When App Academy’s San Francisco staff moved into new offices a month ago, the administrative group faced a common but important foundational task: Naming conference room names.
While no one from the group broke out in hives, there was a bit of pressure to come up with something interesting. After all, tech companies have been know to tie their values and culture to this naming ritual. At SpaceX, all the names are of galactic heroes that provide the nascent space agency’s members direct inspiration. At Twitter, they’ve put a bird on every room and people seem to enjoy them. For App Academy, whose values include empowering people to transform their lives by teaching them coding, a technical solution seemed appropriate.
The staff first chose coding languages. Most staff and students accepted the names until an instructor pointed out that as a writer of code, he hated “when the same word refers to two different things. It always confuses people. In the course of normal conversation at this company, I often have reason to speak of Python, Ruby, JavaScript, or even Go.” He didn’t like that with the introduction of room names, the terms were now “all ambiguous.” So he suggested staff change it to famous programmers.
After a couple of weeks of name suggestions that included a concerted effort to include non-binary gender, race diversity, and historically important figures that match the company’s inclusive values, App Academy staff agreed upon fifteen names everyone could be proud of.
And now you can find out which ones we chose! Check the following gallery to see who made the cut.
If you’d been naming names, who would you have chosen?
Matsumoto Yukihiro — (まつもとゆきひろ) April 14, 1965 –
A Japanese computer scientist and software programmer, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto is the creator of the Ruby coding language and its reference implementation, Matz’s Ruby Interpreter (MRI). Began on February 24, 1993, Matsumoto wanted to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming. He ended up blending parts of his favorite coding languages at the time including Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp. The language was named after the precious gemstone because he said, it was beautiful and highly valued.
Matsumoto’s kindly demeanor over the years has brought about a motto in the Ruby community known as MINASWAN, an acronym for “Matz is nice and so we are nice.” The growth of the language is mostly attributed to the popularity of the Ruby on Rails web framework.
Ada Lovelace — December 10, 1815 – November 27, 1852
Ada Lovelace was born and raised in London, England. Fearing she’d pursue poetry like her father, Lord Byron, her mother Anna Isabella immersed her in mathematics and science. At the age of 17, Lovelace met Charles Babbage, the father of the modern computer, at a party in England. He became her mentor and her life changed from then on.
Working closely with Babbage, Lovelace translated and expanded on an article for the Analytical Engine machine from French to English, which led to her own breakthrough. In Sketch of the Analytical Engine, with Notes from the Translator, she posited machines could be applied to tasks beyond pure calculations. Lovelace is the first to recognize the full potential of a “computing machine,” and the first to create an algorithm meant to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is thought of as the world’s first computer programmer.
Grace Hopper — December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992
Born in New York City, Grace Hopper became the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Yale University, in 1934. After college, she worked as a professor at Vassar University until World War II, when she joined the U.S. Navy. Assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project in 1944, Hopper learned to program the first Mark I computer, a general purpose electromechanical computer used in the war effort during World War II.
While in the program, she had the breakthrough conviction that computer code could be written in English. Her idea was not accepted for three years.
In 1952, Hopper would get her chance to develop that idea. She and her team created the first compiler for the A-0 language and later, machine-independent languages in A-1, A-2, and ARITH-MATIC, which led to the development of COBOL. The latter was an early high-level programming language still in use today. When she retired from the U.S. Navy in 1986 at age 79, Grace Hopper was the oldest serving officer in the service.
Alan Turing — June 23, 1912 – June 7, 1954
Mathematician Alan Turing was born in London, England, studied at King’s College at University of Cambridge, and received his Ph.D from Princeton University. In 1936, he began his public life by publishing one of the seminal academic papers of the 20th century, On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. In the paper, he proved there cannot exist any universal algorithmic method of determining truth in mathematics, and that mathematics will always contain undecidable propositions. The central concept of modern computers is based on this paper.
