In the software development field, we always hear about famous names like Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, Dan Wahlin, Christian Heilmann, Glenn Block, John Papa, etc. As many in the Tech industry, often, they are men. That is why today I decided to write about amazing successful and talented women in the software development field.
There’s often this sort of idea that men do better than women in coding, programming, software architecture, etc. So after doing some research, here’s a list of 11 women I admire for what they have done and for their contribution in the Tech industry.
11 SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT WOMEN
1 – ELISABETH HENDRICKSON
Elisabeth Hendrickson is an Agile consultant, trainer & coach that helps individuals & organizations discover how testing can increase their agility by providing fast feedback & increasing visibility. In 1980, she wrote her first line of code and found her first bug after that. She is currently a co-organizer of the Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools program. She has held position as a Tester, Programmer, Test Automation Manager, Quality Engineering Director in a variety of companies ranging from small startups to multinational firms. She founded Quality Tree Software, Inc., a consulting & training company dedicated to helping software teams deliver working solutions consistently & sustainably.
2 – LIZ KEOGH
Liz Keogh is a lean and Agile consultant & trainer in London with more than 15 years of industry experience. She’s many other things as an international speaker, a core member of the BDD community and a contributor to a number of open source projects including Jbehave, the first tool to allow development & business teams to capture their conversations in the form of automated tests. Liz was awarded the Gordon Pask award in 2010 for deepening existing ideas in Agile and coming up with some pretty crazy ones of her own.
3 – ESTHER DERBY
Esther Derby’s first career was as a programmer. Over the years, she has had many different experiences as business owner, internal consultant and manager. She wrote over 100 articles, was co-author to two books
– Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. She has participated in various conferences all over the world, and still does, as a speaker about subjects as leadership, organizational dynamics, teams, change, and scaling agility. Esther provides coaching & mentoring to teams and also offers workshops, to help them build a strong foundation and finally, in-depth assessment of organizational dynamics to guide teams.
4 – LEAH CULVER
Leah Culver is an iOS & Python developer living in San Francisco. She is also a co-author of both the OAuth and OEmbed API specifications. In 2006, she graduated from university and in 2007, she co-founded Pownce that was later on acquired by Six Apart, in 2008. Leah also is co-founder of Convore since 2011 and has been recently working in the Developer Advocate team at Dropbox. She was named among the Most Influential Women in Web 2.0 by Fast Company Magazine in November 2008.
5 – MOLLY E. HOLZSCHLAG
Molly E. Holzschlag is a US author with more than 25 years of online experience, also a lecturer and advocate for the Open web. She is the author and co- author of over 35 books and an active speaker on subjects as Open Web Technologies, Web design and accessibility. She was named one of San Francisco’s Webgirl “Top 25 Most Influential Women on the Web and has worked with Microsoft, AOL, eBay and BBC. She is invited to the Internationalization GEO and HTML working groups at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is the former Group Lead and member of the Web Standards Project (WaSP).
6 – JEN MYERS
Jen Myers is a technologist and writer based in Chicago. Also the Director of the open Source Curriculum at online training course provider Pluralsight. She founded the Columbus, Ohio chapter for an organization that offers beginner coding classes for women called Girl Develop It. Also founder of Code and Cupcakes, which is a series of mother/daughter introductory coding events. Jen is a speaker and usually talks about design, programming in the technology industry and development and aims to make it accessible to everyone.
7- GINA TRAPANI
Gina Trapani graduated from Marist College and has earned an MS in computer Science at the Brooklyn College. She founded the Lifehacker blog in 2005. Currently, she is controlling the development at ThinkUp, an open-source social media aggregation and analysis tool, also at MakerBase and Todo.txt. Trapani published three books and had been writing for other publishcation like Harvard Business Online, YourBlogStory.org. Fast Company named her one of the Most Influential Women in Technology in 2009 and 2010.
8 – IRIS CLASSON
Iris is a speaker, blogger, Microsoft C# MVP and member of Microsoft Extended Experts Team. She is extremely passionate of programming and has had an incredible career path, working as a clinical dietician and then switching to programming in 2011. That is when she started learning and after only six months she already has a developer job for Telerik. She has a dozen certifications and won a Microsoft MVP award for contributing in the dev. community. Iris is hostess on the Get Up and Code. She presents at conferences such as TechDays and Scandinavian Developer Conference.
9 – DOMINICA DEGRANDIS
Dominica has a BS in Information Computer Science from the university of Hawaii. She is well known as an expert in the IT industry, as a coach and trainer for organizations helping them in the usage of a Kanban flow approach which helps improve workflow. Other than that, she’s a highly recognized international speaker talking about subjects as Lean, Kanban, agile and DevOps. She ran a small consultancy firm for four years and recently, she has been working at LeanKit as the director of Learning & Development.
10 – ALISON GIANOTTO
Alison Gianotto is the Co-Founder/CTO of Mass Mosaic, the creator of Snipe-IT and the CEO of Grokability. She also is the author of two technology books and a speaker at many big technology events. She has been working in the app development field, server management and IT for over 18 years. Alison has been featured in People Magazine, Wired, Mashable, Ad Age, Business Insider, VentureBeat, and Fast Company.
11 – SARAH BUHR
Sarah Buhr is currently a writer for TechCrunch writing about digital health, biotechnology, tech culture, gender and diversity, privacy and security news. Prior to TechCrunch, Sarah wrote for USA Today where she wrote articles on a frequent basis dealing with tech, startups and related material and also wrote about the latest mobile trends such as the infamous Secret app.
Those women, and many others, don’t stop their carrier at this level. They are constantly developing skills and positively working to devote their genius for the Tech industry, web development field and Agile methodologies. I know I am missing many other experts in software development. So please tell me I am missing by leaving comments below!
