Lamento decepcionarlos pero Antonia Alaresi no existe. Ese texto que escribí es una broma literaria a lo Borges, o Umberto Eco. Me gusta mucho jugar con eso. Algo así:

Antonia Alaresi: Hace referencia a Antonio Gramsci. ¿Cómo? En italiano los nombres que indican lugar o pertenencia funcionan así o ponés “de Simone”, o ponés “Simoni”, en este caso Gramsci es de Ales, Sardinia, por lo que si inventases un apellido que indique que alguien es de Ales, quedaría Alaresi. De ahí surge el nombre de la autora ficticia. La persona de la foto es Bluma Zeigarnik, una psicóloga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluma_Zeigarnik

La contra-ficción es referencia a la contra-hegemonía de Gramsci.

¿Por qué la amiga se llama Cristina Ludič? No recuerdo por qué, supongo que será por lo lúdico?

Sobre la “escritura periférica” y “la fuerza centrífuga del capitalismo” eso aparece en un libro muy bueno de Olalla Castro Hernández llamado Entre-lugares de la Modernidad: filosofía, literatura y Terceros Espacios.

Luego ves que habla de Enciclopedia vs enciclopedia, esas son ideas de la semiótica de Umberto Eco, pensé que con esos datos iba a quedar claro que el texto era falso, porque antes de los años ’70 que yo sepa esas ideas no circulaban en la teoría literaria. Eco la presenta en su libro Tratado de Semiótica y se expande en Lector in Fabula.

Por supuesto para que el personaje parezca real mezclo teoría feminista en los dichos de Alaresi, como el tema del voto femenino.

Lo de “las obras literarias viven de la plusvalía generada por los lectores”, eso es directamente de Umberto Eco también.

Lo de los mundos ficcionales siendo parásitos del mundo real, eso es de Eco también, del libro The Limits of Interpretation.

Más adelante habla de Aureliano Buendía, de Cien años de soledad, pensé que esa cita también iba a destapar el anacronismo de la vida de Alaresi.

Sobre la novela policial, lo que dice ahí sale del libro Enigmas y Complots de Luc Boltanski.

El tema de romper con la grámatica, la más antigua de las hegemonías, eso es de Deleuze y Guattari, Mil Mesetas.

Finalmente la obra termina con un libro fechado el 27 de Abril de 1937. Esa es la fecha de fallecimiento de Gramsci.

El texto es un juego de intertextualidad similar al que Eco hace en el Nombre de la Rosa donde mete sin citar retazos de muchas obras medievales y demás.

Not all of us are searching for light, nor shadow. The twilight of a full moon on a clear night sky is still bright enough to contour the creek that runs down the mountains, and still enough for the trees to cast their pale shadows.

Life is still and time moves as fast as this train moves through the mountains. Mountains that suddenly became their mountains, casting their moonlight shade on a valley that one day became their valley.

I’m on a foreign land owned by foreign peoples. A foreigner to foreigners. I speak their language, although I lack their tone. My Ps don’t explode, my Vs are barely noticeable, vowels sounding like bowels. Some of them pretend not to notice. Some of them don’t care. Some of them though… they remind you that you are a foreigner.

A foreigner to foreigners.

The ones like me prefer to hide our common origins, our common language, afraid they might be singled out, but they don’t know that their pace is different, their shoulders hang not the same, and the smile with which they greet a friend tells them apart.

I live in this twilight, always in between, never here nor there, but I know deep inside that mom was always mamá, that my love es mi amada, and that the one casting this pale light is no other than la Luna.

There’s a lot to unpack.

Is software a finished product or an ever going process?

A working program shows a solution that was appropriate at a certain point in time. That solution might be obsolete and not representative of the situation for which the program was built. It responds to needs from some other time, old needs. At least, instead of a ‘scratch it, let’s starts again’, software leaves us with the opportunity of ‘scratch it, let’s write over it’ like a palimpsest.

Every software project is like a palimpsest where every developer scratches old text, and writes on top of it their perceived new solution, creating a manuscript where a mix off styles and languages reflect different understandings of the world, different world visions.

An archeologist armed with patience and a source control tool might be able to unearth the secret history of a software artefact. Perhaps through marginalia.

Each change in the code creates new interconnections to classes and functions, producing and entanglement of meaning with every new word added to the code. The interdependencies increase. La différance becomes manifest.

A mesh grows where every node constantly has new branches pointing to it, and old branches get pruned, even though those very same branches that got deleted nested important information for understanding why that node was there in the first place. The node might end up acting like an information hub which nobody dares to delete, afraid that the cards castle might crumble. Nobody knows why that method is there, yet nobody dares to delete it.

Software development is always pathfinding without ever reaching a goal. The sign posts have changed, were moved, or forgotten. A new feature is added to the program trying to bring it one step closer to represented reality. This is futile. This will never happen, because while the branch extends from the tree to touch the river water, the trunk stayed in place, unmodified, impervious to all the changes that happened around it. When the branch finally reaches the water, the river already changed its course. Reality moved on, and never touched the real.

So software is a collection of attempts, steps that explore a labyrinth, never knowing which side to go when a new bifurcation comes, but with the certainty that the new explored path must inform upcoming travellers. Software development is laying signposts in a labyrinth. Each program is an interstate map, where some roads are highlighted telling the story of a journey, its pitfalls, its shortcuts, its ‘try this, but be careful with that’.

Signifier after signifier, we keep reading, but we can’t find the meaning of what’s written in the code. Not even a place to start, a thread to follow. Yet the software artefact runs, it seems to perform its function. But we need to change it, to improve it, yet we have no waypoint to tell us where we are, no landscape feature to place on a map and point ‘yes, we are here’. Nobody has been in these plains in years. The sands have shifted and the wind has no intentions to stop blowing. The ruins are barely visible. We can guess the shape of an older structure from a past civilisation. Software decay is real.

The oldest components of a software project aren’t necessarily the representatives of the intentions and the needs that brought it to life. Latest additions, completely foreign to the origin of the project, are what best represent its current use. The place of code that’s being worked on, day after day, scratch, delete, write over, and repeat, that’s the palimpsest we should pay attention if we want to discover what’s the theory that lets a software project move forward, but not necessarily the one that pay the bills.

