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Announcing Women Who Code sponsorship (and Ada Lovelace’s birthday!)

As we happily join the celebration of Ada Lovelace’s 197th birthday, we’re also happy to announce that Women Who Code is joining our community sponsorship list!

Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician and writer in the early 1800’s, became known as the first computer programmer through her work on Charles Babbage’s “Analytical Engine”. Without her foresight into what the engine could do, namely operations on things other than numbers, who knows what might be different today? She unfortunately passed away at the young age of 36, long before her ideas on advancing the use of calculating machines came to fruition, but her impact lives on and is celebrated each year in a mid-October “Ada Lovelace Day”. She’s also celebrated in today’s Google Doodle and around the tech news world!

Women Who Code is a San Francisco-based meetup to provide a low-key environment for women to get together and hack on whatever projects they choose. Their schedule includes upcoming events to hack on Scala, Javascript, and Ruby, and they recently met to discuss the in’s and out’s on giving tech talks. The group joins three other female outreach groups in our sponsorship cadre: CodeChix, PyLadies, and LadyCoders.

Along with those four groups, we’re working to include The Ada Initiative, a non-profit group with the goal of “A world in which women are equal and welcome participants in open source software, open data, and open culture.” They hope to fulfill that goal through speaking, teaching, advising, researching, and any other approaches that work to achieve equality.

Thanks to all of our sponsors for supporting PyCon, and a special thanks to our outreach sponsors for helping build a more diverse atmosphere not just at PyCon but throughout the technology world.

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