elite did until World of Warcraft!

I didn’t completely give up on electronics and would develope small projects to connect to my Beeb. In the mid 80s I was studying for a Physics degree and naturally I used my Beeb. My final year project was based around the automation of an experiment. I designed hardware to drive the equipment, sensors and hardware to read data, and wrote software to drive it all from a Beeb.

In 1989 I got an Acorn A3000. It was the successor to the Beeb and also used in schools. It had the Acorn designed ARM processor (now used in nearly everything from a mobile phone to the iPad, set top boxes and televisions), what seemed like copious amounts of memory, loads of colours and a built in disk drive. It had BBC BASIC so I was at home and also taught me to program ARM assembly language (which I still use today). So the Beeb was basically retired.

I moved on to other machines, developing for Linux, higher degrees and becoming a research assistant but I never lost my love of my Beeb though and I still own mine almost 30 years after I bought it. I also still make projects for it. The most recent being an ethernet interface so that I can connect it to the internet.

I am now an embedded software consultant and I work for a company that was formed by employees of the company that bought Acorn Computers when it finally ended in 1999. My most recent project was optimising Linux on a device with an ARM processor. And my entire career is down to me and my Parents buying that Beeb 30 years ago!

I will be running a tutorial Writing a PHP extension in C and speaking about Web Sevices for Consumer Devices. I look forward to seeing you there.

I will be bringing a long several Arduino-a-likes together with a variety of components and CDs of the IDE so that we can get together in groups, code and play.

LinuxChix is a global community of women (and their supporters) who are fans of, users, or just interested in Linux and Open Source Software. LinuxChix has various chapters around the world. Currently there is only one in the UK, based in London, but I am proud to announce the LinuxChix northern chapter, LinuxChixNorth.

LinuxChixNorth is a chapter for LinuxChix members, or potential members, based in and around the M62 corridor in the north of England. This covers the cities of Bradford, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield and York. It is intend the first meetings will be held in Leeds and Manchester but there is no reason why members shouldn’t organise meetings in other cities. The first meeting will be in Leeds at the beginning of December. I am finalising arrangements for a venue and will announce the date as soon as I know it.

Apart from the website we are on twitter as @linuxchixnorth if you want to follow us. You can also e-mail the current organisers at uberchix at linuxchixnorth dot org dot uk.

PHP NW 2009 was a one day formal conference with a social on the night before the conference and more informal talks session on the Sunday morning, the day after.

Personally I feel uncomfortable entering a room mostly full of men. It’s not that I feel unsafe its just that I feel that many many eyes will suddenly be looking at me, appraising my appearance, my age, my potential skills, all in that single moment. I want to see a friendly face so I tend to gravitate to other women in the room. As I am a member of PHP Women prior to PHP NW I tweeted suggesting we met at the social and had a dinner together. I got a few replies and on the Friday night a few of us had a great curry in a near by restaurant. At least one at the table was a woman who didn’t know about PHP Women but seemed pleased that we were there and she had a group that she could hook up with.

The following day was the main conference. There were both men and women assisting with registration and a fair few of the conference assistants were women. This, to me, made the event less threatening and allayed my nerves. Also one of the main organisers is LornaJane adding to the strong female presence. PHP Women had a visible table in the main conference area which gave us a place to congregate between talks and somewhere for other women to come and find out about the group.

There were a respectable number of women among the speakers. LornaJane gave one of the two talks that followed the keynote; Sara, one of the core PHP developers, had travelled from the US and talked on the Sunday about the new features PHP 5.3; and there was a talk about UTF-8. The women weren’t chosen as speakers because they were women but because they were good speakers with interesting talks. But it all helps. It gives a feeling, to me anyway, that we’re not a curiosity, we’re just developers like everyone else attending a conference which is how it should be.

So you want to encourage women to attend your conference review this check list and ask yourself whether you’re doing enough.

Women Organisers

Try an ensure your main organising committee has both men and women. For one thing you’ll get a more rounded set of ideas due to different experiences and social history but also it should give the conference a more women friendly feel, especially when other women see there are women organisers.

Women speakers

Women are the minority in the IT industry. That I can’t deny. However there is no excuse for having a completely male set of speakers. You don’t have to have positive discrimination or affect the calibre of your speakers by choosing a female speaker as there are plenty of good women speakers knowledgeable in a variety of topics. Have a look at GeekSpeakr for example.