The evolution of a a software artefact reflects the tastes and wills of an era. There’d be areas that wanted to cater to an enterprise reader, filled with object oriented patterns that cut through the mess and links parts forging connections that lack meaning but pushes intentions forward. A reader might no be able to understand why Class A is connected to Class B unless it’s told it just follows the need of an idea of enterprise software. But then classes fall apart, crashing onto the floor to leave a bunch of functions grouped in modules. Functions so small and so generic that only in use we can tell what meaning they carry, or produce. Functional programming tried to take over the project, so now the reader is confronted with conflicting styles. It’s time to learn where the woods end, and where the plain starts, up to where goes the snow, and where does the frozen water becomes river.

To Order, to govern,
is to begin naming;
when names proliferate
it’s time to stop.
If you know when to stop
you’re in no danger.
–Ursula Le Guin — Tao Te Ching

The work of Antonia Alaresi is marked by a necessity of breaking out from the narrative standards of her time. Being the only woman in her generation of writers made her traverse a path that was outside the status quo of a Río de la Plata Literature that was looking to earn a spot at the world stage.

Not much from her work has reached us. Her rejection to be published in anthologies or literary magazines limits her know work to an essay and a collection of poems — the latter thanks to the generosity of Cristina Ludič who donated her collection of five years of love letters between her and Alaresi. The Society Friends of Alaresi was endowed with the task of preserving this material.

Let’s take a look at the literary manifest “Counter-fiction: for a literary production without shackles”, written by someone that defined herself as a writer from the periphery in a constant fight against the centrifuge forces of capitalism.

The main idea posed by Alaresi is that every work of literature, even the most radical of them, follows the function of perpetuating the status quo, allowing that those in power, stay in power, dictating the cultural norms that tell us what’s accepted, what can be said, and ultimately, what can be thought. Her thesis is based in a set of principles that we will see now.

First, Alaresi presents the idea of Encyclopedia vs encyclopedia. The first one refers to the whole of human knowledge, something that no human being possess. The second one, in lowercase, refers to the knowledge that each of us has, a knowledge that’s based in everything that we learnt not only from educational institutions, but also across our whole life, from the relationships with our peers, and of course, from the institutions that govern us. The word democracy has a very different meaning for a twenty century Uruguayan woman than for her peer from the nineteenth century. The first one has the right to vote in presidential elections, while the latter lived in a democracy that limited her voting rights, says Alaresi.

Without the encyclopedia, literature wouldn’t be possible. “George got into his car and drove to the hospital” works as part of a fictional piece because our encyclopedia has the idea of cars, of driving, streets, and hospitals. An author uses our encyclopedic knowledge so they don’t have to explain what each and every element of their work means. Literary works live out of the surplus value generated by its readers, writes Alaresi. Until here, she presents theories that have appeared in different form or shape across the twentieth century. The difference is that Alaresi claims that the encyclopedia is the shackles from which literature will never escape. The encyclopedia dictates what we can write about if we want to be understood by our readers, which has the effect that literary productions aren’t but a perpetuation of the status quo.

In relation with her idea of encyclopedia, we find her position about fictional worlds. They have a parasitic character with regards to our reality, because they feed from our own world’s rules and laws. Whenever the rules in fictional worlds aren’t spelled out, we draw them from our own. George’s car probably requires fuel to run, and does it over streets, all information that’s never explicit in the example from above.

Alaresi uses the following text to get her point across:

Literary works function because they are built in such a way that whenever there’s lack of information about how their world works, the reader is able to find them in their own world, extrapolating those rules back into the world of fiction. There’s a tension at the beginning of A Hundred years of Solitude because we believe the bullet could injure the anatomy of Aureliano Buendía. We apply the logic of our reality into a world that clearly doesn’t work by those rules, as we can see from the deeds of Melquíades the gypsy.

The problem for Alaresi stems from this anchoring of fiction into our own reality, which has no other function than bringing the dominant culture of our society into the fictional landscape of literature. In the end this has the effect that the possible worlds that a society is able to think about, are limited to those allowed by the dominant culture.

Detective fiction is the genre which has the biggest rejection in Alaresi’s manifest, because it’s a genre that in order to work it requires an established social order and a set of stereotypes. There’s a mystery that breaks into reality and which detective seeks to solve, to bring back reality back to normal. Normal according to whom?Asks Alaresi and continues: Normal in a genre that’s plagued with caricaturesque characters trying to fool the reader into thinking that the immigrant is the main suspect, so we find with shock that the honorable store owner was the actual murder; or a doctor that raises suspicion because it has Arab physiognomy, or has a bald head; or a woman that likes to go out at night so she “deserves” to be the victim of a murder. All these stereotypes are in play so the masses that consume this kind of literature don’t question the reality that’s been put forward by the police state that governs them.

Despite all her loath for detective novels, she offered the following commentary about who’s the real murderer when it comes to all kinds of works in this genre: if we assume that the reader decides which rules apply to a fictional world, then it’s the reader who decides that the bullet or the knife have the power of ending the life of its victims. This makes every reader a criminal that walks scot free from every murder that he reads. A conclusion that’s no less interesting.

It’s easy to understand why Alaresi didn’t produce any works of fiction, finding her creative outlet in poetry, because poetry doesn’t need to signify anything, it’s just a game that seeks to break with the biggest and oldest of hegemonies, that of grammar.

In a letter sent to Ludič, Alaresi declares that poetry is the ultimate goal for any writer, because poetry frees the human being from its role of meaning-producing-machine, it breaks with the semiotic function, and avoids to re-present the social hierarchies into the mind of its readers.

Let’s finish this commentary on the work of Alaresi with one of her poems, dated on the 27th of April, 1937.

Nights without neighboring beads
Adorn my whispering
Evil birds of power
Destroys without knowledge
Prison that writes my letters

Podríamos decir que la obra de Antonia Alaresi está marcada por una necesidad de romper con los estándares narrativos de su época. Ser la única escritora mujer de su generación de escritores la llevó a trazar caminos laterales para el status quo de una literatura rioplatense que buscaba hacerse un lugar en la literatura mundial.

Poco perdura de su obra. Su rechazo a ser publicada en antologías y revistas literarias de la época limitan los textos que sobreviven a un ensayo, y una colección de poemas — los últimos gracias a la gentileza de Cristina Ludič quien cedió a la Sociedad Amigos de Alaresi, su colección de cinco años de correspondencia amorosa con la escritora.

