Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging dedicated to drawing attention to women excelling in technology. The brainchild of freelance social software consultant Suw Charman-Anderson, Ada Lovelace Day aims to inspire and empower young women to get involved in technology by highlighting and celebrating the women we admire. A mashup of all the blog entries written by those participating in the event can be found at The Ada Lovelace Day Collection.
Allison Randal is the chief architect and lead developer of Parrot, a Free Software virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute
bytecode for dynamic languages such as
Javascript, Ruby, PHP, Python and Perl 6; a Director on the Board of The Perl Foundation; Chairman of The Parrot Foundation; founder and president of print-on-demand tech publishing company, Onyx Neon Press; a Program Chair for O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON); co-author of Perl 6 & Parrot Essentials and editor of various books on dynamic languages for O'Reilly.
I admire Allison partly because her account of her childhood interest in technology closely matches that of my own and we share many of the same interests, but mostly because she has demonstrated that you can excel in the programming field by working hard, by being assertive and by not caring too much about what others might say or think about you. I am tremendously grateful that she found the time during the run-up to the imminent release of Parrot 1.0 to answer some questions on what interests and motivates her about programming, and also what advice she'd offer young women wishing to get into the field:
Rosellyne: What interests you most about programming?
Allison: Tough one. I enjoy programming on such a fundamental level that explaining why is a bit like trying to explain why I like chocolate. :) Part of it is certainly the problem-solving aspects, it's an interesting mental challenge, keeps me from getting bored. Part of it is purely practical, there are things I want to get done and programming is the best way to do them.
Part of it is the creative aspects, programming gives you a power to give life to your ideas, to manipulate your (virtual) environment to suit your needs. I suppose it's much the same human quality that drives people to build bridges, write and perform music, paint, decorate houses, or sew their own clothes.
Rosellyne: What is the highlight of your career so far?
Allison: Definitely Parrot. In some ways it feels like my entire career has been driving me to this point. (version 1.0 was just released on March 17th.) It's certainly plenty to keep me interested and engaged for several decades to come.
Rosellyne: Who and what inspires, motivates and drives you?
Allison: The work Mark Shuttleworth and his team have done with Ubuntu inspires me. It has restored my belief in making the impossible a reality.
Fun motivates me more than anything else. I'll happily tackle the hardest of problems if it's also an enjoyable challenge.
I'm not quite sure what drives me, but it must be something. Otherwise I'd be off on a beach in Tahiti instead of working insane hours on far too many projects. I think it's partly a desire to see things done well. When I see certain things aren't getting done that need to get done, I have a tendency to pitch in to take care of it. Looking back at respected positions I've held over the years, they all grew out of a very practical perspective something like, "It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it."
Rosellyne: What advice would you'd like to give a young woman who is keen on technology but isn't sure whether or how she should get into the field?
Allison: Start small. It can seem a bit overwhelming, but chances are that she's already surrounded by technology from cell phones and PDAs, to email and web surfing, to cable television, DVD players, etc. So, it's not really a question of whether to get involved in technology, it's just a question of whether she wants to do a little bit more than she's already doing.
And start practical. She'll learn faster and better when she's doing it for a purpose than just reading some abstract information. Maybe pick something she can do for herself or for someone she knows, like storing a list of her music collection, or setting up a simple web site for a local animal shelter, or helping her grandmother archive the family photo album, and share it with the whole family.
On how... in any field, the way to get involved is by doing. If you program every day for 10 years, you'll become an expert, even without really trying.
[Image source: Flickr; Taken by Piers Cawley (homepage: http://bofh.org.uk), released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Licence.]
Allison Randal is the chief architect and lead developer of Parrot, a Free Software virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute
bytecode for dynamic languages such as
Javascript, Ruby, PHP, Python and Perl 6; a Director on the Board of The Perl Foundation; Chairman of The Parrot Foundation; founder and president of print-on-demand tech publishing company, Onyx Neon Press; a Program Chair for O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON); co-author of Perl 6 & Parrot Essentials and editor of various books on dynamic languages for O'Reilly.I admire Allison partly because her account of her childhood interest in technology closely matches that of my own and we share many of the same interests, but mostly because she has demonstrated that you can excel in the programming field by working hard, by being assertive and by not caring too much about what others might say or think about you. I am tremendously grateful that she found the time during the run-up to the imminent release of Parrot 1.0 to answer some questions on what interests and motivates her about programming, and also what advice she'd offer young women wishing to get into the field:
Rosellyne: What interests you most about programming?
Allison: Tough one. I enjoy programming on such a fundamental level that explaining why is a bit like trying to explain why I like chocolate. :) Part of it is certainly the problem-solving aspects, it's an interesting mental challenge, keeps me from getting bored. Part of it is purely practical, there are things I want to get done and programming is the best way to do them.
Part of it is the creative aspects, programming gives you a power to give life to your ideas, to manipulate your (virtual) environment to suit your needs. I suppose it's much the same human quality that drives people to build bridges, write and perform music, paint, decorate houses, or sew their own clothes.
Rosellyne: What is the highlight of your career so far?
Allison: Definitely Parrot. In some ways it feels like my entire career has been driving me to this point. (version 1.0 was just released on March 17th.) It's certainly plenty to keep me interested and engaged for several decades to come.
Rosellyne: Who and what inspires, motivates and drives you?
Allison: The work Mark Shuttleworth and his team have done with Ubuntu inspires me. It has restored my belief in making the impossible a reality.
Fun motivates me more than anything else. I'll happily tackle the hardest of problems if it's also an enjoyable challenge.
I'm not quite sure what drives me, but it must be something. Otherwise I'd be off on a beach in Tahiti instead of working insane hours on far too many projects. I think it's partly a desire to see things done well. When I see certain things aren't getting done that need to get done, I have a tendency to pitch in to take care of it. Looking back at respected positions I've held over the years, they all grew out of a very practical perspective something like, "It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it."
Rosellyne: What advice would you'd like to give a young woman who is keen on technology but isn't sure whether or how she should get into the field?
Allison: Start small. It can seem a bit overwhelming, but chances are that she's already surrounded by technology from cell phones and PDAs, to email and web surfing, to cable television, DVD players, etc. So, it's not really a question of whether to get involved in technology, it's just a question of whether she wants to do a little bit more than she's already doing.
And start practical. She'll learn faster and better when she's doing it for a purpose than just reading some abstract information. Maybe pick something she can do for herself or for someone she knows, like storing a list of her music collection, or setting up a simple web site for a local animal shelter, or helping her grandmother archive the family photo album, and share it with the whole family.
On how... in any field, the way to get involved is by doing. If you program every day for 10 years, you'll become an expert, even without really trying.
[Image source: Flickr; Taken by Piers Cawley (homepage: http://bofh.org.uk), released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Licence.]
