Archive of Our Own ^beta

Happy Ada Lovelace Day from everyone at the Archive of Our Own!

The majority of AO3 volunteers are women, so we're thrilled to have the opportunity to celebrate women in technology! Our testers, coders and systems staff are all inspirational, and in the five years they have been working on the Archive they have all become role models for one another.

This Ada Lovelace Day we'd like to give a shoutout to one inspirational woman in particular: AD&T Co-chair Elz. Elz has been coding on the project since the very beginning, and we're in awe of her amazing patience, her great teaching and mentoring skills, and her ability to produce massive amounts of code: she is the number one contributor of code to the AO3 and has written over 130,000 lines of code!

Elz is particularly inspirational because she didn't originally come from a STEM (science/technology/engineering/math) background: she majored in literature at university and is a self-taught coder. The experience she gained working on the AO3 enabled her to move into coding professionally, and she now works in the tech industry: a great example of how sharing skills in the open source community can enable people from non-STEM backgrounds to move into technology.

Elz has done amazing work on the AO3 over the years, and she's been incredibly generous with her time and her skills over the years. We're happy to celebrate her on Ada Lovelace Day!

We'd also like to celebrate all our volunteers, especially those who joined us more recently: we've had fifteen coders make their first commits to the project in the last year. We're proud of the achievements of all our volunteers - of all gender identities - and we're grateful to them for their hard work.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!