Veamos de qué trata el manifiesto literario Contra-ficción: por una producción literaria sin ataduras, escrito por alguien que se definió como una escritora periférica en lucha constante contra la fuerza centrífuga del capitalismo.

La idea central de Alaresi se basa en que toda obra literaria, por más radical que parezca, cumple la función de perpetuar el status quo, permitiendo que aquellos que están en el poder continúen allí, dictando las normas culturales que nos dicen qué es lo aceptado, qué es lo que se puede decir, y últimamente, pensar. Su tesis se basa en un conjunto de principios que iremos analizando paso a paso.

Primero Alaresi presenta la idea de Enciclopedia vs enciclopedia. La primera hace referencia a todo el saber universal, algo que ningún ser humano posee. La segunda, en minúscula, refiere al saber con el que cada uno de nosotros cuenta, saber que está basado no solo en lo que aprendimos en las instituciones de enseñanza, si no también a lo largo de nuestra vida, del relacionamiento con nuestros pares, y por supuesto con los organismos que nos gobiernan. La palabra democracia tiene un significado muy distinto para una uruguaya del siglo XX, que para su coterránea del siglo XIX. La primera es capaz de votar las elecciones presidenciales, mientras que la segunda vivió en una democracia que le coartó su derecho al voto, escribe Alaresi.

Sin enciclopedia no habría literatura posible. “Jorge subió a su auto y condujo hasta el hospital” funciona como parte de una obra de ficción, por que nuestra enciclopedia contiene la idea de auto, de conducir, de calles y de hospital. Un autor apela a nuestro conocimiento enciclopédico para no tener que explicar qué significa cada uno de esos conceptos. La obras literarias viven de la plusvalía generada por los lectores, dice Alaresi. Hasta aquí, nos presenta teorías que más o menos han aparecido de distinta forma a lo largo del siglo XX. La diferencia está en que Alaresi sostiene que la enciclopedia son los grilletes de los cuales jamás podrá escapar la literatura. La enciclopedia dicta de qué se puede escribir si se desea ser entendido por los lectores, lo cual provoca que las producciones literarias no dejen de ser más que una perpetuación del status quo.

Relacionada con su idea de la enciclopedia, encontramos su planteamiento sobre los mundos ficcionales. Estos tienen un carácter parasítico respecto a nuestra realidad, ya que se nutren de esta cuando las reglas del mundo ficcional no son explícitas. El auto de Jorge probablemente necesite combustible para moverse, y lo haga circulando sobre calles, información que no nos es dada por el autor del ejemplo anterior.

Alaresi ilustra el punto anterior con el siguiente ejemplo:

Las obras literarias funcionan, porque están construidas de tal forma que ante la falta de información sobre cómo funciona el mundo allí planteado, el lector es capaz de recurrir a su mundo y extrapolar reglas. La tensión generada al comienzo de Cien Años de Soledad se da porque asumimos que la bala del pelotón de fusilamiento puede lastimar la anatomía de Aureliano Buendía, aplicamos lógica de nuestra realidad a un mundo que claramente no las tiene, como vemos más adelante cuando se nos narran las andanzas del gitano Melquíades.

El problema para Alaresi radica en que este anclaje de la ficción en nuestra realidad, no hace más que transportar la cultura predominante al terreno ficcional, llevando a qué los mundos posibles para una sociedad, no sean más que aquellos permitidos por la cultura predominante.

La novela policial es el género al que más se opone Alaresi en su manifiesto, ya que este género requiere de un orden social y de una suerte de estereotipos para funcionar. El misterio que se busca resolver irrumpe en la armonía de la realidad, y el detective o investigador busca resolverlo para volver todo a la normalidad. ¿Normalidad según quién? Pregunta en su ensayo y continúa: Normalidad, en un género que utiliza caricaturas de personajes de nuestra sociedad para engañar al lector: el inmigrante como principal sospechoso, para que luego descubramos con asombro que el respetable dueño de la fábrica era el asesino; un doctor que despierta desconfianza debido a sus rasgos árabes, o a su cabeza calva, una mujer que gusta de la noche y por eso “merece” ser asesinada. Todos estereotipos que sirven para asegurar que la realidad del estado-policía no sea cuestionada por las masas que consumen este tipo de literatura.

A pesar de su desprecio por la novela policial, Alaresi nos ofrece el siguiente comentario sobre quien es el verdadero asesino en cualquier producción de este género literario: es claro que si el lector es quien decide las reglas del mundo ficcional que lee, es el lector quien decide que la bala, o el puñal, son quienes cortan con la vida de la víctima, transformando a cada lector en el criminal que siempre escapa al brazo de la ley . Una conclusión que no deja de ser interesante.

Es más que entendible ahora por qué Alaresi no produjo obras de ficción y su expresión creativa encontró soslayo en la poesía, ya que esta no necesita significar, es un juego del lenguaje que busca romper con la mayor y más antiguas de las hegemonías, la de la gramática.

En una carta enviada a Ludič declara que la poesía es lo máximo a que puede aspirar un escritor, ya que esta[la poesía] no necesita significar. Libera al ser humano de su rol de máquina productora de significado, quiebra con la función semiótica y evita re-presentar las jerarquías sociales en la mente del lector.

Concluimos este texto sobre la obra de Alaresi con uno de sus poemas, fechado el 27 de abril de 1937:

Noche sin cuentas aledañas
Engalanas en mi suspirar
Aves rufianes del poder
Destruye ya sin saber
Cárcel que escribe mis cartas

Programming as Translation — References & Other Books

Now that my article about translation for Increment Magazine is out, I want to list here some of the books & articles I consulted while writing that piece. Some of them made it into the text, while others were interesting deviations through the labyrinth of research.

The idea to look at Programming from a Translation POV came after a chat with Dr. Rachel Souhami during the JSConfEU dinner. After she shared a brief explanation of her thesis “Exhibition Production as Processes of Translation”, I saw how there were lots of connections between programming & translation. It was time for me to learn more.

Umberto Eco — Dire Quasi la Stessa Cosa

The main source of ideas for the article comes from Eco’s book about translation, Dire Quasi la Stessa Cosa. Sadly that book doesn’t have an English translation. In English you can find Mouse or Rat? also by Eco, although it doesn’t contain all the essays from Italian.

