Saturday, February 25, 2012

Tech Women

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During my routine email check, one particular newsletter caught my attention highlighting the role of women in technology by Ellinor Mills for CNet News. If you are a woman passionately in the tech-world, read on and be inspired.

An extract: : 
Three tech leaders, Google's Marissa Mayer, Flickr founder Catarina Fake, and Padmasree Warrior of Cisco--speak on how woman have broken through the gender imbalance in the tech world. According to Mills, all three agree that progress  has been made, but that there's still a long way to go to get more women into the technology field. When Marissa Mayer joined Google in 1999, she was the first female engineer the search start-up hired. Now, vice president of location and local services at Google, she has overseen much of the technology and user interface features on Google Search. Catarine Fake who co-founded Flickr, emphasizes the fact that, although people  may stereotype referring your ways of doing things, as a very female approach to product design and technology, your role is to be that person - to be mindful of the humanity in the technology.

Padmashree who grew up in Viyawada in South India joined Motorola in 1984 following her higher studies at Cornell University, was named chief technology officer in 2003. Currently, she is CTO at Cisco. She points out the fact that as women in the tech world, we are  different and noticed, because there are few of us in the tech industry, this is something we can leverage upon as an advantage.
These women  have worked hard and excelled in a male-dominated field in positions with a handful, if any female counterparts.  Nevertheless, I feel this era has witnessed a clear boom of women embracing 'techy' jobs, from those in my generation especially which would continue to grow into the following generations. Behold the future! the imbalance shall soon be wiped out with more and more tech-women currently being molded.

Worthy to mention, Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992), a pioneer in the field, a computer scientist and United States Navy officer who developed the first compiler for a computer programming language. Her conceptualization of a machine-independent programming language led to COBOL.
       

Seeing the spectacular curves of Oprah House

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My first ever visit to one of the most profound and iconic building sites of this century,  the Oprah house in Sydney, a master piece by Danish architect John Utzon. I was surprised to learn that it all started off back in 1957, when he won the design competition amidst 233 entries by architects from 32 countries across the world.  It is also considered to be one of the first examples of the use of computer-aided-design. Modern architecture paves the way half a century ago!