Women staff

Registration is the first time delegates get a chance to decide the tone of a conference. Ensure you have a mixed staff at registration. Also ensure there are some women available at all time during the conference because there may be issues that women are uncomfortable bringing up with a male member of staff.

Personally I don’t really have a problem with the ‘Booth Babe’ but if that’s the only women that women delegates see then that does far more damage than if they weren’t there at all. Try and keep some balance. PHP NW’s ‘uniform’ was generally unisex t-shirts carrying the sponsors logos, jeans and sneakers. Perfect.

Women friendly talks

Strongly encourage your speakers to be aware of women delegates and to pitch their talks appropriately. Unfortunately at one conference I attended this year two of the talks had slides with questionable content for example scantily clad women. Infamously both Richard Stallman and Mark Shuttleworth have been blatantly misogynist recently in their talks. One bad speaker can ruin a whole conference.

Support the women’s groups

The are various groups such as PHP Women, LinuxChix, DevChix, Systers, etc. who would more than be happy to have a presence at your conference. Help them out by having a table or booth in a prominent position and donating a couple of tickets. Such booths give women a focal point to congregate.

Post conference feedback

Finally in your post conference feed back try and get the opinion of women delegates and take note of any ideas they have as to improving the conference for women next time. Please try not to be defensive and if something unfortunate has happened just apologise, don’t try and qualify that apology you’ll just make it worse.

The opinions above are purely my own and I may get some flak from them. Also I know the list is in no way comprehensive or complete. If you have any further ideas I would be interested to hear from you. May be we can produce a definitive guide.

This is totally unacceptable and rather disappointing. The IT industry is one of the remaining industries where women are under represented. “Entertainment” like this does nothing to encourage women or make them feel comfortable at events like this.

However in the past this may have gone unnoticed but this time people tweeted about it, there were e-mails on mailing lists, blog posts and so on. Social networking ensured that Yahoo! heard about the disgust and they have apologised. The text of the apology is below:

All,

I wanted to acknowledge the public reaction generated by the images of
female dancers at our Taiwan Open Hack Day this past weekend. Our hack
events are designed to give developers an opportunity to learn about
our APIs and technologies. As many folks have rightly pointed out, the
“Hack Girls” aspect of our Taiwan Hack Day is not reflective of that
spirit or purpose. And it’s certainly not the message we want to send
about our values here at Yahoo!. Hack Days are about making everyone
feel welcome, including women coders and technologists. 

This incident is regrettable and we apologize to anyone that we have
offended. Rest assured, it won’t happen again.

Best,

Chris Yeh
Head of YDN

twitter: @ydn
email: cyeh at yahoo-inc dot com

This is a good thing. However what about the Go-Go dancers at last years event? I was going to link to video on Youtube at this point but as I was doing it they went private! May be they’re ashamed?

Another “Win” for social networking was the outcry against Jan Moir’s homophobic article on Stephen Gately’s death. It ran with all the clichés i.e. that gay people are sexually promiscuous, that a civil partnership is less than a marriage, and so on. However so many people complained (over 21,000, the highest ever) both on the Daily Mail’s site and the Press Complaints Commission’s site (which actually buckled under the strain) that the PCC is to examine the article and the Daily Mail.

Social networking now means that intolerance and injustice can not go unnoticed anymore. This is a good thing!

The whole of my working life, accountancy, academia (Computer Science and the Physics), and then industry I’ve been one of the few women amongst many men. I’ve gotten used to it. I can’t remember all the injustices but a few come to mind though; Such as the male students I was supposed to be supervising during their masters (since their work was based on my work) who went to my professor rather than me; Or being an acting team leader for a couple of years but whenever I tried to get the promotion I was told “I didn’t have the right attributes” even though I was going the job (I eventually decided the right attributes were a set of male genitalia); Or listening to colleagues discussing the possible appearance of a prospective employee once they discovered she was female. I just learnt to live with incidents like these as did most other women I knew. Yes I could complain but then I would just be seen as a moaning woman but it would have never gotten me anywhere so I kept my head down and got on with work.

