things i learned today

It’s been a rough month for technologists. Yesterday, Dennis Ritchie died at the age of 70.

If you’re a programmer, and you don’t know who Ritchie is, you should, because his work has had a serious impact on your life. He’s the co-creator of UNIX, from which Linux, Mac OS X, and CellOS (the PS3 OS) are all descended, just to name a few. He literally wrote the book on C because he created the language.  (The C Programming Language, cowritten with Brian Kernighan. Yeah, it’s that skinny little book gathering dust on your shelf because you’ve been too busy with all of those C++ books.) Even if you’re not a C programmer, if you use C++, Objective C, C#, Java, Python, Ruby, or even some shell scripting languages, you’re using a C descendant, or at least something heavily influenced by C. He played a very major part in shaping the computing world into what it is today.

Thank you for everything, Dennis Ritchie.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. For those of you not familiar with the Countess of Lovelace, she was the only child of Lord Byron and is widely credited with being the world’s first computer programmer.

Ada Lovelace, Queen of the Nerds

There’s a large gender disparity in the video game industry. Likewise, there’s a large gender disparity in computer programming. While I’m fairly certain nobody would argue the truth of those statements, there’s quite a bit of controversy surrounding what to do about this and whether it is even a bad thing. I’m not going to attempt to address any of those issues today. Instead, I’m going to point out a few ladies in engineering who have influenced my life (positively!), and who I consider role models in my current career path.

Continue reading ‘Ada Lovelace: This One’s for the Ladies’

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Rest in peace, Steve Jobs. You are immortal.