Tim's journal

I read Mary Gardiner's memorial post for Telsa Gwynne and was struck by this sentence in it: "Telsa is the direct inspiration for the entire 15 years of content on this website, especially the personal diary."

I would like to acknowledge some of the people who have been major inspirations for my public writing over the past 5 years; I hope they all lead long and happy lives, but I think it's important to thank people while they're still alive if we can.

• Mary Gardiner and Valerie Aurora co-founded the Ada Initiative. On an organizational and on a personal level, they both have changed how I see the world in ways I often take for granted now. Mary, in particular, contributed a huge amount of content early on to the Geek Feminism blog and wiki, both of which have influenced me in such deep ways that it's hard to summarize exactly how they've changed me.
  
• Skud created the Geek Feminism Wiki (and later handily summarized its history in in a a retrospective talk).
  
• Leigh Honeywell has set an example for me with her uncompromising pursuit of justice.
  
• Lindsey Kuper has been a colleague and comrade in navigating sexism in the programming language research community.
  
• Clarissa Littler has and continues to awe me with her tenacity in the face of adversity. In a very literal way, I would be less happy and more complacent without her.
  
• Kake created the original version of the Male Programmer Privilege Checklist in 2006, which opened up for me what it was possible to talk about.
  
• The anonymous author of the original version of Derailing for Dummies gave me names for the patterns I'd observed but been unable to articulate in how oppression operates through discourse.
  

I can't possibly make a complete list, but I can say for certain that without these individuals, my feminist consciousness would be sadly lacking and I would never have thought it important to share what I had to say about social justice in technology. I owe them a debt.