Happy Ada Lovelace Day - our tech heroine, Sidra!

Happy Ada Lovelace Day ! This year, Accessibility, Design and Technology staffers and everyone who works on the Archive of Our Own have more reason than usual to give thanks to one particular tech heroine - Sidra, keeper of the AO3 servers. Sidra is the co-chair of the Systems Committee (along with Arrow, another tech heroine ♥) and a long-serving staffer on AD&T. She's been with us since the beginning and an impressive 17% of code commits to the Archive are hers; we don't have stats on exactly how many lines of code she's committed, but it's safe to say that the answer is a lot! Even more importantly, Sidra is the member of Systems dedicated to looking after the AO3 servers - when we're deciding what servers to buy, deploying new code, or dealing with site performance Sidra is right there at the heart of the action! Sometimes this involves being woken up at ungodly hours - if the Archive goes down, it's Sidra who we call in the middle of the night! We are in awe of her ability to climb out of bed and work her magic on the servers!

This past weekend was a compelling reminder of just how awesome Sidra is, as she battled mysterious loads on the servers, tweaked settings, and managed to restore the AO3 after some alarming and unexpected overloads. We know how incredibly hard she worked (and continues to work) to ensure that we can keep serving up delicious fanworks to our users - thank you, Sidra!

Our Systems team is a fantastic group of people, both men and women, but we're particularly proud to say that the Archive has a female sys-admin, since there are relatively few women working in this area. In fact, Sidra also deserves credit for helping to pave the way for women in tech: she entered the tech industry in the 1980s and is now a senior sys-admin in her professional life. Sidra is definitely proof that women can not only work in technology, they can kick ass at it! (Arthur C. Clarke tells us that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but we're not at all convinced that Sidra's ability to vanquish recalcitrant technology isn't actually magic.)

Thanks Sidra - a fannish tech heroine! The Archive definitely wouldn't be the same without you! ♥ ♥ ♥