I am Magdalena.

I like to be outside in the sunshine, chat with my

friends, go out, I like to go shopping, and hate to start my

computer at night after a days work. I love beautiful things, art exhibitions and music, as a kid I went horse

riding and played the flute, I hated physics and chemistry at

school, and loved languages, in a shooter game my

character dies after 3 secs, I like to laugh, I played with dolls,

I am just a normal woman.

I am physicist, I love the beauty of the standard model, I

like to search for the structure behind things and understand it. I would hang a bubble chamber particle signature on my wall. I did write programs which run on

computers with thousands of processors, I love to think

about challenging and complex problems, solve

puzzles, I work as a software engineer, my

favourite os is linux, I love to design programs which are

elegant and match their purpose well. I am still a normal

woman. I am a geek.

when I go to work, there are mostly

men around me. So where the hell are

all my female co-geeks?

programming is about…

design, style and elegance

creativity

Hedy Lamarr, actress and co-inventor of spread spectrum communication, 1941

programming is about…understanding the world we live

in…

get to the core of things,

understand the fundamentals,

be it in business or in science,

or…

Lise Meitner, first theoretical explanation of fnuclear fission, 1939

it is about …

taking part in our modern world… don’t stay at the edge, move it, transform itSheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook

…and about

teamwork!

you have been hanging together on your laptops to get started with Rails, discussing on how to go further encouraging, and helping each others out… that’s what we do every day!

Michelle Cueni, Jacqueline Gasser, Ellen Sprunger, Lea Sprunger , Leichtathletik EM 2012 Helsinki,6 th place

….it is also about…

communication

– most bigger project don’t fail because of technical pitfalls, but because… to Alice it was not clear what Bob wanted and to Bob it was not clear that Alice didn’t know what he wantedRuth Metzler-Arnold, Eveline Widmer-Schlump, Tag der Wirtschaft 2011

… all these require skills in which women are strong…

Angela Merkel, physicist, German Chancellor since 2005

it’s a women’s world

the first computer program ever was written by a woman, long before the first machine that could run it was builtAda Lovelace, 1842

programmers at the world’s first real electronic computer were all ….…. Women

Only later the guys joined, because they realized that the girls were doing something cool there…

Kay Mc Nulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snycder, Marly Wescoff, Fran Bilas, Ruth Lichterman, Programmers at ENIAC, 1943

where to go from here?

you have already started today, dig deeper

don’t be afraid of new stuff

be pertinacious…

don’t let yourself be discouraged easily, especiallynot by a geek with fatty pizza fingers who knows the exact spec of the latest generation graphic cards and keeps talking about it…… you might design the cooler game than he… you might write cleaner code than he… you might understand much better which are the really important features

code, code, code

programming is not for geniuses, it is a craftsmanship the more you do it the better you get and the more fun it is.…. so code, code, code

books - find out which ones the favourite books for you favourite programming language, find out whether they suite you

tutorials – many programming languages, environments - like Ruby and Rails- are free.You can find tutorials on the web to help you

blogs - there are millions bloggers who write about programming and its surrounding biosphere, your favourite

programming language, find the ones you like courses - register in a course at https://www.coursera.org/

get in touch - find your favourite tech local tech meet up on http://www.meetup.com/, new faces are always welcome and being a girl might earn you a bonus…