“It really amazed me that these men were programmers because I thought it was women’s work!”
These are the words of Elsie Shutt, who started her work as a programmer at the defence company Raytheon in the US in 1953. Yes, back then programming was considered a female occupation! So when Snutt joined Raytheon, she was surprised that 50% of their programmers were men.
Here are a few more facts that show that women have been at the outset of the IT industry:
- Ada Lovelace was the world’s first computer programmer, who wrote the first machine algorithm in 1840
- The team of programmers of the first computer ENIAC was 100% female
- Grace Hopper created the first high-level programming language COBOL in 1959
- Margaret Hamilton, an American computer scientist coined the very term ‘software engineering’
While the gender gap in tech still remains a big issue, the tech sector has made strides towards bringing women back to the industry in the last few decades. At CodersRank, our mission is to help developers tell their professional story based solely on their real achievements and merits (read more about how we measure developers’ experience here).
Today, we’d like to celebrate 12 female developers who inspire and amaze us.
Some of them are already known in the field, while some are rising stars. Some of them are active members of the CodersRank community and others are just someone we follow and admire. All of them are a great inspiration and continuous proof of the fact the future of tech belongs to women.
Jump to a developer profile:
- Sandi Metz (Object-oriented Design Expert | Ruby on Rails Developer)
- Alicia Sykes (Full-stack Web Developer)
- Joanna Rutkowska (Security Systems Expert)
- Judit Pacsai (Front-end Developer)
- Joanna Otmianowska (Front-End Engineer | Blogger)
- Dani Roxberry (Python and Go Developer | Software Architect)
- Beata Zalewa (Full-stack Developer | Mentor)
- Pamela Fox (Front-End Engineer | Course Creator | Mentor)
- Sara J. Chipps (JavaScript Developer | Blogger | Non-profit Founder)
- Ania Pietras (Java Developer | Blogger)
- Jenny Chen (Front-End Developer | Community Founder)
- Ola Kunysz (Software Engineer | Clean Code Evangelist)
Sandi Metz
Sandi is a programmer with 30+ years of experience. She believes in simple code and straightforward explanations. Her mission is to help developers transform their code and bring back the joy.
She’s also an author of two books about Object-oriented programming: 99 Bottles of OOP and Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (POODR).
What she’s up to:
- Speaks at The Rabbit Hole Podcast, where she shares actionable tactics to improve your day-to-day job performance as a developer
- Runs Practical Object-Oriented Design (POOD) course, in which she teaches students to think in objects
- Speaker at conferences all around the world, from Barcelona to Paris to Boston and (usually virtually) to meetups from Guadalajara to Stockholm to Sydney
Follow her on:
Alicia Sykes
Alicia Sykes is an experienced full-stack web and native mobile developer, who really cares about great code. As of the publishing date of this article, she ranks in the Top 5 Vue developers in the UK at CodersRank.
She spends most of her spare time at the keyboard competing in international hackathons and answering questions on StackOverflow.
What she’s up to:
- Contributes to a myriad of open source projects, including:
✔️ digital-defense.io, a series of guides to help inform people about personal cybersecurity and online privacy
✔️ Happy app, which finds out how team members are feeling about their project, and visually displays results
✔️ Un-wasted app, using the blockchain to reduce food waste
- Serves as a reservist soldier in British Army
Follow her on:
Joanna Rutkowska
Joanna Rutkowska is a world-renowned security systems expert. She is most known for writing Blue Pill, the first hardware virtualization-based rootkit, introducing Evil Maid attack.
She’s also the founder of Qubes OS, a security-oriented, free and open-source operating system for personal computers.
As a feminist, Joanna advocates for women’s rights worldwide. As a matter of principle, she doesn’t travel to countries that discriminate against women’s rights (or any other minority’s rights) by law.
What she’s up to:
- Continues to serve as an Advisor at Qubes OS
- Serves as a Chief Strategy and Security Officer at Project Golem, a flexible, open-source platform offering democratised access to digital resources
- Speaker at various industry conferences including Next-Generation Threats, BlueYard Conversation, Media CCC, Coreboot, and EXATEL Security Days
Follow her on:
Judit Pacsai
Judit is a front-end developer and self-confessed gamer girl. She has a keen, problem-solving mind and a passion for building creative and innovative software. If you want to learn how to create and implement unique designs, Judit is one to watch.
What she’s up to:
- Judit is ranked in the top 4% of developers on CodersRank and is one of the top 10 CSS and SCSS developers on the platform.
- She is skilled in multiple languages and technologies including JavaScript, React, React Native, Vue, Sass, TypeScript, Redux, NextJs, Jest, Cypress, Puppeteer and Python.
- Judit is very active on GitHub with a variety of interesting projects.
- She has built many applications such as a book tracking app, neighbourhood app, classic arcade game, matching game, and a restaurant reviews app.
- She holds multiple certifications from Udacity, CodeBerry, and FreeCodeCamp.
Follow her on:
Related: 7 Hungarian Developers You Should Follow 👍
Joanna Otmianowska
A Philology graduate, Joanna Otmianowska turned her life 180 degrees when she started her adventure with programming in 2016. She inspires women all around Poland to break into the IT industry and improve their skills via ‘Programuj Dziewczyno!’ community and at her blog Wake Up and Code.