Dire Quasi la Stessa Cosa is filled with anecdotes both from Eco’s experience as translator, and from his experiences of his novels being translated. For example Baudolino’s first chapter is almost impossible to translate, with Spanish being almost the only exception. In that chapter Baudolino narrates his adventure in first person, using a 12th century dialect from a rural area of Torino, Italy. That chapter can be translated in Spanish without losing its spirit, because in Spanish there’s the old Castilian from El Cid Campeador.

If you read Spanish, be sure to check out Helena Lozano Miralles essay where she explains her decisions while translating Baudolino: “Cuando el Traductor Empieza a Inventar: Creación Léxica en la Versión Española de Baudolino de Umberto Eco”.

Data & Reality

This a book from back in the ’70s about data modeling. I consider this book a must read for any software developer. It’s clear, and presents very interesting questions about how we should handle data under the ever relevant idea of “the map is not the territory”.

The library/books/volume section of my article is based on examples form this book.

Os Keyes — The Misgendering Machines: Trans/HCI Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition

This is probably one of the best papers I’ve ever read. Very thorough on the topic of AGR and its ethical implications. Whether you are into AI/ML or not, you should to read this paper.

Emily Wilson — The Odyssey

Emily Wilson new translation of the Odyssey comes with a great introduction where she explains her decisions while bringing the text back to life in a new rendition. She has written a few Twitter threads with great insights about translation. Her thread about the Sirens convinced me to buy the book as soon as it was available.

It’s really interesting how she explains why the new medium and context where her Odyssey appears influenced her translation of the many epithets from the original text. We live in a society with high literacy, where written text is almost second nature for us, so this asks for a rendition of the text that have very different goals from Homer’s original poem.

Judith Buttler — Introduction to Derrida’s Of Grammatology

From Buttler’s introduction to Derrida’s text I’ve got the idea of translation as a ruin. Also this introduction is full of gems on its own. See for example:

[…] a translation retroactively alters the language in which the original was written as it breaks into, and augments, the language into which the original arrives […] the arrival is ongoing, uneven, and incomplete.

We can see this happening in how software augments and changes reality, Google Maps being perhaps one of the most obvious examples, with its maps altering the reality we expect out there.

At the same time, I think this happens when we translate code from one programming language into another. Each translation or porting of code defines how certain patterns say in Haskell, must be written in Java, and vice-versa.

Jean Baudrillard — Simulacra and Simulations

The famous essay from the French author introduced me and idea that goes beyond “the map is the territory” when he says:

The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it […] it is the map that engenders the territory.

This was discussed in most of the article, where I try to show with examples how our abstractions affect and determine reality.

And that’s it. I hope you enjoy these books and articles as much as I did while I was writing this piece for Increment. I’m sure they will help you bring a new point of view into how you develop software.

Satoshi Nakamoto — Anon is Often a Woman

You might wonder why we end our calendar with Satoshi Nakamoto, an unexpected choice for a calendar about women pioneers in tech. Since the start, this project has been an art project. As such it seeks to question our assumptions and to provoke an intervention in our minds. Why do we tend to assume that Satoshi Nakamoto is a man?

Yes, an expert in anonymity and disguise published on a website that their birth date was on the 5th of April of 1975, and their name was Satoshi Nakamoto. It won’t be the first time someone misgenders themselves to break publication barriers. George Eliot, Isak Dinesen or Pablo del Cerro were but pen names for Mary Anne Evans, Karen Blixen and Paula Nenette Pepin. In mathematics, Sophie Germain used to correspond with Gauss under the pseudonym M. LeBlanc. Gauss was astonished when he found out that LeBlanc was a woman.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without singing them, was often a woman. — Virginia Woolf — A Room of One’s Own.

So if we aren’t to assume Nakamoto’s gender—it might even be a collective of people—could we at least entertain the idea that they might not be a man?

Visibilizing Women’s Work

Conjecture aside, the aim of our advent calendar has been to visibilize those women that have been forgotten from the history of tech.

Think of Claude Shannon, the creator of Information Theory. He worked side by side with his wife Betty Moore Shannon. She was a mathematician that helped him with his papers. Not only that, she was the one that wired the famous Theseus mouse. How many of us knew that Claude Shannon most important intellectual collaborator was his wife Betty?

They would work side by side. Betty looked up references, took down Claude’s thoughts and, importantly, edited his written work. She offered her improvements and added historical references. As Betty put it, “Some of his early papers and even later papers are in my handwriting…and not in his, which confused people at first.” — Betty Shannon, Unsung Mathematical Genius by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman.

How many Betty Moore’s are out there that we don’t know about?

But women not only have been working side by side with men. When they are at the front producing significant research, our society tends to misgender them as men, even if they use their true names.

From our calendar, many people learnt that Barbara Liskov—from the Liskov substitution principle—is a woman. Thanks to our calendar, it was brought to our attention that the Corasick from the famous Aho-Corasick algorithm is a woman as well: Margaret J. Corasick.

Another problem we found while we were working on the profiles, was that in at least two situations some of our pioneers were portrayed with a picture of an entirely different woman. Dorothy Vaughan sometimes appears in a picture where the person in the photo is Melba Roy, a NASA mathematician. Another one was Jean E. Sammet, one of the designers of COBOL. In this case it was the Data Modeling pioneer Diane C. Pirog Smith.

Fundamental Discoveries

One reason why we started the calendar was to show that there were many more women pioneers in computing than the holy trinity of Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton—even if that’s not obvious already. We knew that there were more women out there, which had made fundamental contributions to the world of computers.

As we started building the list we found that a woman named Kathleen Booth had created the first assembly language, wrote one of the first computer programming books, and was a pioneer in machine learning and artificial intelligence, all back in the late 40’s and early ’50s. I was flabbergasted.

Then as we asked for help on finding women from the old USSR, a friend suggested Kateryna L. Yushchenko from Ukraine, who created a programming language with pointers many years before PL/1 saw the light of day.

In our own Latin America we found Veronica Dahl, one of the founders of the Logic Programming field. Her book Logic Grammars has been cited as a main resource that helped with deciphering the human genome!

