Ada Lovelace Day Hangover

I feel wiped out today. I only had one tiny glass of wine with my women friends, but I drank abundantly from the fountain of inspiration that was Ada Lovelace Day. I spent many hours reading hundreds of posts about terrific women in science and technology. Today I'm trying to make sense of it all. Here are a few insights I came up with:

• The shorter blogs were the best. Mine was too long. :-)
• Bullets are good.
• Attention spans are even shorter than they were last year when we celebrated Ada Lovelace Day. Are they going to keep getting shorter? What has Twitter done to us?
• Blogs that taught me something held my interest.
• The best blogs included pictures, videos, and personal stories.
• The most moving blogs were about multiple women and communities of women.
• Good writing matters. The blogs that I read from beginning to end were written by professional writers or people who blog frequently.

I made a list of my favorite blogs here:

• My favorite blog was an appeal to women from a male manager looking for programmers. He's an experienced writer and the writing in this post really moved me: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2010/03/appeal-to-unremarkable-women.html
  


• I like this next one because of its great use of graphics and portraits: http://www.spellboundblog.com/2010/03/24/ada-lovelace-day-portraits-of-women-in-technology/


• This is a nice wacky one about a German mathematician, Emily Noether, who lived near where I lived when I spent my junior year abroad in Germany at the University of Erlangen: http://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/emmy-and-the-habilitation/


• I liked learning about Hypatia. I'd never heard of her: http://utterlyelastic.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/hypatia/


• Ada Fruit blogged about a woman once per hour! Ada Fruit is an interesting company that builds and sells DIY open source electronics equipment: http://www.adafruit.com/blog/


• This one is interesting because it's about a community of women in systems and because it comes from Turkey (most blogs were from Europe and the US): http://www.cmpe.boun.edu.tr/%7Ebayhan/AdaLovelaceDay2010.html

• Anita Borg's compendium here has a list of some really good blogs, including mine: http://anitaborg.org/news/archive/anita-borg-institute-and-friends-celebrate-ada-lovelace-day/


• This isn't really a blog, but Victoria Law's historiography is a terrific way to learn about Ada Lovelace: http://hubpages.com/hub/Historiography-of-Ada-Augusta-Lovelace


• This isn't a blog either, but it shows a video from a potluck un-conference hosted by Ada Lovelace Day founder and organizer, Suw Charman-Anderson. Thank you, Suw, for all your hard work making such a successful day! http://blog.findingada.com/blog/2010/03/25/video-ald10-potluck-unconference/