What she’s up to:
- Works as a Front-End Engineer at OLX Group
- Shares motivational content on her Instagram account and email newsletter
- Continues to run ‘Programuj Dziewczyno!’, a Facebook community that has grown to 21K members
- Author of the mini-courses for beginners ‘HTML and CSS Basics’ and ‘Java-script Basics’
Follow her on:
Related: 10 Polish Developers You Should Follow 👍
Dani Roxberry
Dani is a battle-tested software architect with 15 years of experience. She wrote her first BASIC program at the age of five.
Since then she has had experience as a Senior Systems Engineer, CTO with clients like IMAX and the NFL, CTO with patented software used by products like Twitch, and an instructor for UC Berkeley Extension.
What she’s up to:
- Redesigns higher educatation at Make School
- Continues to work as a consultant at FrameBuzz, a free, online video conversation platform that she founded
- Teaches the Full Stack Web Development Bootcamp as well as the Data Analytics and Visualization Bootcamp at UC Berkeley extension
- Ranks in the top 2% of CodersRank Users, and in the top 50 of Go and Python developers in the United States
Follow her on:
Beata Zalewa
Beata is an IT coach, consultant and full-stack developer with 10-year background in C# and T-SQL developing.
She’s a Microsoft Certified Trainer, who specialises in designing & implementing Azure functions, handling Azure Cosmos DB documents and working as a SharePoint and Office 365 administrator and developer.
What she’s up to:
- Mentoring at the Learn IT, Girl! and Tech Leaders Poland programs
- Writes articles for IT Professional and Lubelski Programista magazines
- Owner at Zalnet
- Offers free expert consultations at the Let’s Solve It! Program
- Speaker and presenter at Data Community Poland
Follow her on :
Pamela Fox
Pamela Fox is a front-end developer, who is most known for her witty computing courses at the Khan Academy.
Before Khan Academy, she’s been the 2nd front-end engineer at Coursera, worked on developer relations at Google, and started up the engineering team at Woebot.
What she’s up to:
- Leads computer science classes on a volunteer basis at UC Berkeley
- Recently developed the AP Computer Science Principles review course at Khan Academy
- Creates insightful content about technology and her life as a new mom on her Medium blog
Follow her on:
Sara J. Chipps
Sara Chipps is a JavaScript developer, who has been working on Software and the Open Source Community since 2001.
She’s the Director of Product at Stack Overflow, a board member at Open JS Foundation and .NET foundation, and the co-founder of Jewellbots.
What she’s up to:
- Continues serving as the Director of Product at Stack Overflow
- Runs Jewellbots, a company dedicated to drastically changing the number of girls entering STEM fields using hardware
- Co-founder of Girl Develop It, a non-profit which taught 100,000 women and non-binary individuals how to build software
- Shares inspirational and educational content on Medium to 14.7K followers
Follow her on:
Ania Pietras
Ania is a passionate Java programmer who is always keen to learn and grow her skills.
She’s one of the authors’ behind kobietydokodu.pl, where she describes different aspects of working with Java and Spring and helps people make their first step to becoming programmers.
What she’s up to:
- Works as the Technical Lead at Hubspot
- Runs kobietydokodu.pl, a treasure trove of useful information about Java programming and career growth for software developers
- Runs an inspirational Facebook group ‘Kobiety to Kodu’ with more than 11K followers
- Patronizes Infoshare, one of the biggest tech conferences in Central and Eastern Europe
- Creator of a free Java course for beginners
Follow her on:
Jenny Chen
Jenny is a freelance web developer and the founder of Women in Web Dev Facebook Group. She’s built an engaged community for female developers of all experience levels with 5k+ members.
Through Women in Web Dev, she inspires female developers to share resources, stories and opportunities and support each other in their careers.
What she’s up to:
- Works as a freelance back-end developer
- Organized the winning team of the 21-Day JavaScript Challenge by Lighthouse Labs with 638 points
- Continues growing Women in Web Dev community, which is one of the most engaged and supportive female dev communities online
Follow her on:
Ola Kunysz
Ola Kunysz is a Software Engineer with many years of experience and a Clean Code Evangelist.
She teaches developers to write clean code and run unit tests in Java, Python, JavaScript, C# on her course SzkołaTestów. She spreads the knowledge about quality through lectures, blog posts, webinars and podcasts.
What she’s up to:
- Speaks at multiple webinars and workshops and organizes Wroclaw Code Carrots meetups
- Shares knowledge on her YouTube channel
- Runs her own company SzkołaTestów
Follow her on:
Help us grow our female community!
At CodersRank, we help developers create an ultimate developer profile and showcase their professional achievements in a compelling way.
We aggregate your developer activity from different platforms such as GitHub, GitLab, StackOverflow, LinkedIn and provide the tools (API, Widgets, Community, CV Creator) to create a profile you want. And best of all – it’s always free for developers!
Currently, our community includes 40,000 developers globally, and we are keen to keep increasing diversity on our platform. Create your ultimate developer profile here or spread the world to amazing female developers you know!