Women were also pioneers in computer art, as Carolyn L. Kane shows us in her book Chromatic Algorithms. One of them is Laurie Spiegel, who created a system called VAMPIRE in which she could draw real time graphics back in the ‘70s! Also in art we the iconic Wendy Carlos. She wrote the music for hacker’s cult film Tron.

In the field of programming there was Barbara Liskov and her invention of Abstract Data Types back in 1974. A development that changed the field of programming for ever. Her influence is still seen in modern Object Oriented Languages.

In the CPU world, we had Sophie Wilson, designer of the ARM processor that is present in most modern CPUs. If you are using a cellphone, then most probably your phone is running one of Sophie Wilson’s designs.

The list featured 23 pioneers, and many more that we couldn’t include because we were limited to 24 articles. Jeanette Wing, co-creator of the Liskov Substitution Principle, Joan C. Miller, computer graphics pioneer, Annie Easley, NASA Computer Scientist, or Lynn Conway inventor of techniques that make modern CPUs possible, are among the names that we had to leave out due to the limits of our list.

Sisterhood and Persistence

Finally, something that really touched me as we were researching and producing each profile, was the incredible stories of sisterhood and persistence that these women share.

For example Dorothy Vaughan and her story of not only learning FORTRAN on her own, but uplifting her computer colleagues so they could learn programming as well, and be able to keep their jobs at NASA.

We have Verónica Dahl, protesting against the Natural Sciences and Research Council of Canada. Thanks to her struggle women and men both can expense childcare when attending conferences while nursing.

Also these women weren’t shy to do what was needed to get a shot at an opportunity in tech. Evelyn Berezin lied about her age so she could get a job at a tech company in New York when WWII started. She was 16, but the earliest age one could work in New York City was 18. She went on to design the first computerized airline ticket reservation systems in the world.

Promotion in a world of men was also difficult. Judy Wajcman wrote in her 2004 book TechnoFeminism:

A successful career in IT requires navigation of multiple male cultures associated not only with technological work but also with managerial positions, as I have discussed in Managing Like a Man. — Judy Wajcman

This phenomenon was no strange to one of our pioneers. After many years in tech, Berezin noted that she never got a promotion. Her solution? Found her own company and name herself CEO. In that company she created the first true word-processing computer.

Access to education also wasn’t easy for these women. Barbara Liskov was rejected from Princeton for being a woman. Kateryna L. Yushchenko had to travel far away to Samarkand in Uzbekistan to be able to attend university, since her family had political problems in the USSR.

Uplifting Others with Education

Finally since we are talking about education, we’ve seen that many of them wrote some of the most influential books in their fields. Kathleen Booth wrote on of the first computer programming books as we mentioned above. Kateryna L. Yushchenko did so in Russian for the Kyiv University.

Nancy Lynch wrote one of the core books in distributed systems, and Rina Dechter wrote a seminal book about Constraint Processing. But perhaps the one that has had a wider impact in newer generations of programmers is Kathy Sierra with her Head First book series.

A Final Reflection

When reading about Elizabeth Holberton, we found this amazing quote about what it means for a woman to work day to day in a male dominated field:

Betty said she spent half her time trying to figure out what people needed in computers, and the other half convincing an engineer it was his idea, so the work would be done.

In 2018 one would think that this doesn’t happen anymore. That we are past that. Sadly as books like Reset by Ellen Pao show, there’s still a long way to go.

Let us quote Judy Wajcman again:

For many women the price is too high. No equivalent sacrifice has been expected of men. Their identification with technology has been taken for granted, women’s absence cast as women’s problem. But women’s problem is men, even though not al men are directly implicated. — Judy Wajcman

This is something that has to change. Something that we can help change by building spaces that are safe for women and other minorities in tech.

The challenge is for men who have premissed their masculinity on technical mastery to relinquish their hold on technology and give up the privileges and power that go with this construction of masculinity. — Judy Wajcman

We hope our advent calendar is a nudge in the right direction for showing that women not only have been fundamental in the world of computing, but they are essential if there’s going to be a future—and a present—in the tech industry. An industry in which we hope tech industry means all of us.

Acknowledgments

This advent calendar was a great adventure that required a huge amount of work and dedication by the whole team. So why this is still not in book form, we think some acknowledgments are due.

Florencia Grattarola — @flograttarola

I’m hugely grateful to Álvaro and Seba for inviting me to be part of this fulfilling adventure. Oh girl it was! It all started with “wouldn’t it be incredible?” and the next thing you know we were splitting the names of pioneers to start the calendar. One by one they went, one by one they captivated us.

It was an intense month of much reading and research, of anguish and excitement, for so many hard and incredible stories. It has been such an inspiring exercise to apprise the lives of all these women that I hope it spreads and more leaders in technology keep being pondered.

We need more visible women in our history! To all of those that have shed light to the life of such amazing women, thank you for collectivizing their work and enabling us to broaden the cannon of computer science pioneers. I think that focusing on them, and diversifying and enriching at least a bit of the story being told, was worth every night.

Special thanks to Álvaro, for the trust, the guidance and the patience.

Sebastián Navas — @SebastianNavasF

I want to deeply thank Álvaro and Florencia for allowing me to be part of the team. They made me work outside of my element and usual themes, something that’s needed from time to time. The idea was captivating and challenging since the beginning, so for me it was a pleasure to be part of this project.

I hope this work is useful and meets its goal of giving a name and a place to at least a few of those many great women that have built the world of computing. I hope it’s an inspiration for all the women that fight day to day to achieve their goals, and also, I hope it upsets those that need upsetting so it generates consciousness about these issues in those who most need it.

Thank you very much, I leave you my work with the most utmost respect and admiration for all these great women.

Alvaro Videla — @old_sound

I’d like to thank my partners in crime Florencia and Sebastián for being part of this project. Writing and Illustrating twenty four articles is no easy task, and they have shown their dedication and commitment throughout the month, even if that meant working long hours into the night so every profile had the detail it deserved.

For me it has been an honor to be able to learn and write about the lives of these amazing women that shaped the computing industry since day one. The word humbling doesn’t honor the feelings I have when I read their stories, and see their accomplishments.

Finally I’d like to thank Joyce Park @troutgirl. Without your book about programming in PHP, I wouldn’t be here in the tech industry. Perhaps without realizing it, you opened a door for me, and I’m sure for so many others. Today I’m happy to be able to call you my friend.

