What I Spent Ada Lovelace Day Working On

As I track on the API space, the gender gap becomes increasingly obvious. As with many other guys, I’m struggling with coming up with the most constructive way that I can contribute to closing the gender gap in technology. As I do with the rest of the API space, I figured I can work harder to tell more stories about women doing interesting things in the API space, while also working to understand the history of women in the space.

With this in mind I took the opportunity on Ada Lovelace Day, to publish a project dedicated tracking on women doing interesting things in the world of APIs, and as with the other 75+ projects, I will spend time each month moving the project forward. My goal is to find more stories for my blog, more speakers and attendees for API industry events, and make sure women are better represented across my research.

To kick things off, I wanted to showcase notable women in the history of compute, and by spending my day looking beyond just the Wikipedia entry, I was able compile a pretty impressive list of women who have made a significant impact on technology. The list I compiled is not complete by any means, but it is far more complete than any one list I have found out there, and the big difference is my list is machine readable--meaning you can pull the JSON listing of notable women in compute history and use on any other website, or in mobile applications.

Next up, I want to make an functional web API so anyone can search the listing, as well as provide the ability to add, and update the list via API. I want to also take advantage of the fact that my women in tech research website is build on Github, and encourage visitors to help me make the list more complete, and extend the reach of the information available here.

If you know someone or something that should be represented here, feel free to reach out via the Github issues, Twitter, or feel free to fork the project and contribute in any way you see fit. Use the updates and roadmap pages to find out what I’m working on, and where I am planning to take my research next.