10 Influential Feminine Builders to Know and Love on Stack Overflow

How would you’re 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 neighborhood 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 information and GitHub content material, enabling our clients to search out influential builders and actual consultants within the engineering trade. That is big for the organizations seeking to develop and nurture their developer evangelists and influential neighborhood packages.

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

Analyzing 1000’s of Subjects on Stack Overflow to Uncover Prime Contributors

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

• Programming languages
• Algorithms
• Generally used software program instruments, and many others.

After analyzing these subject tags on Stack Overflow, I discovered that solely ~2 % of the highest answerers are identifiable as girls (‘prime answerers’ as outlined by Stack Overflow itself), which I assumed was attention-grabbing, albeit a bit disappointing. On the identical time, I discovered nice leaders amongst these 2 %, and right here is my choose of the ten most influential girls 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 many others., which, along with their ‘repute’ and ‘folks 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 quicker than some 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 corporations 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 parts for creating an progressive spirit.

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

Discovering What Led These Girls to their Careers in Programming

To study much more about these girls, 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 training and studying–simply the kind of factor Stack Overflow makes potential!

“The best way I began getting curious about laptop science is a bit foolish, I used to be in highschool at the moment and my elder sister determined to take up Laptop Science for her Masters and in doing so we acquired our first laptop at house. She would spend lots of time programming on it and me being me, I assumed 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 curious about laptop science, it was like a complete new world for me the place I may make a pc do issues. It was magic! I really like difficult myself and drawback fixing provides me a thrill. Programming permits me to do exactly that, work out environment friendly methods to resolve a given drawback. I like to study new issues and that is one of many the explanation why I really like working as a developer. Expertise retains altering and there may be at all times one thing new that I can study, it by no means will get boring. Just lately, I’ve been engaged on creating Knowledge Science abilities and stepping into R programming. All the time 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 searching for software program that might 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 favored making issues, and coding appeared very daunting on the time, so that actually appealed to me. Fortunately, my mother purchased it for me, I feel it was about $100. A couple of yr 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 finally discover font design software program, a few decade later :).” – Lea Verou

Reflecting on my Personal Journey into Programming

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

In highschool I beloved constructing easy web sites, and with my fundamental information of HTML and net design, I created a fan web site for Hollywood actor Edward Furlong, which grew to become fairly common (embarrassing and proud reminiscence on the identical time).

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

The significance of recognizing girls 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 girls on Stack Overflow. It was an ideal pleasure for me to study a lot of them, not solely the highest 10 within the checklist above, and I used to be glad to have an opportunity to achieve out and chat with a few of them.

Study 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 information and GitHub content material is only one of such progressive initiatives. In case you’d wish to study extra, get in contact with us.