Merry Ada Lovelace Day!
Mar. 24th, 2009 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flamingswordTechnology is empowering, freeing. It offers a sense of agency that has nothing to do with gender or the cultural expectations placed on gender like a throttle to keep our binary gender assignments separated. Welcome to Ada Lovelace Day, where we blog about women in technology.
These are the Satats I know: the woman as artist, the woman as art. But her art is rendered as much digitally as photographically, conceived by a mind deeply rooted in technology. Our roots are often deliberately buried, or passed over in favor of focusing on the shiny end product. But our roots need re-dyeing anyway, and to present only the side most easily visible is the commonest failing of our superficial culture, and something Satat derides verbally (sometimes colorfully and at length). So I've been interrogating our fearless female Patriarch of Perversion and doing some thinking to bring her to you.
Satat lives on both sides of the internet. As geeks, we all tend to spend too much time here, but for most of us it's a recreation, not something we get paid for. She works as a datacenter technician for a top-tier internet hosting company that maintains the server farms for other internet hosting companies. In her words, "I make sure around 50,000+ computers stay online." A hobbyist at network security, server-side scripting and web design, hardware re-purposing, and inventor of ways around programming obstacles, Satat can work in every current operating system I've heard of, and some I haven't (Mandriva? Backtrack3? Who in the what now?).
Our culture says that women are supposed to be easily turned aside by frustration, that unlike men who are supposed to strive against hardship, we are meant to seek a more sedate path. Satat does not believe in sedation. First among her caffeine-addicted IT comrades, she thrives on over-stimulation. She thinks of that inane double standard as one of her biggest challenges, especially as it applies to education. Being largely self-taught at art, Satat has learned to rely on her own initiative and the resources of the internet to keep her industry knowledge up to date, no easy feat in our fast-moving electronic age. She admits the many frustrations of dealing with both software and hardware, but seems to take joy in overcoming problems other coders are unaware exist.
Part of this expanded sense of her own power is Satat's ability to accomplish goals by taking broken technology and adding parts to it until it can function as something new. Putting things together that weren't meant to go takes work, but ingenuity (and willful disregard of things like the need for sleep) allows her to edit programs and drivers that her misfit creations can operate. Her innovations with hard-meets-software allow her ghetto-rigged laptop to function, and one day may allow her to fulfill her plans for robotics. I eagerly await the day when this woman gets access to real money, folks: what she's doing with spare change and scrap parts is already scary-awesome.
The ecclecticism, confidence in her abilities, and restless energy are what you would expect, but alongside them runs a darkly ironic sense of humor born of having so many expectations to violate. And she does. Y'all know how much I like to fuck with people, but this woman is heroically taking my hobby to work and freaking the mundanes there. "I have held 32 GB or DDR2 266 ECC FB ram in my hand while balancing 6 TB drives in the other and didn't think anything of it. Hell at least 2 of those 6 Terabyte drives are broken out of the factory anyways." See why I like her? Fearless.
Have a safe and happy Ada Lovelace Blogging About Women In Technology Day!
These are the Satats I know: the woman as artist, the woman as art. But her art is rendered as much digitally as photographically, conceived by a mind deeply rooted in technology. Our roots are often deliberately buried, or passed over in favor of focusing on the shiny end product. But our roots need re-dyeing anyway, and to present only the side most easily visible is the commonest failing of our superficial culture, and something Satat derides verbally (sometimes colorfully and at length). So I've been interrogating our fearless female Patriarch of Perversion and doing some thinking to bring her to you.
Satat lives on both sides of the internet. As geeks, we all tend to spend too much time here, but for most of us it's a recreation, not something we get paid for. She works as a datacenter technician for a top-tier internet hosting company that maintains the server farms for other internet hosting companies. In her words, "I make sure around 50,000+ computers stay online." A hobbyist at network security, server-side scripting and web design, hardware re-purposing, and inventor of ways around programming obstacles, Satat can work in every current operating system I've heard of, and some I haven't (Mandriva? Backtrack3? Who in the what now?).
Our culture says that women are supposed to be easily turned aside by frustration, that unlike men who are supposed to strive against hardship, we are meant to seek a more sedate path. Satat does not believe in sedation. First among her caffeine-addicted IT comrades, she thrives on over-stimulation. She thinks of that inane double standard as one of her biggest challenges, especially as it applies to education. Being largely self-taught at art, Satat has learned to rely on her own initiative and the resources of the internet to keep her industry knowledge up to date, no easy feat in our fast-moving electronic age. She admits the many frustrations of dealing with both software and hardware, but seems to take joy in overcoming problems other coders are unaware exist.
Part of this expanded sense of her own power is Satat's ability to accomplish goals by taking broken technology and adding parts to it until it can function as something new. Putting things together that weren't meant to go takes work, but ingenuity (and willful disregard of things like the need for sleep) allows her to edit programs and drivers that her misfit creations can operate. Her innovations with hard-meets-software allow her ghetto-rigged laptop to function, and one day may allow her to fulfill her plans for robotics. I eagerly await the day when this woman gets access to real money, folks: what she's doing with spare change and scrap parts is already scary-awesome.
The ecclecticism, confidence in her abilities, and restless energy are what you would expect, but alongside them runs a darkly ironic sense of humor born of having so many expectations to violate. And she does. Y'all know how much I like to fuck with people, but this woman is heroically taking my hobby to work and freaking the mundanes there. "I have held 32 GB or DDR2 266 ECC FB ram in my hand while balancing 6 TB drives in the other and didn't think anything of it. Hell at least 2 of those 6 Terabyte drives are broken out of the factory anyways." See why I like her? Fearless.
Have a safe and happy Ada Lovelace Blogging About Women In Technology Day!
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Date: 2009-03-24 08:04 pm (UTC)