So the day has finally come for my Ada Lovelace Day post, and although I’ve been think­ing about who I will write about for over a month now, I’m still no closer to mak­ing a deci­sion. So, I decided to stop fight­ing it and write about all of the Aus­tralian women in IT who inspire me.

These are not the peo­ple who get acco­lades (well, not all of them). But they each pos­sess qual­i­ties that I admire and so this post is a lit­tle thank you to them for being wonderful.

First up is Sonja Bern­hardt. She’s some­what well known as a spokesper­son for the issues fac­ing women in IT and unlike the other women I’m going to talk about, she does get acco­lades, and they are well-deserved. I admire Sonja for look­ing at the gen­der prob­lem and actu­ally doing some­thing about it. Not of all of her ideas suc­ceed, but she has the drive to keep try­ing dif­fer­ent things regard­less and she deserves recog­ni­tion for that.

Sec­ond of all I’d like to call out some­one near and dear to me: Helen Burgess. Helen is a lec­turer at Cen­tral TAFE and faces a daily uphill bat­tle to get web devel­op­ment best prac­tices taught to stu­dents, in line with indus­try require­ments and expec­ta­tions. As I write “a daily uphill bat­tle” I can’t help but imag­ine her bat­tling through a computer-game like world, blast­ing away at bud­getary restraints, stuffy tra­di­tion­al­ist teach­ers and restric­tive guide­lines as she goes to get her morn­ing cof­fee. I’m sure it’s less dra­matic than that. Helen sits on the Aus­tralian Web Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion com­mit­tee (as do I), and is also the Judg­ing Chair­per­son for the WA Web Awards — so she’s keep­ing us all honest.

My next local hero­ine is the fab­u­lous Har­riet Wake­lam. Har­riet works with all kinds of edu­ca­tional tech­nol­ogy. I admire Har­riet not only for what she achieves, but for her pas­sion for edu­cat­ing which can’t help but come through when you speak to her. Har­riet is also on the AWIA com­mit­tee and when I first met her (at a Port80 net­work­ing event at the pub) I was impressed by her abil­ity to jug­gle a young fam­ily and a tech­nol­ogy career and still have time for the occa­sional beer at the pub with some col­leagues. She’s a super­woman for sure.

Next I’d like to wel­come to my imag­i­nary stage Max­ine Sher­rin. Max­ine is one of the organ­is­ers of Web Direc­tions, the web tech con­fer­ence that has basi­cally become a full time endeav­our for her over the past few years and has inspired all kinds of other events, includ­ing but not lim­ited to our own Edge of the Web con­fer­ence in Perth. Max­ine is unbe­liev­ably cool, and she makes stuff hap­pen. Also she gets to hang out with cool peo­ple. In fact, when I grow up, I totally want to be Maxine.

As I write this I realise there’s more and more peo­ple I could write about, but I’m going to limit myself to one more: Cheryl Gled­hill. Chezza and I share some com­mon ground in that we both decided to start our own busi­nesses in the web devel­op­ment sphere with our part­ners. I look at the way Molt:n have approached their busi­ness and have picked up some things that I think we could be doing bet­ter (and I wear my Molt:n “I like code” tshirt with pride). I also love Cheryl’s atti­tude, which comes through in her blog posts and tweets – this girl does not take shit from anyone.

So there you have – just a few of the Aus­tralian women in IT that I admire.