Next Saturday a group of more than 20 women that work with Free Software in Argentina and Uruguay will gather to speak at a Free Software event in Buenos Aires, called Software Libre, Pasión de Mujeres.

It's your typical Free Software event, with talks related to the philosophy of Free Software and the Free Culture in general, and also technical talks related to using and developing Free Software. With one important difference: all the speakers will be women.

This might sound shocking to some people and normal stuff to some others, but the reaction created by the call for talks of this event was definitely not something I expected. Women from all over the country (and many also from other Latin American countries) have contacted us, to tell us about what they do in their daily lives with Free Software and how they would like to share their work with others.

The event is open for both men and women to attend, however, of the more than a 100 people that have already pre-registered, more than half are women. A ratio that is more than amazing when you have been to a Free Software event before. I think that the fact that all the speakers are women is really encouraging for many women to attend, who otherwise wouldn't.

Debian will be sponsoring the event, by paying the bus tickets of the speakers that come from the whole country, which is a great help in making this event a big success. I really expect the event to be a fantastic opportunity for the women in our country to finally show all the great work they are doing... I'm very excited about it :)

PS: Somehow, I screwed up Planet Debian, filling it with old posts. I'm sorry! :-\

This post is about Barbara Liskov, for the Ada Lovelace Day.

Barbara Liskov is the first woman in the United States of America that obtained a Ph.D. from a Computer Science department, in 1968. However, this isn't by any chance her greatest achievement.

She's the creator of the CLU programming language, a language created in the mid-70s, that we would find crufty and ugly nowadays, but that with its strong emphasis in abstraction, the use of clusters (basically equivalent to what we call classes today) and iterators, was to become the rock foundation of Object Oriented Programming.

Apart from that, she worked in the design of a timesharing operating system, called Venus; designed another programming language, called Argus, that was oriented to distributed applications, and also set the foundations for much of what is currently done as distributed computing.

Aged 70, she's currently still working at MIT, as the leader of the Programming Methodology Group, researching ways to tolerate byzantine faults.

For all this work, she received the John von Neumann medal in 2004, and the Alan Turing award in 2008.

All in all, what I find the most inspiring of all her life, is the fact that she was able to pursue her career, working on a new way of creating programs, while she was also a wife and a mother; and that today, aging 70, she's still researching, leading a group, and working towards making computing better.