Happy Ada Lovelace Day! Also from Reddit.

[unjapanologist]

It's Ada Lovelace Day! Here's a fascinating intro to the Countess, her work, and especially to how people have been trying to disparage and minimize her contribution to computer science for a century. The first sentences for anyone who's not familiar with this amazing woman:

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (known as Ada Lovelace) is probably a familiar figure to most of our readers. She is the world’s first computer programmer, writing the instructions to carry out a computer program on what would have been the world’s first computer if it had been built – the Analytical Engine, designed by famous inventor Charles Babbage.

Tech and open culture sites all over the internets have been posting Ada-related posts, from the Free Software Foundation to the AO3 and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. However, my favorite quote of all the Ada Lovelace Day-related content floating around is this absolutely damning assessment:

This whole "recruit non-white, on-male, non-heterosexual people" is nothing more than feminism.

They're on to us. (Found via Tom Morris)

If you have money you urgently need to get rid of, a good way to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day would be donating to the Ada Initiative or the OTW, both projects that are doing great work for women in tech and open culture. Both also happen to be holding fundraisers right now, so any contributions or signal-boosting would be very welcome.