In ninth-grade science class, we watched a documentary about the discovery of the double helix, and it left me blazing indignant with anger. James Watson and Francis Crick, the two men who won the Nobel Prize for this discovery, had stolen essential research from the offices of an x-ray crystallographer named Rosalind Franklin, without which they never would have deduced the helical nature of DNA. Watching how she was treated by the men in the film incensed me—even her own boss and co-workers conspired with Watson and Crick to deceive and exclude her regarding her contribution to the research. When I learned that she did not receive the Nobel, I was outraged; although it was the greatest scientific discovery of the century, the Swedish Academy waited until after she died—of cancer, at age 37—to give the prize to Watson and Crick.

When I wanted to be a writer, I obsessed over Edna St. Vincent Millay and Margaret Atwood. When I was studying philosophy, my heroes were Hannah Arendt and Catherine Z. Elgin. And when I began to seriously focus on turning my day job into my life’s work, I had to do some serious searching for women in tech. When Ethan Marcotte gave a talk on web standards at an Harvard ABCD group meeting, Molly Holzschlag came onto my radar; she was my very first tech-girl icon. At findingada.com, the organizer of Ada Lovelace Day notes that “[r]ecent research by psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones,” and my own experience bears it out; Ada Lovelace Day is about making sure that other ladies don’t have to search as hard as I did for women to look up to.

Which brings us to early this January, and an item on The Huffington Post announcing the first annual Ada Lovelace Day. I’d first come across Ada’s name last year, in an article on steampunk in the Boston Phoenix: Ada, along with Jules Verne, is idolized by adherents to the Victoriana DIY subculture. Being the dedicated researcher, obsessive information aggregator, and hardcore feminist that I am, I delved into learning as much as I could about the world’s very first computer programmer—who just also happened to be female.

Ada Lovelace Day is March 24, 2009, just two weeks away. That box on the top right-hand side of this page represents my pledge to write and publish a blog post on that date about a woman in tech who I admire. Quite conveniently, I was about halfway through drafting just such a post at the time I learned about ALD09: my response to the gender-lopsided year-end “Best in Tech” lists that were making their way through the blogosphere. I set that post, a list of inspirational “kickass women in tech,” aside, and have been expanding it, and will post it two weeks from today.

I hope you join me: please think about your favorite women in tech—whether they are designers, programmers, bloggers, journalists, digital artists, music remixers; whether they are friends, co-workers, strangers, historical or even fictional—and please compose and publish a blog or vlog post, a Facebook note, a Myspace bulletin, newspaper or magazine article, or a podcast honoring them on March 24.