Turing later became a lead participant in code-breaking during World War II. Some say his specifying of the BOMBE, an electromechanical device used to decipher German Enigma encrypted signals, changed the course of the war and helped the Allies win. Later, Turing led design work for the Automatic Computing Engine at the National Physical Laboratory. He is also considered the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
Prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2009 publicly apologized on behalf of the government for “the appalling way he was treated.”
Richard Stallman — March 16, 1953 –
Richard Stallman is a software developer and software freedom activist. Educated at Harvard and MIT, Stallman is known for writing the first extensible Emacs text editor at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. He also developed the AI technique of dependency-directed backtracking, known as truth maintenance.
In 1983, Stallman announced a project to develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like OS meant to be entirely free and which launched the Free Software Movement. He campaigned for free software to be distributed in a manner such that users receive the freedoms to use, study, distribute and modify that software. In 1985, Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation, where he serves as president and full-time volunteer.
Since the 1990s, Stallman has advocated for free software, pushed against software patents, and dangerous extensions of copyright laws.
Linus Torvalds — December 28, 1969 –
Born in Helsinki, Finland, Linus Torvalds studied at the University of Helsinki, graduating with a Master’s in Computer Science. In 1991, he purchased a PC and quickly found himself unsatisfied with the included MS-DOS operating system. Preferring the UNIX operating system he used in college, Torvalds decided to create his own UNIX-based system. His work would eventually lead to the Linux kernel, the Linux operating system, Android, and Chrome OS.
Based on his use of the GNU General Public License for his original kernel, Torvald came to believe that “open-source [coding] is the only right way to do software.”
Around 2005, Torvalds was criticized for his use and advocacy of BitKeeper, a proprietary version control software, in the Linux kernel. As a response, he wrote a free software replacement called Git. Torvalds has been named by Time Magazine as “one of the most influential people in the world.”
Margaret Hamilton — August 17, 1936 –
Margaret Hamilton is a computer scientist, systems engineer, and entrepreneur. She was the Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program. From 1961 to 1963, Hamilton worked on the SAGE Project at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The lab gave new recruits an “impossible” coding task to welcome them—a task Hamilton was able to solve. The computer systems developed from this project became the computing foundation for the NORAD anti-ballistic U.S. program. Hamilton’s work in this project led to her position as the lead developer for the Apollo space program flight software.
While at MIT in the early 1960s, Hamilton also reportedly coined the term “software engineering,” to give the discipline the same level of legitimacy as others. Hamilton is the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc.
David Heinemeier Hansson October 15, 1979 –
David Heinemeier Hansson, known as DHH, is a Danish programmer. He is the creator of the Ruby on Rails web development framework, and a founder and CTO of Basecamp (first known as 37signals). Rails was created as an internal tool for 37signals before being released in 2004. In 2005, DHH was recognized by Google and O’Reilly with the “Hacker of the Year” award for his Rails development. Hansson says he wrote the framework to optimize it for “programmer happiness and beautiful code,” echoing the structural motivations for the creation of Ruby.
Miguel de Icaza — 1972 –
Born in Mexico City, Miguel de Icaza studied mathematics at the city’s top educational institution, the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), but never received a degree. Instead, de Icaza began to write free software around 1992, the best known of which led to the influential GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin projects. Partnering with fellow engineer Federico Mena in August 1997, the GNOME project sought to create a free desktop environment and component model for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
Two years later, de Icaza co-founded a free software company that created the Mono Project to allow the use of Microsoft’s new .NET development platform on Linux and Unix-like platforms. Besides developing and leading Mono, de Icaza is an advocate for Microsoft open tech and endorses Microsoft’s Office Open XML document standard.
Mark Dean — March 2, 1957 –
which made it easy to plug external devices into IBM PCs, and the first gigahertz chip. In particular, the chip was a revolutionary piece of technology development as it was able to do a billion calculations a second.
