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In the software development field, we always hear famous names like Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, George H. Fairbanks, Uncle Bob, Mark Richards, etc. As many in the Tech industry, often, they are men. That is why today I decided to write about amazing successful, talented and influential women in software development.
After doing some research, here’s a list of 25 women in software development I admire for what they have done and for their contribution in the Software Development Industry.
25 influential women in software development
1 – Elisabeth Hendrickson
The first one in our list of influential women in software development is Elisabeth Hendrickson. She is responsible for R&D (both product management & engineering) for GemFire and associated Pivotal Cloud Cache product. She is the author of the book “Explore It!: Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing” where she uncovers surprises, risks, and potentially serious bugs with exploratory testing. In this book she shares essential skills of a master explorer, including how to analyze software to discover key points of vulnerability, how to design experiments on the fly, how to hone your observation skills, and how to focus your efforts.
2 – Mala Gupta
Mala works as a Developer Advocate with JetBrains. Founder and lead mentor at eJavaGuru.com, Mala Gupta has been actively supporting Java certification as a path to career advancement. A sought after speaker and coach, Mala Gupta’s Java books with Manning Publications, USA, are top-rated for Oracle Certification around the globe. She has over 18 years of experience in software industry as an author, speaker, mentor, consultant, technology leader and developer. She was recently selected as ‘Java Champion’ by Oracle Corporation, most prestigious recognition in global Java ecosystem. Also, she is a frequent speaker at industry conferences like JBCN Conference (Spain), C# Corner, Techfluence and Eclipse Day. She conducts workshops and lectures at leading institutions like IIT Delhi. Moreover, Mala co-leads Delhi Java User Group and Women Who Code Delhi, she drives initiatives for diversity advocacy for Women in Technology. Among her publications you may find: “OCA Java SE 8 Programmer I Certification Guide“, “Java 11 and 12 – New Features: Learn about Project Amber and the latest developments in the Java language and platform“, “OCA Java SE 7 Programmer I Certification Guide: Prepare for the 1ZO-803 exam“, “OCP Java SE 7 Programmer II Certification Guide: Prepare for the 1ZO-804 exam“, OCA Java SE 7 Certificate Guide, etc.
3 – Ana-Maria Mihalceanu
Ana-Maria Mihalceanu is a custom application development enthusiast, co-founder of Bucharest Software Craftsmanship Community and a constant adopter of challenging technical scenarios. Some of her older experiments are available on Dzone. In 2016, as tech passionate of cloud application development she achieved IBM Certified Application Developer – Cloud Platform v1. Since then, she has enriched her cloud expertise by learning and certifying as a Salesforce Developer and attained a better understanding on how to integrate different types of cloud offerings.
4 – Lisa Crispin
Lisa Crispin is a tester who enjoys sharing her experiences and learning from others. She is the co-author, with Janet Gregory, of More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team (Addison-Wesley, 2014) and Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams (Addison-Wesley, 2009). She specializes in showing testers and agile teams how testers can add value and how to guide development with business-facing tests. Her mission is to bring agile joy to the software testing world and testing joy to the agile development world. Lisa has worked as a programmer, analyst, technical support engineer, tester, and QA director with various organizations, including a university, large and small software companies, successful web startups, consulting firms and financial services companies. Her experience includes developing business and retail applications, back-end processes, software tools, travel industry software, and financial applications. Lisa currently does testing and customer support on the Tracker Team at Pivotal Labs.Lisa regularly contributes articles about agile testing to publications such as Better Software magazine, IEEE Software, and Methods and Tools. Lisa also co-authored Testing Extreme Programming (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2002) with Tip House. She’s a contributor to Experiences of Test Automation by Dorothy Graham and Mark Fewster (Addison-Wesley, 2011), DevOps for Developers by Michael Huetterman (Apress 2012), and Beautiful Testing (O’Reilly, 2009). Lisa combines her practical experience “in the trenches” with inspiration and new skills gained from workshops and conferences. Her preferred coaching method is working side-by-side with testers and teams to help them understand their problems and find good ways to deliver better business value. She splits her time between writing, speaking, teaching, helping teams, and working with her own team at ePlan Services Inc.
5 – Chiu-Ki Chan
Chiu-Ki Chan is an Android developer with a passion for speaking and teaching. Chiu-Ki—a Google Developer Expert in Android, she runs her own mobile development company. Through this venture, she’s produced apps such as Monkey Write—which helps users learn Chinese writing—as well as an app for snapping photos to stitch into a heart. When she’s not writing apps, she can be found travelling the world, sometimes to sightsee and other times to share her Android knowledge on stage at different tech conferences.
