This is my third #shecoded post. My entries from 2020 and 2019 were actually pretty similar, and described how I got started and why I like coding. This year, I wanted to share something a little different.

She has ALWAYS been coding

Women may be under-represented in the industry, but women have always been coding.

We were some of the earliest computer programmers.

You may have read about Ada Lovelace or how women dominated the field at first.

But maybe you haven't heard about how knitting (and other fiber crafts) can be expressed in terms remarkably like code, with loops, conditional statements, etc. Or how women during wartime used fiber arts to encode sensitive information.

Stereotypical "women's work" is extremely technical. Cooking is applied science (I will fight you on this). I don't know if you have ever read a sewing pattern, but there are amazing, independent women designers selling patterns all over the internet. They rival every technical writer I have ever met.

We have always been here. Doing technical things. Understanding complex topics. Creating things for our communities and ourselves. If you think we aren't technical, maybe you have simply misunderstood or undervalued our contributions and our history.

"Knitting" by Erin E Flynn is licensed with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/