Today is Ada Lovelace day and as such, we are prompted to write about someone we admire who is female and is involved in technology.
For my Post today I have chosen LornaJane. This stems from many reasons, which over the course of this post I hope to explain.
Ok As many of you know (and if you don’t then shame on you for not actually looking at the content :p ) I work with PHP and various other web related technologies on a daily basis (sometimes on a Nightly basis too ) and a few years ago I came across the PHP Women group and started hanging around in their IRC channel. LornaJane was one of the people there that made me feel truely welcome.
After a while, the PHP UK Conference for 2008 came around and she prompted me to go, so I did. It was my first conference and I was extremely nervous, but I made it through and made some interesting acquaintances and new friends.
After this, she helped me get to grips with things and improve upon concepts and ideas I had, and also helped me gain confidence that maybe I wasn’t the silly girl for wanting to write code that had tainted before.
Later after another Conference, which she helped persuade and get me to, I had a crisis of confidence over some of the comments that people had left on the net in regard to it and myself. Lorna calmed me down and helped me see it in perspective.
So it’s for these reasons that I celebrate the PHP Woman LornaJane for all her good work within the community and for being someone that I would truely consider a friend.
Lornajane is lovely, friendly and encouraging. She deserves to be the subject of a blog post!