A little over four years ago, my good friend Mary Gardiner and I co-founded the Ada Initiative to support women in open technology and culture. Today, thousands of conferences have anti-harassment policies, dozens of communities have codes of conduct, over 2000 people have taken the Ally Skills Workshop (and 40 people know how to teach … Continue reading The Ada Initiative is ending, but our work continues on
Tag: ada initiative
Thanking things for their service
Personal organizer Marie Kondo has some unique organizing advice, as summarized by Penelope Green for the New York Times: "Discard everything that does not 'spark joy,' after thanking the objects that are getting the heave-ho for their service." One of the symptoms of hoarding disorder is a stronger than usual emotional attachment to inanimate objects, … Continue reading Thanking things for their service
Operating systems war story: How feminism helped me solve one of file systems’ oldest conundrums
Hi, my name is Valerie Aurora, and I am the inventor of a software feature that has prevented billions of unnecessary writes to hard drives, saving energy and making our computers faster. My invention is called "relative atime," and this is the story of how my feminist approach to computing helped me invent it - … Continue reading Operating systems war story: How feminism helped me solve one of file systems’ oldest conundrums
2013: Tipping point for the Linux kernel community?
As the last days of the Ada Initiative fundraising drive come to a close ($103,000 so far!), I'm reflecting on what's changed for Linux in the last 2 and half years. And it's pretty awesome. This is the year I've been waiting for in the Linux kernel community: the year that 7 new women are … Continue reading 2013: Tipping point for the Linux kernel community?
Coding is a human right
Today I was walking down the street, thinking about how barbaric it was that many women were forbidden to learn to read and write in the 19th century in England (some people felt that illiterate women made better wives). Then it struck me: Preventing women from learning to code is the moral equivalent of preventing … Continue reading Coding is a human right
Ada Lovelace Day party in San Francisco
Ada Lovelace Day is coming up next Tuesday, October 16th, and so the Ada Initiative is throwing a party in downtown San Francisco. Details at the link, but I wanted to post here so I could make a personal comment: I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the first Ada Initiative event in San … Continue reading Ada Lovelace Day party in San Francisco
A personal appeal for support from Valerie Aurora, executive director of the Ada Initiative
This post originally appeared on the Geek Feminism blog and is reposted here for posterity. I'm writing to ask you to donate to the Ada Initiative. A year ago, a friend of mine was groped at an open source conference. Again. I've personally been groped twice at conferences myself. But what shocked me most was … Continue reading A personal appeal for support from Valerie Aurora, executive director of the Ada Initiative
