This year I’m recognizing Brianna Wu from Giant Spacekat. She and her team of women software developers created the iOS game Revolution 60. Bri has been in the forefront promoting women in gaming – both as game developers and as game players – in a predominantly male environment. I had the honor of getting her interview on the App Stories for Girls site last year and am in awe of her technical knowledge in computer graphics and her drive to succeed in the gaming business. She wrote a very emotive article for The Magazine entitled Choose Your Character – it was a very heartfelt and insightful look into a part of the development of Revolution 60. And so I celebrate Bri’s achievements, commend her contributions to the field of technology and for being a great role model for other women, not only in STEM, but also in gaming, and business. Thanks Bri!
Tag: ald
This year I’m choosing to honour Adele Goldberg. Her team developed Smalltalk-80 which is the precursor to all modern Object Oriented Languages, and in particular inspired the syntax for Objective-C. I acquired Digitalk Smalltalk/V for Mac OS back in 1989 and tried to understand how it all worked. I marvelled at the simplicity and uniformity of the language constructs in Smalltalk: everything is an object, even integers, and you make objects do things by sending them messages. One thing which stuck in my mind was that you could make changes to the system objects and the environment would morph to the changes you made. The illustration given was painting yourself in a corner with the changes but in Smalltalk, the paint dried instantly! Fortunately you could save virtual machine snapshots and go back to a previous version. Smalltalk lives on as Squeak – do check that out!