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Tabitha Roder is a heroine - she does awesome things in her day job i'm sure, but it her weekend volunteer "job" that is inspirational.

Tabitha is the force behind Wellington's Friends in Testing - This is a group that meets *every* weekend, has breakfast, and then proceeds to test the latest build of Sugar OS on the One Laptop Per Child XO laptops.

She pays for data (over cdma cellular) from her own pocket, she feeds the poorer students coffee and fries while testing, and she send a report back to the project at the end of the day.

The true awesome thing she does is cheerlead and muster the group of students, coderhackers, parents, and others to turn up every weekend - She's done a mighty thing that has a positive effect on far reaching parts of this work.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, "an international day of blogging to draw
attention to women excelling in technology".

http://findingada.com/

To take part
All you need to do is sign the pledge, pick your tech heroine and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about - everyone is invited.

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was a computer scientist and United States Naval officer.

She developed the first compiler for a computer programming language.

Because of the breadth of her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is sometimes referred to as "Amazing Grace".

In the 1970s, she pioneered the implementation of standards for testing computer systems and components, most significantly for early programming languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL. The Navy tests for conformance to these standards led to significant convergence among the programming language dialects of the major computer vendors. In the 1980s, these tests (and their official administration) were assumed by the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), known today as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

"I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same."

go on... sign the pledge