6 – Anna Shipman
Anna Shipman is a technical director and software developer living and working in London. She is a Technical Director for Customer Products at the Financial Times, leading on the award-winning FT.com website and the FT iPhone and Android apps.
7 – Mazz Mosley
Mazz Mosley is a technologist with over 15 years experience across various sectors of this diverse industry.
She has held a variety of positions, VP, Tech Lead and senior engineer working in online advertising, digital agencies, e-commerce, an art start-up, government digital service and infrastructure tooling at docker inc.
8 – Maria Gutierrez
Maria Gutierrez is a VP of Engineering and an excellent example of Scotland’s commitment to employing women in the STEM sector. Originally from Barcelona, Maria came to Scotland as a student and completely fell in love with the country. After a successful period as VP of Engineering at FreeAgent, Maria recently took up a whole new challenge. She is now working as the Head of Engineering at Intercom and continues to fly the flag for female representation in the STEM sector.
9 – Alice Bartlett
Alice Barlett works at the Financial Times as a Principal Engineer in the Customer Products team. She used to work at The Government Digital Service (GDS), BERG, FT Labs (formerly Assanka) and IBM. Also, she is a regular tech writer and speaker.
10 – Liz Keogh
Liz Keogh is an independent Lean and Agile consultant based in London. She is a well-known blogger and international speaker, a core member of the BDD community and a contributor to a number of open-source projects including JBehave.
11 – Leah Culver
Leah Culver co-founded the micro-blogging site Pownce, acquired by Six Apart in December 2008. She left Six Apart in February 2010 and co-founded Convore,focused on real time chat in 2011. Convore pivoted into Grove, a chat service for workgroups, which she sold to Revolution Systems in October 2012. From 2013 to 2016, Culver worked as an engineer at Dropbox. Leah is currently CTO of Breaker, which she co-founded with Erik Berlin in December 2016. She has authored OAuth and OEmbed API specifications. Important to mention that Culver was named among the Most Influential Women in Web 2.0 by Fast Company Magazine in November 2008.
12 – Trisha Gee
Trisha Gee is a developer / technical advocate / educator, based in Spain and working remotely for JetBrains. She loves the combination of solving technical problems and working out the best way to teach other developers techniques that will make their lives easier. She is a leader of the Sevilla MongoDB and Java User Groups, and a key member of the London Java Community. In 2014 she became a Java Champion, and she is a 2015 MongoDB Master.
13 – Iris Classon
Iris Classon is an appreciated speaker, writer, blogger, Microsoft C# MVP and member of MEET (Microsoft Extended Experts Team) with a tremendous passion for programming. She has had a remarkable career path that proves that nothing is impossible- switching from being a licensed and registered clinical dietician to a software developer with a dozen certifications and a full time developer job with renowned companies. She has been featured in several newspaper articles, online articles and podcasts such as Hanselminutes, Computer Sweden and Developer Magazine. As a sought-after and frequent speaker at conferences such as TechDays, Scandinavian Developer Conference and various user groups she is known for her unique, creative and uplifting presentation style. Iris is hostess on the Get Up and Code! podcast, and on her spare time she does pro-bono work as a dietitian and is very engaged in the developer community.
14 – Belén Albeza
Belén Albeza is a software developer. Currently, she is working at Mozilla, in the the Firefox DevTools team. She had the chance to work in web development (both front-end and back-end sides) as well as in in the videogames industry (releasing games for iOS and Facebook). At the moment she is writing a lot of JavaScript, and she can get pretty enthusiastic defending good HTML/CSS practises. She likes to speak at events, conferences, meetups, etc. about game and web development. Some of the places I have spoke or run a workshop at include: View Source, Future of Web Apps, Ladies Who Code, MediterráneaJS, Ruby Manor, etc.
15 – Bridget Kromhout
Bridget Kromhout is a Principal Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. A frequent speaker and program committee member for tech conferences, she leads the devopsdays organization globally and the devops community at home in Minneapolis. She podcasts with Arrested DevOps, blogs at http://bridgetkromhout.com, and is active in a Twitterverse near you.