Advent Calendar — Help us make it a book!

From December 1st until December 24th we plan to release one article each day, highlighting the life of one of the many women that have made today’s computing industry as amazing as it is: From early compilers to computer games, from chip design to distributed systems, we will revisit the lives of these pioneers.

Each article will come with an amazing illustration by @SebastianNavasF

If you want to see these series to become a book with expanded articles and even more illustrations by Sebastián, then subscribe to our newsletter below.

Credits

• Illustration: Sebastián Navas

References

• Betty and Claude Shannon with various instruments on display, Computer History Museum. http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102665758
• Frances Snyder Holberton, 1997 Computer Pioneer Award. (https://www.computer.org/web/awards/pioneer-frances-snyder-holberton)
• Sony, Jimmy and Goodman, Rob. Betty Shannon, Unsung Mathematical Genius. Scientific American, 2017.(https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/betty-shannon-unsung-mathematical-genius/)
• Wajcman Judy. TechnoFeminism. Polity Press 2004.
• Wikipedia Profile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto)
• Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (p. 88). Green Light. Kindle Edition.

Satoshi Nakamoto — Anon is Often a Woman was originally published in A Computer of One’s Own on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Audrey Tang — Open Government Hacker

Today’s pioneer is active both in open source and politics. She wrote the first implementation of Perl 6 using Haskell. Also, she became the first transgender minister in Taiwan. She’s an open government proponent, and animal rights advocate. It’s almost impossible to categorize the colorful personality of today’s pioneer. Meet Audrey Tang.

Audrey the Hacker

An avid open source contributor and free software advocate, Tang name is related to software projects of all kinds. Let’s take a look at some of those.

Perl 6

Audrey Tang has been an active member of the Perl community since more than ten years ago. At some moment though, she got fascinated by the architecture of Darcs, a distributed version control system implemented in Haskell. The problem was that to understand Darcs, she had to learn Haskell. The rabbit extended their hand and Audrey went right into Type Systems Wonderland.

To learn Haskell she started studying Type Theory from the TaPL and ATTaPL books, which after a few chapters made her realize that the best way to put her new learnings into practice was to create a new language. Being a Perl expert, she decided to implement Perl 6.

So what started like an exercise to understand type systems, to get a grip on Haskell, so she could follow Darcs’ architecture, ended up becoming the first implementation of Perl 6. What a journey!

Spreadsheet software

Now it’s time for some spreadsheets.

In 2005 and inspired by the Wiki model, Dan Bricklin, the inventor of spreadsheets, decided to create collaborative spreadsheet software, so people could work in a similar way as they do with wikis. This was the birth of the WikiCalc project, which Tang got involved with afterwards.

The problem this project presented was that all the logic was implemented server-side, which meant there were a lot of roundtrips between browser and server, making WikiCalc only usable in a localhost kind of setup.

This led the team to embark in a rewrite from Perl to Javascript, moving the spreadsheet processing functions from the server to the browser. After three years of development, they managed to release a new project, called SocialCalc.

SocialCalc met their needs, allowing for real-time collaboration, cross-browser support, and most importantly in these kind of products, conflict resolution. For those interested, Tang provides a nice explanation of how conflict resolution works in this article about SocialCalc.

SocialCalc had such an extensible engine, that they could add features with ease to the project, like rich text editing. This presented a problem though: how to prevent the project from having every single feature out there:

In the case of SocialCalc, having Tracy Ruggles as our chief user-experience designer was the key for the project to converge toward a shared vision. Since the underlying SocialCalc engine was so malleable, the temptation of feature creep was very real. Tracy’s ability to communicate using design sketches really helped us present features in a way that feels intuitive to users.

This is a very valuable lesson, because for a project to succeed is not enough to have great coders like Audrey Tang, but also to have someone with a clear vision of what the product must do.

You can read more on the EtherCalc project website about how something that started as a wiki-style spreadsheet project, ended up becoming a scalable collaborative spreadsheet that today runs on node.js. There you will find a full description of these projects’ architecture, along with how each migration to a new technology with new capabilities was implemented. If that sounds like too much, in this other article, Audrey Tang teaches how to build a web spreadsheet in 99 lines of code: Web Spreadsheet.

Worse is Better Prediction

Besides all her accomplishments with code, let’s take a look at her 2006 prediction about the future of open source, delivered at a tech conference:

I think, but I cannot prove, that next year JavaScript 2.0 will bootstrap itself, complete self-hosting, compile back to JavaScript 1, and replace Ruby as the Next Big Thing on all environments.

I think CPAN and JSAN will merge; JavaScript will become the common backend for all dynamic languages, so you can write Perl to run in the browser, on the server, and inside databases, all with the same set of development tools.

Because, as we know, worse is better, so the worst scripting language is doomed to become the best.

Twelve years later we can see that most of her predictions have become true. Javascript is the new assembly language of the web.

A Minister Without Portfolio

During the Sunflower Student Movement in Taiwan, Audrey Tang got involved with the protests, providing them with her programming abilities to create all kinds of platforms that would help them collaborate online, since among other things, they wanted a more participative democracy.

At the next elections Ing-wen Tsai became the first woman to be elected president of Taiwan. She wanted a link with the younger–more digital–generations, so she invited Audrey Tang to become a Minister. Tang is now in charge of Taiwan’s social innovation.

Of course for a hacker activist like Tang, becoming part of the government had some conditions. This is the very special covenant that she has with the Taiwanese government, following these three points:

1. Voluntary Association (working with, not for the government)
2. Radical Transparency (every meeting transcription is published after 10 days)
3. Location Independence (to allow for creativity wherever she is)

In her office, Tang advocates for open government, where citizen’s participation is crucial. Also she considers herself an “Anarchist Minister”, one that doesn’t give commands, nor obeys commands.

Let’s finish today’s profile with the poem that Tang uses to describe her job:

When we see “internet of things”, let’s make it an internet of beings.
When we see “virtual reality”, let’s make it a shared reality.
When we see “machine learning”, let’s make it collaborative learning.
When we see “user experience”, let’s make it about human experience.
When we hear “the singularity is near”, let us remember: the Plurality is here.

Advent Calendar — Help us make it a book!

