I love the idea of Ada Lovelace day. I’ve known her name since I was maybe nine because my dad had a crush on her. I’ve been thinking about the women who are my technology role models, and the person who floats to the top is Jeanne Kramer Smyth.
Jeanne’s not famous. She’s not a household name. But in her enormous social and professional network (in which she plays a vital node-like role, gathering people and keeping them connected), she is a go-to person for technical advice. She has a voracious appetite for new ways of managing information and connecting people to each other and to the information they need. If anyone has a question about search engine optimization or RSS or piping or blog templates or visualizing information, it’s Jeanne we call.
I became an IT professional by accident, and I still feel quite seat-of-the-pants a lot of the time. Jeanne’s example of how far noodling around can get you has been very inspiring to me. She has traveled the paths, and her light still clings there, tracing the paths for others. She sees possibilities that would never occur to me, but seem obvious once she lays them out. I feel less lost when I’m exploring something new, because of the way she sets out exploring. She is a dear friend, but I’m not sure I’ve ever told her how important she is to me from this technical and professional perspective, so this post is a little tribute to her. She’s my Ada Lovelace Day pick. She blogs at http://www.spellboundblog.com/.