16 – Tanya Reilly
Tanya Reilly has been a Systems Administrator and Site Reliability Engineer at Google since 2005, working on low-level infrastructure like distributed locking, load balancing, and bootstrapping. Before Google, she was a Systems Administrator at eircom.net, Ireland’s largest ISP, and before that she was the entire IT Department for a small software house. Right now, Tanya Reilly is a principal engineer at Squarespace, working on infrastructure and reliability.Also, she speaks at conferences about software reliability and the IC career path.
17 – Adi Polak
Adi Polak is an experienced Software Engineer with a demonstrated history of working in the big data industry. Skilled in Java, Scala, Big Data, Machine Learning, and Software Design. Strong engineering professional with a Master of Science (M.Sc.) focused in Software and Information Systems Engineering, Machine Learning program from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
18 – Bianca Henderson
Bianca is a Partner Engineer for Red Hat Ansible Automation, and teaches the monthly Ansible Essentials webinar.
19 – Ashley Hunsberger
Ashley believes quality is everyone’s responsibility! She loves to help strategize and facilitate testing, and teach teams how to incorporate those strategies into their development – bridging the gap between Engineering and QA. This has naturally led to a career in DevOps, where she lives and breathes the principles of collaboration, continuous improvement, continuous testing, and continuous learning. Most recently she has taken on the role of Director of Release Engineering, where her group enables teams to go from idea to production as fast as possible, with as high of quality of possible.
20 – Pearl Latteier
Pearl Latteier is a senior software developer at Bendyworks in Madison WI, a Google Developer Expert in web technologies, and co-organizer of Madison’s Google Developer Group. She builds Rails and JavaScript applications for web and mobile, and she has spoken at conferences around the world on topics including Progressive Web Apps, Web Components, and Mobile Web Performance.
21 – Jen Luker
Jen Luker is a Senior Software Engineer who has spent a majority of her career as a full-stack developer using PHP, Javascript, and CSS, but has a particular fondness for frontend technologies. She is a leader on frontend teams, trains others in ReactJS, and build apps in React Native. Jen has spoken at several conferences across the USA.
22 – Jessica Mauerhan
Jessica is a senior Software Engineer, expert knowledge in LAMP stack, proponent of TDD/BDD, code review, pair programming and education. She is skilled in rapid development and problem solving with an attitude that anything is possible. Experienced with designing new applications as well as maintaining and improving legacy projects. Well-known speaker at PHP and Open Source conferences and user groups, often presenting on TDD and software design.
23 – Lyndsey Padget
Lyndsey is a Kansas City based, full stack Javascript developer with 15 years of software and web development experience at both mega-corporations and startups. She is experienced in the MEAN stack: MongoDB, Express, Angular (2-7), and NodeJS. I am fluent in vanilla Javascript, Typescript, and Coffeescript – ES5/6/7. She is professional and detail-oriented, a believer in the KISS principle, and a can-doer (it’s all about tradeoffs). She walks the TDD walk and specializes in designing maintainable and intuitive RESTful APIs, as well as Git workflows and release management strategies. Professionally trained in agile methodologies, she has also been known to stunt-double as a project manager using tools like Jira and Asana. She is the owner of GitGrit.com, where she offers organizational training/consulting on all things Git. She frequently speaks at tech conferences on technical topics, as well as soft skills such as diversity & inclusion, healthy teams, public speaking, and the pursuit of badassery. She is involved in local organizations that encourage women, young and old, to explore careers in math and science.
24 – Hilary Weaver-Robb
Hilary is a software quality architect, working with teams to help determine best tool for the job, testing strategies and techniques that will fit their project, as well as mentoring team members and building community around testing. International conference speaker on dev/qa relationships and REST service testing. She started Motor City Software Testers in Detroit because she felt that she needs to build a testers community in the area. Bringing the passion of testing to the Motor City!
25 – Clare Sudbery
Clare is an experienced .NET and MVC software developer, working via continuous integration in an Agile environment. She has a particular interest in, and aptitude for, Test Driven Development. Code quality is very important to her, and she aims to write clean code which adheres to SOLID principles. She is a published writer and ex teacher, she has presented workshops and talks at national and international events and conferences, and have exceptional communication skills. She has full stack experience, have always been involved in the complete development lifecycle, and has extensive DevOps experience.
These influential women in software development and many others don’t stop their career at this level. They are constantly developing skills and positively working to devote their genius for the Tech industry, the web development field, and Agile methodologies. I know I am missing many other impressive women in software development. So please tell me who I am missing by leaving comments below!
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