From December 1st until December 24th we plan to release one article each day, highlighting the life of one of the many women that have made today’s computing industry as amazing as it is: From early compilers to computer games, from chip design to distributed systems, we will revisit the lives of these pioneers.

Each article will come with an amazing illustration by @SebastianNavasF

If you want to see these series to become a book with expanded articles and even more illustrations by Sebastián, then subscribe to our newsletter below.

Credits

• Illustration: Sebastián Navas

References

• Chung, Jake. Profile: Audrey Tang: 100% made in Taiwan. Taipei Times, 2016. (http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2016/08/28/2003654031)
• Government By The People, With the People: How g0v.tw is Transforming gov.tw, Four Years After the Sunflower Occupy Movement. Institute for Public Knowledge, NYU. (https://ipk.nyu.edu/events/government-by-the-people-with-the-people/)
• A Plan for Pugs. O’Reilly Media, 2005. (https://www.perl.com/pub/2005/03/03/pugs_interview.html/)
• Tang, Audrey. From SocialCalc to EtherCalc, The Performance of Open Source Applications. (http://aosabook.org/en/posa/from-socialcalc-to-ethercalc.html)
• Tang, Audrey, Stories From the Future of Democracy: Taiwan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DkhUO7LiGs)
• Wikipedia Profile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang)

Audrey Tang — Open Government Hacker was originally published in A Computer of One’s Own on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii — Computational Semiotics Pioneer

Today’s pioneer is a Professor at the University of Tokyo, that has invested her career in the study of language and programming. In 2010 she published the award winning book Semiotics of Programming which brings a new perspective into the analysis of programs and how we write them.

One interesting aspect of her book is what she calls the ontologies of Being vs. Doing. Being denotes entities by what they are, while Doing denotes entities by what they do or what can be done to them. How is this related to programming?

Being vs. Doing, or Why Favor Composition Over Inheritance

Consider Object Oriented Programming (OOP) with classes. In this case we will work with objects that have the internal structure offered by the class they instantiate. The object functionality will be determined by the class, which means a programmer that wants to use them effectively needs to know about the class internal structure. For the programmer this implies an extra burden of knowing more than it should about implementation details.

Now let’s consider Interfaces, Abstract Data Types, or Haskell like Type Classes. In this case we have a set of declaration of functionalities, a protocol, but we lack the actual implementation. In this case a programmer needs to know what the object can do, or what can be done with it, information that is specified by the Interface. Consider a Haskell Type where it makes sense to test for equality, by conforming to the Eq type class. You know you need to provide functions that implement == and /=, and that’s it.

Of course modern OOP languages mix these two approaches, but it’s interesting to note that without Interfaces, we can pretend to agree what a class does or what could be done to it, that is, we assume that it should implement certain methods. If the class conforms to an Interface then we are sure that certain methods and return values will be provided by the object.

Finding a balance between class inheritance and working with interfaces presents an interesting problem, as Tanaka-Ishii remarks

One common problem among programmers is how to integrate and balance the ‘being’ and ‘doing’ approaches to simultaneously maximize the advantages of code sharing and task sharing.

As software projects increase in complexity, Tanaka-Ishii says that we should move towards the Interface or the Abstract Data Type, since we want to be able to plug objects together without necessarily knowing how they are implemented.

Under the ‘being’ ontology a programmer has the total responsibility to know what’s is going on; today, under the ‘doing’ ontology, the programmer’s knowledge can be limited to the predefined communication protocol, or the interface.

If we bring this discussion to a bigger scale, we can consider how we orchestrate microservices today, where the API they offer is all what we need to know about them, leaving implementation details to other developers, possibly belonging to different teams or even companies.

If you want to dig deeper into this problem, here’s her paper Being’ and ‘Doing’ as Ontological Constructs in Object-Oriented Programming.

Now let’s take a look at her latest research project.

A new tool for assessing how AI adapts to human societies

In an interview for HITE Tanaka-Ishii talks about her research group’s new project, that tries to grade the behavior of AI’s and the impact they can have on markets.

This project follows from these two fundamental questions asked by Tanaka-Ishii’s:

“How can we stop AI that is motivated purely by profit?”, and “How can we design evaluation methods to prevent such behavior?”

These kind of questions seem more and more relevant these days as people start talking about AIs as if they are some sort of black boxes that provide answers for almost everything, from facial recognition used for law enforcement, to self-driving cars, where an error by the AI that could cost a human life is blamed on the algorithm as if that exempts us from all responsibility, either from implementing it, or by putting the algorithm, unrestrained, in practice.

Now let’s consider an AI that starts to behave recklessly in an investment market, up to the point where they produce a financial crisis. Could we tell in advance that an AI is misbehaving, and prevent it from wrecking the economy?

According to Tanaka-Ishii’s research, this should be possible by considering AIs behavior by using a power law statistical model. How does this work?

She explains that many natural and social systems work according to power laws, but more specifically in language–her specialization field–she noted that if we graph the frequencies of words in a language like English, against their frequency rankings, we will see that a power law appears. By frequency of words she means that “the” is the most used word in English, followed by “of” or “and”. She says that if we analyze a big corpus of text, or even the language of a kid, we will see such power laws appearing.

On the other hand if we analyze the text produced by AIs, until recently, they would almost never produce a power law, so there’s something unnatural about them–for lack of a better word. Why is it so important that they behave in such way?

It is still unknown why this kind of distribution happens in nature, but it’s been observed to hold for earthquakes, market prices, language, or population distribution in cities.

So how is Tanaka-Ishii and her group trying to assess AI systems?

We are considering how to create a system that detects any AI systems that do not produce power laws, so that for example we could exclude AI with the potential to behave recklessly in the field of investment. In stock investments, if an AI keeps on pursuing short-sighted maximum gains, it is likely that its behavior will destroy the power law, and this could risk the whole market. We believe it might be possible to detect these signs in advance by using methods that use power laws as the criteria for making judgments.

This is what I find fascinating about Tanaka-Ishii’s work. By looking into semiotics and philosophy, she brings a powerful point of view that can help us reflect and ask the right questions from things like the way we program, to help us assess how well an AI behaves in a society.

Advent Calendar — Help us make it a book!

From December 1st until December 24th we plan to release one article each day, highlighting the life of one of the many women that have made today’s computing industry as amazing as it is: From early compilers to computer games, from chip design to distributed systems, we will revisit the lives of these pioneers.

