Today it’s Ada Lovelace day. For those of you who haven’t heard of Ada Lovelace Day before, it’s a special day to honour women in technology whom you look up to or have learnt a lot from or just have been inspired by during the last couple of years. For me, this isn’t one special woman, it’s a whole group!
As you may know by now, I’m talking about PHPWomen. And this year is even more special since tomorrow it’s the 5th birthday of PHPWomen. Over the last couple of years, I’ve started to get to know many of the members of PHPWomen and they each have inspired me in several ways. In a way, PHPWomen was my introduction to the PHP community, along with Ibuildings (my former employer) by organizing the Dutch PHP Conference (DPC). But in fact, it was Lorna Mitchell that introduced me to several speakers at DPC in 2009 and I’m thankful to her for that. She really opened my eyes to the PHP community and today, she’s still a role model to me. She is a very good PHP developer, speaker, community person and write. She has recently wrote her first book! She’s been a great friend over the years and she has inspired me to realize what kind of goals I want to reach in the next couple of years. Thank you for that Lorna!
Besides Lorna, there are other PHPWomen that have inspired me or just helped me when I was having problems (of any kind). The PHPWomen group almost feels like family to me and I’d like to thank every member that I’ve been in touch with over the last couple of years for that. There is another PHPWomen member I’d like to name specifically and that is Kim Rowan. She hasn’t been a member for very long yet, but she inspired me to do a new project together with her for the PHP community, which means I feel even more part of the PHP community because of that. Thanks for all the inspiration and kind words, you’ve truly become a good friend over the past months Kim!
To wrap it all up, I love keeping in touch with my PHPWomen friends and meeting them at conferences. This weekend, I will be visiting Manchester for PHPNW and I will meet a lot of PHPWomen there that I only know online right now. It will be great, I’m sure and I’m really looking forward to celebrating PHPWomen’s 5th birthday there!
P.S. Visit the PHPWomen stand this weekend if you’re at PHPNW, I have brought something special from The Netherlands for you to taste.