Online it was worse! The anonymity that the net gives people allows them to be blatantly bigotted or misogynistic with no recourse. I know women who only post anonymously on Slashdot for example since if they didn’t they would basically get attacked. Some would argue that in most cases it is just words on a screen but eventually enough words have an effect. More often than not I hid behind my nick which is not obviously female. So in the last few years I just haven’t been publicly active on-line.

There is a real issue with gender prejudice and some of the incidents have become really quite nasty. Emma McGrattan of Ingres caused a stir when she commented on gender and coding styles. Discussion sites such as Slashdot had many rather vitriolic posts by people who hated her over it. Kathy Sierra , however, got hate mail and death threats and ended up shutting down her blog because of what she had written. Other female bloggers and speakers worry about having content in which they have opinion because of the backlash and bullying that seems to occur from a section of the IT community. My issues have been light in comparison.

Then recently there have been a few speakers at various conferences who have had inappropriate content. I have written before about the inappropriate slide content of a scantily clad woman parading across the screen at PHP Conference UK 2009. Richard Stallman did not endear himself to women when he gave the keynote at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in 2009. And finally, (since I don’t want to make this a long list), there’s Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote at LinuxCon where he used ‘guys’ almost entirely, made an ejaculation pun, and talked about “explaining to girls what we actually do”. All of this is discouraging to women in the industry and I frequently have conversations with women who talk about changing career at some point due to this kind of atmosphere.

But in all this negativity there is a ray of sunshine. Unlike when I first started in IT there are now women’s groups both virtually and actually for example PHP Women, Linuxchix, Systers, Girl Geek Dinners and so on. These groups are supportive to women, provide encouragement to young women interested in a career in technology, and also give us a place to talk to one another about issues we are facing. Some of this conversation obviously turns towards incidents like those I’ve written about above and we are at least annoyed at most angry about it. However rather than just merely griping we’re doing something about it. All of the speaker incidents have been blogged about quite extensively. There are sites such as the Geek Feminism Blog and the Geek Feminism Wiki to name a couple. We’re being positive; we’re doing something about it; and it makes me optimistic for the future.

Derick’s very interesting talk was on Test Driven Development in a PHP environment. Derick is the author of XDebug and an expert in PHP QA. It covered the concepts behind Test Driven Development and why it both improves code quality and makes code development more efficient over the long term. It covered the use of PHPUnit, XDebug and CruiseControl. As a fan of quality reusable code this is a great way to develop.

Next month is the PHP NW 2009 Conference held in Manchester. The you can see Derick and some of other great European PHP conference speakers doing their thing. Its fantastic value for money and you get a year’s subscription to PHP Architect Magazine too. Bargain!

They are made very simply by taking a pair of the giant spiral containers, which are usually intended for holding semi precious (or otherwise) stones, and a pair of earwires. I simply slipped the wires on to the spirals and closed the end off with a touch of solder.

The great thing is that the D20s are removable and so can still be used

So who was Ada Lovelace? Ada Lovelace, né Ada Byron, was the result of Lord and Lady Byron‘s short lived marriage. In order to prevent her daughter taking on her father’s dangerously poetic traits Lady Byron had her daughter taught mathematics and music. The young Ada was fascinated by mathematics and when she was 17 she met Charles Babbage, then Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge (a position currently held by Stephen Hawking). Their copious correspondence made them life long friends. Ada eventually married and by way of inheritance became Lady Ada of Lovelace but she continued her friendship with Babbage.

Even though the Difference Engine was not complete Charles Babbage wanted to move on to his next contraption, the Analytical Engine. In order to be easily configurable, i.e. programmable, the engine was to utilised the punched card idea from the Jacquard Loom. In 1842, while Babbage was trying to get sponsorship from abroad to be able to build his device, Italian Mathematician Louis Menebrea published a memo on the Analytical Engine in French. Babbage employed Lady Lovelace to translate it for him.

But Ada Lovelace did more than just translate the document but furthered the research and the notes she wrote to accompany the paper are larger than the paper itself. In the notes Ada Lovelace described how you could configure the Analytical Engine to produce a sequence of Bernoulli Numbers. This was the first ever computer program and she was the world’s first programmer so it seems fitting the day is named after her. She also has the ADA programming language named after her too. But Lady Lovelace was not completely unaffected by her father’s legacy and when her peers were seeing such devices as merely scientific and mathematical machines she saw how computers could be artistic, used to make music or be used in graphics.