Each article will come with an amazing illustration by @SebastianNavasF

If you want to see these series to become a book with expanded articles and even more illustrations by Sebastián, then subscribe to our newsletter below.

Credits

• Illustration: Sebastián Navas

References

• Tanaka-Ishii, Kumiko. Semiotics of Programming. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Using “Power Laws” to assess the degree to which AI adapts to human society (http://www.jst.go.jp/ristex/hite/en/topics/373.html)
• Kumiko TANAKA-ISHII, University of Tokyo Researcher Profile (https://www.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/research/people/staff-tanaka-ishii_kumiko.html)
• Wikipedia Profile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Holz)

Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii — Computational Semiotics Pioneer was originally published in A Computer of One’s Own on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Evelyn Berezin — Systems Reliability Pioneer

Today’s pioneer is know for having built the first true word processor. In the 1976 list “Top 100 Business Women in the United States” she was the only one that was the president of a tech company. This is the fascinating story of Evelyn Berezin.

Desperate Times Require Desperate Measures

In 1941 as the US entered the war, men where leaving for battle, so a former physics professor offered her a job at a tech company that was producing printing ink. She was 16 which made her inelegible for work in New York City, but she knew how to handle that:

I was prepared for this next problem because I had worked during the summer before and I knew enough to lie. I told them I was 18, which was the earliest age you could work in New York City. I was five foot nine and I wore makeup, so they did not guess that I was 2 years younger than that. Whew!

Of course her ambition didn’t stop at landing her first full time job in tech. She also went to college at night, from 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM, being back home after one hour on the subway, time she spent doing her homework. A total dedication to the advancement of her career, so she could get her degree in physics.

At school, she was not only the only woman at Brooklyn Polytechnic, but was the only woman who had ever been there. For her that meant she had to get the extra mark to show women could do well in physics:

I did end with a straight A average there, so I kept the flag flying for the women, which I very much wanted to do.

The First Automated Airline Reservations System: a Lesson in High Availability

While working at Teleregister, a company that specialized in building reservation systems, Evelyn Berezin designed the first automated airline reservation system for United Airlines. In eleven years, this system never went down. Let’s talk about high availability! Her description of this design is really interesting from a modern systems reliability perspective.

The SLAs where pretty tough. The system had to run 24/7, allowing for a failure tolerance of the central computers could last a few seconds max. Keep in mind that this is 1958, where one of the constraints is that she couldn’t use tubes, because downtime would be prohibitive, so they used semiconductors.

You couldn’t tolerate a failure of the central machine for anything more than seconds.

Then it was time to choose a location for a system that had to serve the whole United States. Berezin chose Denver. Requests would arrive there from about 60 terminals in various cities spread across the country.

The central computing system was built up using three computers, with a load balancer that would take care of allocating requests depending on the load of each machine. Why? They couldn’t estimate at the time how much the aviation industry was going to grow in the next ten years, so she had to be well prepared. If the system started to drop requests, both United Airlines and her company would be in big trouble, and her career probably over.

But her idea of reliability didn’t stop there. Each terminal had a dedicated line for sending requests to the central system in Denver, and a dedicated line for receiving responses. These two lines were duplicated just in case one of them would fail. Also if a terminal was misbehaving, a switch would bypass it making sure the connection that went from there to other cities in the country wouldn’t be interrupted.

What about shared storage in those three main computers? There was none. She implemented a sharded architecture with the drum storage (perhaps a first in database systems?):

[…] each of the drums were divided into the places where the specific trip information was stored.

So apart from this being the first automated airline reservation system, we can see that it pushed forward techniques for high availability which are very much relevant today.

Being a Woman in Tech

For Evelyn Berezin, it wasn’t easy to be a woman in tech. She got offered a job at the New York Stock Exchange to design their first electronic system, something for which she was one of the few qualified people in the world, just to be told by the board of directors that she wouldn’t be hired, “because the language of the floor wasn’t for a woman’s ears”.

So that tells you the situation of women at the time. What, I think, made it worse was that I had never had any problems working with men, even as a manager of men — even within all-male (except for me) engineering organizations

As time went by, she realized that she always had the same position at tech companies, running the logic department. Higher than that and glass ceiling was there for her.

[…] I’m looking up to the next role, to vice president. And I knew damn well that I would never get that job. That job was for a man, and I would never have it. I had learned the lesson.

So she solved the problem in full Berezin fashion: She created her own company and made herself president. Here she brought all her feminist values, even up to the company advertisement, which she signed herself. This is some copy from one of her ads:

After all, until the feminist, Katherine Gibbs, founded her secretarial school in 1911, women were as welcome in a business office as mongooses in a cobra pit.

And later she writes in the same advertisement:

Unlike your complacent sisters of the previous generation, you want freedom to get into more interesting and challenging work–work that’ll give you the chance to move into a staff, administrative, or managerial position–where you can call some of the shots. [emphasis mine]

So that’s Evelyn Berezin, a woman that had no problem to do what was needed to get her first job in tech, and that when she realized that in the corporate world she would never reach a high management role, she just went on her own and opened her own company. With that platform in place, she rallied other women to leave the secretary world in search of more ambitious roles.

Advent Calendar — Help us make it a book!

From December 1st until December 24th we plan to release one article each day, highlighting the life of one of the many women that have made today’s computing industry as amazing as it is: From early compilers to computer games, from chip design to distributed systems, we will revisit the lives of these pioneers.

Each article will come with an amazing illustration by @SebastianNavasF

If you want to see these series to become a book with expanded articles and even more illustrations by Sebastián, then subscribe to our newsletter below.

Credits

• Illustration: Sebastián Navas

References

• Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Changes, A Literary History of Word Processing. Harvard University Press, 2016.
• Oral History of Evelyn Berezin. CHM, 2014. (https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102746876)
• Remembering CHM Fellow Evelyn Berezin (https://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/remembering-chm-fellow-evelyn-berezin/)
• Teleregister Corporation Brochure. (http://www.computerhistory.org/brochures/t-z/teleregister-corporation/)
• Wikipedia Profile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Berezin)

Evelyn Berezin — Systems Reliability Pioneer was originally published in A Computer of One’s Own on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.