by Magdalena Luz

1. I am Magdalena.
I like to be outside in the sunshine, chat with my
friends, go out, I like to go shopping, and hate to start my
computer at night after a days work. I love beautiful
things, art exhibitions and music, as a kid I went horse
riding and played the flute, I hated physics and chemistry at
school, and loved languages, in a shooter game my
character dies after 3 secs, I like to laugh, I played with
dolls, I am just a normal woman.

2. I am physicist, I love the beauty of the standard model, I
like to search for the structure behind things and
understand it. I would hang a bubble chamber particle
signature on my wall. I did write programs which run on
computers with thousands of processors, I love to think
about challenging and complex problems, solve
puzzles, I work as a software engineer, my
favourite os is linux, I love to design programs which are
elegant and match their purpose well. I am still a normal
woman. I am a geek.

3. when I go to work, there are mostly
men around me. So where the hell are
all my female co-geeks?

4. programming is about…
design, style and elegance
creativity
Hedy Lamarr, actress and co-inventor of spread spectrum communication, 1941

5. programming is about…
understanding the world we live
in…
get to the core of
things, understand the
fundamentals, be it in business
or in science, or…
Lise Meitner, first theoretical explanation of fnuclear fission, 1939

6. it is about …
taking part in our modern world
… don’t stay at the edge, move it, transform it
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook

7. …and about
teamwork!
you have been hanging together on your laptops
to get started with Rails, discussing on how to go
further encouraging, and helping each others
out
… that’s what we do every day!
Michelle Cueni, Jacqueline Gasser, Ellen Sprunger, Lea Sprunger , Leichtathletik EM 2012 Helsinki,6th place

8. ….it is also about…
communication
– most bigger project don’t fail because of technical
pitfalls, but because
… to Alice it was not clear what Bob wanted and to Bob it
was not clear that Alice didn’t know what he wanted
Ruth Metzler-Arnold, Eveline Widmer-Schlump, Tag der Wirtschaft 2011

9. … all these require skills in which women are
strong…
Angela Merkel, physicist, German Chancellor since 2005

10. it’s a women’s world
the first computer program ever was written by
a woman, long before the first machine that
could run it was built
Ada Lovelace, 1842

11. programmers at the world’s first real electronic
computer were all ….
…. Women
Only later the guys joined, because they realized
that the girls were doing something cool there…
Kay Mc Nulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snycder, Marly Wescoff, Fran Bilas, Ruth Lichterman, Programmers at ENIAC, 1943

12. where to go from here?
you have already started today, dig deeper
don’t be afraid of new stuff

13. be pertinacious…
don’t let yourself be discouraged
easily, especially
not by a geek with fatty pizza fingers who knows
the exact spec of the latest generation graphic
cards and keeps talking about it…
… you might design the cooler game than he
… you might write cleaner code than he
… you might understand much better which are
the really important features

14. code, code, code
programming is not for geniuses, it is a
craftsmanship
the more you do it the better you get and the
more fun it is.
…. so code, code, code

15. books - find out which ones the favourite books for you
favourite programming language, find out whether they suite you
tutorials – many programming languages, environments - like
Ruby and Rails- are free.
You can find tutorials on the web to help you
blogs - there are millions bloggers who write about
programming and its surrounding biosphere, your favourite
programming language, find the ones you like
courses - register in a course at https://www.coursera.org/
get in touch - find your favourite tech local tech meet up on
http://www.meetup.com/, new faces are always welcome and
being a girl might earn you a bonus…