10 Influential Feminine Builders to Know and Love on Stack Overflow

How would you are feeling if Google shut down for a day? With certainty, a lot of your burning questions would go unanswered. If a query and reply website like Stack Overflow skilled the identical destiny, many programmers would such expertise excessive frustration–I do know I’d!

Stack Overflow attracts over 50 million programmers every month, the place they study and share information amongst friends. It’s a group I depend on in my function as a Knowledge Analyst at Traackr.

Final month, we introduced that Traackr is the primary influencer advertising and marketing platform to combine Stack Overflow knowledge and GitHub content material, enabling our prospects to seek out influential builders and actual specialists within the engineering trade. That is large for the organizations trying to develop and nurture their developer evangelists and influential group applications.

I used to be a part of the group that labored on this integration and curiously, I needed to surprise, “Who’re the highest contributors to Stack Overflow?” So I seemed to Traackr to seek out out.

Analyzing Hundreds of Subjects on Stack Overflow to Uncover High Contributors

With a purpose to supply the platform’s prime contributors, we gathered hundreds of Stack Overflow tags in areas related to the Stack Overflow group, together with:

• Programming languages
• Algorithms
• Generally used software program instruments, and so forth.

After analyzing these matter tags on Stack Overflow, I came upon that solely ~2 % of the highest answerers are identifiable as ladies (‘prime answerers’ as outlined by Stack Overflow itself), which I believed was attention-grabbing, albeit somewhat disappointing. On the identical time, I discovered nice leaders amongst these 2 %, and right here is my choose of the ten most influential ladies on Stack Overflow, proficient in varied technical fields.

1. Michelle Tilley
2. Linda Lawton
3. Kirti Thorat
4. Deborah Kurata
5. Chiu-Ki Chan
6. Jennifer Marsman
7. Lea Verou
8. Kate Gregory
9. Christina Arasmo
10. Carol Skelly

These rock-stars are additionally lively on their blogs, Twitter, and GitHub accounts, and so forth., which, along with their ‘popularity’ and ‘individuals reached’ on Stack Overflow drives their Attain and Resonance on Traackr’s platform. Learn extra about Traackr metrics and scoring methodology.

Recognizing the Main Females in STEM

STEM jobs are rising sooner than every other U.S. sector, however 84 % of the working professionals at the moment in science and engineering jobs within the U.S are white or Asian males.

Because of this, many main tech firms are lacking out on the super advantages of getting a various workforce that brings a wide-range of concepts, experiences and approaches to the desk–essential components for creating an modern spirit.

As a query and reply website for skilled and fanatic programmers, Stack Overflow is a group the place many newcomers primarily learn to code, so it’s undoubtedly inspirational for ladies who learn to code on Stack Overflow to see ladies amongst its prime contributors.

Discovering What Led These Girls to their Careers in Programming

To study much more about these ladies, I reached out to them to listen to their tales about what led them to their careers in programming. Two tales actually stood out to me, as a result of they spotlight the significance of ongoing schooling and studying–simply the kind of factor Stack Overflow makes attainable!

“The best way I began getting concerned about laptop science is somewhat foolish, I used to be in highschool at the moment and my elder sister determined to take up Pc Science for her Masters and in doing so we bought our first laptop at dwelling. She would spend plenty of time programming on it and me being me, I believed it was my proper to hassle her on a regular basis. I’d learn her notes, watch her programming and begin prompting from behind her whereas she was coding. That have truly made me tremendous concerned about laptop science, it was like an entire new world for me the place I might make a pc do issues. It was magic! I like difficult myself and drawback fixing offers me a thrill. Programming permits me to just do that, work out environment friendly methods to unravel a given drawback. I like to study new issues and that is one of many explanation why I like working as a developer. Know-how retains altering and there may be at all times one thing new that I can study, it by no means will get boring. Lately, I’ve been engaged on creating Knowledge Science expertise and stepping into R programming. At all times continue to learn, it is enjoyable!” – Kirti Thorat

“After I was 11, we visited some household within the US. I used to be into computer systems already, so my uncle took me to CompUSA. I used to be obsessive about fonts on the time, so I used to be on the lookout for software program that may let me design my very own fonts. Sadly, I could not discover something of the like, solely CDs with font collections. Nonetheless, throughout that search, some software program known as Multimedia Fusion caught my eye. It enabled you to construct purposes visually, with out writing any code. I at all times appreciated making issues, and coding appeared very daunting on the time, so that basically appealed to me. Fortunately, my mother purchased it for me, I believe it was about $100. A couple of 12 months after utilizing it for a number of hours a day, I made a decision I used to be able to study an actual programming language. For anybody questioning, I did ultimately discover font design software program, a few decade later :).” – Lea Verou

Reflecting on my Personal Journey into Programming

For many people, novice {and professional} programmers, the journey began considerably by chance.

In highschool I liked constructing easy web sites, and with my primary information of HTML and internet design, I created a fan web site for Hollywood actor Edward Furlong, which turned fairly in style (embarrassing and proud reminiscence on the identical time).

After getting a level in linguistics, I began working in localization, and, ultimately, my profession took me to knowledge evaluation. I depend on Stack Overflow myself at any time when I have to debug my automation scripts or study a brand new know-how, so figuring out the highest contributors was an attention-grabbing investigation.

The significance of recognizing ladies in STEM has additionally been on my thoughts for a very long time, so, naturally, I used to be particularly curious to study concerning the influential ladies on Stack Overflow. It was a terrific pleasure for me to find out about a lot of them, not solely the highest 10 within the record above, and I used to be pleased to have an opportunity to achieve out and chat with a few of them.

Be taught Extra about Traackr’s Stack Overflow Integration

I’m proud to be a part of the group that by no means stops innovating, and enabling Traackr’s integration with Stack Overflow knowledge and GitHub content material is only one of such modern tasks. For those who’d wish to study extra, get in contact with us.