Don’t be shy about expressing admiration for people whose achievements you admire. As you may have discovered from other sites, today is Ada Lovelace day, and loads of people have agreed to write blog posts about technical women worthy of admiration. I’ve been a little unsure who to write about — not because I can’t think of technical women whom you should know about but because I know so many and I can’t easily choose. I’ve managed to whittle my list down to two. For example, I want to single out Robin Jeffries, “her systers keeper,” because she has spent so many years running the Systers community of women in IT. Robin has always kept a steady hand on the wheel as she moderates a community of 3,000 worldwide participants, all of whom are tempted to lead a discussion away from subjects related to technical women. Robin has a gift rare among online community managers — that of nudging everyone back on track without making a rule-breaker (like myself) feel like an idiot. (Robin is technical herself, outside her Systers role, but this is the persona by which I know her best.) I want to thank Robin publicly for all the times she has gracefully kept a flame war from starting. Another candidate for role model is far more “obvious,” as Fran Allen was the first woman to win the Turing Award (“for pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution”). (She’s since been joined by Barbara Liskov, the most recent Turing Award recipient.) I was honored to meet Fran Allen in January at the Rebooting Computing summit, and I can assert that her energy and dedication to the field (and in particular, to exploiting multiprocessors) is infectious. But what I remember most about talking with Fran at the summit was a parallel conversation with two students from a university in New Zealand. One of these young women gazed at Fran from ten feet away with the intensity of admiration a non-techie might lavish on a rock star. I urged her to introduce herself to Fran, but oh no, she was too shy, what would she say? I insisted: Fran would not be offended. So I introduced these two women to Fran Allen — and then I sat back to watch their conversation. It was clearly a memorable moment for the students, who explained how much her achievements had meant to them. But what I loved watching was how much it meant to Fran to hear it. Not because of ego (I don’t get the impression that Fran’s an “ego wrapped in skin,” as are some über-famous techies I’ve met), but because the student’s remarks made it clear that Fran had made an impact, and because she had, in some small way, encouraged more bright people to enter the computing field. The lesson that I took away from this is that praise is never wasted. If you admire someone for their actions, say so, and tell them why. None of us are immune to admiration, no matter how “famous,” and the smartest people you know (of any gender) truly want to know that their efforts made a difference in someone else’s life. There is no occasion in which saying Thank You is inappropriate. Careers