Today is Ada Lovelace Day. It took me a while to decide on a female role model to blog about. I know a lot of women in technology, women in programming, and especially women in kernel development, but I didn’t meet most of them until I’d already been a programmer for several years. I have immense respect for them, but they were more my peers than role models. But when it finally hit me, I was sure who I wanted to write about.
Pauline Middelink was the first female kernel programmer I’d ever heard of. She wrote, among other things, the original ip masquerading code and a video4linux driver. I never met Pauline or talked to her online (although I used her release of the bigphysarea patch more than once), but just knowing she existed made me feel more confident that I could write kernel code too.
Spelling of name?
While “Pauline Middlelink” seems to be quite frequently used, her homepage (which seems pretty old) uses “Pauline Middelink”, without the first ‘l’.
You were the first person I ever met that had touched the kernel. And you and Katie (at that Oct 2006 DC LinuxChix meetup) were the first female Linux users I ever met…I think. Maybe met Cassia before that, but I think I was too shy at that LUG meeting.
Re: Spelling of name?
Ah, you are correct. Thanks! I’ll use her homepage URL too.
FYI
Posts about you that I know of: by Mackenzie Morgan, by Noirin Shirley and by Nathan Myers.
Re: FYI
Also:
Adria Richards
Re: FYI
Also also one by Liz Henry.
I considered writing about you, though I hope you won’t feel offended that I opted for Admiral Grace Hopper instead.