I have been working with computers for a couple of years now and my sphere has been pretty constrained to the giants in the industry. So I didn’t really think that there were more “special” engineers out there, basically due to lack of thought on my part. Recently I started using Twitter again and I made some interesting discoveries. There is a huge amount of talented people across a range of languages, work focus, race and ethnicity.

Over the last 20 years, I can count on two hand the amount of women engineers that I have worked with and one finger a person of color. I am not sure why that is, but this limited my view of who else is out there. I know the bro culture is real, but I also had the belief that there must not be that many women or people of color that were interesting in computer science. I was a fool and lazy for never really pondering the possibility.

My daughter is mixed and I thought if I teach her to be an engineer that she could contribute to the culture shift, but to my surprise that shift was already in high gear. As a manager, I never saw people in terms of color or gender, we just didn’t have people anybody in that category applying. That further reinforced my line of thinking.

Like I said earlier, I started on twitter again and so many women of color are popping up in my feed and they are awesome. I have looked at some of their work and they are shit hot. I guess it was time to pull my head out of my ass and look around at what is happening.