But this post isn’t about Ada Lovelace. It is about Lynn Conway who is a heroine of mine and an inspiration. It think she quite rightly deserves to be blogged about on Ada Lovelace Day.

Lynn Conway is Professor Emerita of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. She retired from teaching and research in 1998. Professor Conway is responsible for many advances that are required for modern computing and much of her work was carried out during a time when women were virtual non-existent in computer sciences and misogyny was rife.

I was not sure whether I should talk about Lynn Conway’s earliest work as she is a trans-woman and her earliest work was prior to transition. I was reluctant because I wanted to write about Lynn Conway the woman technologist and not her biological past however Ms Conway is open about her past and it does not detract from her achievements. In fact it makes them even more inspiring. Lynn Conway entered MIT in 1955 where she excelled. She tried to transition whilst there but the medical and social climate was against her so she left despondent and worked as a technician for several years. She resumed her education at Columbia University obtaining her batchelor’s degree in 1962 and her master’s a year later. She was subsequently head hunted by IBM to work as a researcher on the Advance Computing Systems project. Whilst at IBM Lynn Conway invented dynamic instruction scheduling.

Micro-processors have many functional units which can operate in parallel. I do not mean multiple core processors but units that are part of a single core. As a simplist example we can consider a processor that has separate addition and multiplication units. I.e. the processor can add a pair of numbers and multiply a pair of numbers simultaneously. Conway’s idea was to utilise this parallelization by re-ordering instructions in a program dynamically to suit the processor’s architecture. For example supposing a set of instructions comprising two additions followed by two multiplications performs a mathematical calculation. And suppose you could do the same calculation as addition, multiplication, addition, multiplication. I.e. you swap the second and third operations. Then this would be more efficient since the processor can do those additions and multiplications simultaneously. The rearrangement would be dynamic, i.e. the tools or processor would do it and not the programmer. This is dynamic instruction scheduling and is core to modern computer science.

Whilst at IBM the depression caused Professor Conway to attempt transition again and it was during this transition she was fired by IBM for being a transsexual person. She completed her transition, changed her name, hid her past, and started her career again from scratch.

Lynn Conway worked firstly as a contract programmer and then for Memorex as a system designer and computer architect. Then in 1973 she moved to, the famous Xerox PARC, where she led the Large Scale Integration Systems team. Whilst there she collaborated with Professor Carver Mead of Caltech. Between them they wrote the classic text Introduction to VLSI Systems. This text spearheaded the Mead and Conway Revolution whereby the number of engineers capable of developing new chips significantly increased. The book filled a major gap in the literature and formed the basis of an educational revolution in computer science. Many universities started teaching VLSI courses based upon the book and some even used Conway’s notes from her own, now famous, course held at MIT in 1978.

The course on its own would not have been that useful if students were not able to realise their designs so, in addition to inventing design rules which simplified chip design and design tools, Professor Conway also worked on an internet based infrastructure that allowed for rapid prototyping and short run fabrication of a large number of VLSI designs. The Multi Project Chip was demonstrated at the MIT course and within weeks students had their fabricated prototypes for testing. The system evolved and is still used as a national infrastructure by universities and researchers. Lynn Conway’s work has had significant impact on chip design. In the early 80s Ms Conway moved to DARPA and in 1985 she became Professor of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan and associate dean of engineering there. She stayed there as a researcher and teacher until she retired in 1998.

Most people don’t invent anything during their lives. Lynn Conway not only had one major invention, or even two, but several which changed the face of computer science and gave birth to much of the modern technology we use today. However when she heard that story of her early work at IBM was going to be published she decided to come out as a trans-woman. Since then she has been a trans-activist in order to “illuminate and normalize the issues of gender identity and the processes of gender transition.” Lynn Conway suffered bigotry in the 50s and 60s, transitioned and restarted life as a woman forging an impressive career in a male oriented industry and becoming an inspiration to many. Then, later in life, she risked bigotry again by revealing her path and has fought for justice and equality since then. I had a chance to correspond with her a few years ago and she is a lovely lady.

Lynn Conway is my heroine on Ada Lovelace Day.
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html