Ada Lovelace Day: Gayle Laakmann

Today, I just learned, is Ada Lovelace Day. The idea is that people write blog posts about women in technology that they admire, so I thought I’d join in.

I’ve talked about Gayle Laakmann tangentially in past posts, but this one is going to focus solely on her. Three years ago almost to the day, I signed up for Computer Science and Engineering 490. 490 is a “special topics” class; it’s the number the CSE department assigns to any class that’s offered temporarily and doesn’t fit anywhere else. The one I was taking was Software Design and Development,worked for Google. taught by Gayle Laakmann.

Gayle had recently joined Google after working at Microsoft. All the students were in awe; we had all just come through the intro CS sequence, so we knew how to program, but writing actual software that actual people would want to use seemed impossibly far-off. Gayle was someone who did that every day, and what’s more she was going to put us on the path to writing that sort of software ourselves.

At the University of Washington, courses are ranked on a five-credit scale. Students are typically encouraged to take fifteen credits total a quarter; five credits is supposed to represent five hours of in-class work and ten hours of homework. Both of these get fudged occasionally.

That particular quarter I was taking twenty-one credits. Gayle, who had taught a similar course at UPenn, wasn’t familiar with the UW credit system, so 490 was only two of those credits. I ended up spending more time on it than on any of my other courses that quarter, and every minute was worth it.

The first week, Gayle had us write one of those puzzle games where you slide the tiles around to make a picture. This gave us a sense of the basics of writing a GUI application. Then we made a blog client which connected to a remote database: the first time I had ever seen SQL. Finally, the final project, which we had to design, spec, implement, and demo all on our own.

I called my project “Dal.” It was a layered image editor, taking inspiration from Photoshop and The Gimp. The killer feature was that it was collaborative: multiple instances could connect peer-to-peer and work on the same image at once. I only had four or five weeks to implement it, and I didn’t end up with a hugely polished or featureful product, but it did what I wanted it to do and I was proud.

If those projects had been my only interaction with Gayle, it would have been enough to warrant this blog post. But she went above and beyond simply teaching us to design and develop software. She took it upon herself to put her students on the track to becoming excellent programmers all around.

Gayle suggested that all of us try to find an open-source project to contribute to. She even brought in her co-worker, Sean Egan, to talk about his work on Pidgin (then called Gaim). Her suggestion inspired me to start looking out for opportunities to contribute; the first one that caught my eye was a post on the Ruby on Rails mailing list by one Hampton Catlin showing off his new markup language, Haml.

Gayle also told us how to go about looking for internships. She reviewed our resumes and gave us practice interviews. Between her interview help and having Haml on my resume, I got an internship at Microsoft that year, and again at Fog Creek the year after. And now this year she recommended my resume to Google, and I’ve got an internship with them starting in June.

So here’s to Gayle, to Ada Lovelace, and to women in technology everywhere.