Computer scientist and engineer Mark Dean graduated at the top of his class at the University of Tennessee in 1979. After landing a job at IBM post-college, Dean ended up developing many of Big Blue’s landmark technologies. His important work led to the creation of the color PC monitor, the Industry Standard Architecture system bus,
The recipient of three of the company’s original nine patents, Dean has received more than 20 patents in total. In 1996, he was named an IBM fellow, the first African-American to ever receive the honor. A year later, he was honored with the Black Engineer of the Year President’s Award and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In 2001, he was tapped to be a member of the National Academy of Engineers.
Kathleen Booth — 1922 –
constructed three machines including ARC (Automatic Relay Computer), SEC (Simple Electronic Computer), and APE(X)C (All-purpose Electronic Rayon Computer). Because the first computers were programmed by writing a series of 0s and 1s, an assembly language provided simpler and more reliable programming.
Kathleen Booth worked at Birkbeck College, University of London, from 1946-1962 and is credited with developing the first assembly language. With the help of husband John Von Neumann and a small research group, she
In 1957, Booth co-founded the School of Computer Science and Information Systems at Birkbeck College. In 1958, she published a book on programming APE(X), Programming for an Automatic Digital Calculator, which was one of the early books on programming and one of the first by a female author.
Dorothy Vaughan — September 20, 1910 – November 10, 2008
Dorothy Vaughan was an American mathematician and computer programmer. During World War II, she began working at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory on a temporary war job. Two years after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, the lab began hiring black women to meet the demand for processing research data. Vaughan was assigned to the segregated West Area Computing Unit and served as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA) first African-American manager. When NACA was incorporated into NASA, the segregated facilities were closed and the space program began using electronic computers. Vaughan later became an expert at FORTRAN, a language used for scientific and algebraic applications.
In 2016, a book by Margot Lee Shetterly—Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race—drew attention to the contributions of the West Computers. The book was made into an acclaimed film.
Mary Ann Horton — November 21, 1955 –
Mary Ann Horton is a pioneer computer scientist and transgender educator. Horton received her Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1981 and contributed to the development of Berkeley UNIX. The latter development led to the growth of Usenet. Eventually, UNIX became the software platform for Sun Microsystems. In addition to this work, Horton specifically contributed to tools such as vi, termcap/terminfo, and curses.
While her contributions to tech are immense, Horton is also recognized for her LGBT work as a diversity advocate. Currently, she is a chair for Transgender at Work and is a board member of It’s Time, America.
Monica S. Lam —
Compilers, Principles, Techniques, and Tools (2nd Edition).
Monica Lam is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. She is the faculty director of the Stanford MobiSocial Computing Lab and co-Principal Investigator in the Programmable Open Mobile Internet 2020 project. She has worked on compiler optimization and software analysis to improve security and co-authored
Lam’s contributions in compiler optimizations include software pipelining, data locality, and parallelization. In program analysis, her insight is critical in security tools that detect cross-site scripting and SQL injection bugs in Java/JSP web apps. Her current research interests include building an open and federated social computing infrastructure.
Sally Floyd —
worked on Internet congestion control and co-designed the Random Early Detection, a queueing discipline for network schedulers.
Sally Floyd studied Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1960s but became a computer systems engineer after college. In the late 60s, Floyd built the computers that run the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) trains. After receiving a Master’s degree in Computer Science in 1987 and a Ph.D in 1989 from Berkeley, she spent 15 years at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI). There, she
This research led to the discipline’s study and development of active queue management, the latter of which allows transport mechanisms of the Internet to operate smoothly in the face phenomenal traffic growth. As of 2017, Floyd is one of the most cited researchers in computer science in the world.
Peter Landin — June 5, 1930 – June 3, 2009
Landin is also responsible for inventing the SECD machine, the first abstract machine for a functional programming language.
Peter John Landin was a bisexual British computer scientist, political radical, and gay rights campaigner. In the early days of computing, software written for one make of machine could not run on any other. Computer scientists at the time wanted to define “programming languages” that could be universally understood. Early in his career, Landin had a great insight: that the meaning of a computer program could be pinpointed in mathematical logic and liberated from the control of the manufacturer.
Landin was an active anti-war demonstrator for the Committee of 100. In the early 1970s, Landin became a leader in the Gay Liberation Front.