Inspiring Women in Tech You Should Be Following

On March 8, we celebrated International Women’s Day, a time to celebrate women’s social, economic, cultural, and political achievements, and we continue to reflect on women’s contributions throughout Women’s History Month. Today, there are more women developers, engineers, tech startup entrepreneurs, and business leaders than ever before—but there’s still a lot of work to do. For International Women’s Day, I gave to organizations that support trans people, protect sex workers, and pursue racial justice.

Once I did that hard work, it was time to have a bit of fun and follow some rad people on Twitter and DEV. Here are a few people I love to see when I get online, in alphabetical order by first name:

Aisha Blake

Why to follow: Aisha is a senior DevRel engineer @NewRelic, a champion of feedback, a fierce accessibility advocate, and a steward of strong teams. A theater kid turned tech community leader, she also co-organizes @selfconference and is a @SpeakersInTech co-founder.

Twitter: @AishaBlake

Twitch: AishaCodes

Ali Finkelstein

Why to follow: Ali, developer relations at New Relic, worked in cryptocurrency, SaaS, and healthcare before starting at New Relic. Ali is driven by innovation and loves security, SaaS, and startups.

Twitter: @endingwithali

Twitch: twitch.tv/endingwithali

Ali Spittel

Why to follow: A senior dev advocate at AWS and fantastic developer, educator, and creator, Ali is one of those people who teaches me something every time I look at her work.

Twitter: @ASpittel

Alice Goldfuss

Why to follow: Alice is a “systems punk with years of experience working on cutting-edge container platforms.” She’s an international speaker who keynoted at LISA19 and has emceed DevOps Days Portland. Check out her helpful and popular post How to Get Into SRE.

Twitter: @alicegoldfuss

GitHub: github.com/alicegoldfuss

Amy Wibowo

Why to follow: Amy conducted machine learning research at Honda Research Institute, human-computer interaction (HCI) research at the University of Tokyo, and worked as a developer at Airbnb before starting her own computer science education company, BubbleSort Zines, which has been featured in The New Yorker and Recode.

Twitter: @sailorhg

Website: bubblesort.io

Anna McDougall

Why to follow: I would be so pleased to have half the energy and insight that Anna has. An engineer and YouTuber, just watching one of her videos gives me the energy to start a new project.

Twitter: @AnnaJMcDougall

Annyce Davis

Why to follow: Annyce is the engineering director at Meetup and an Android Google Developer Expert. She is working on moving native applications into the future. She was recently honored on the #Google Developer's list of trailblazing women in tech.

Twitter: @brwngrldev

Website: adavis.info/

GitHub: github.com/adavis

Corey Leigh Latislaw

Why to follow: An American in London, Corey is a feminist, head of engineering at @kinandcarta_cr, an international keynoter, author, and sketchnoter.

Twitter: @corey_latislaw

GitHub: github.com/colabug

Destiny Bertucci

Why to follow: Destiny, a product strategist at Auvik, is passionate about IT monitoring and management software, security, networking, and troubleshooting. Empowering women in IT and STEAM programs are things that allow her to stay empowered and constantly pushing forward.

Twitter: @bertuccidez

Erica Joy

Why to follow: Erica is an engineering leader and advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion in tech, as well as expanding access to tech exposure and education. She is a founding member of Project Include, was the 2015 Level Playing Field Institute Lux Award winner, and a nominee for the 2016 Crunchies Include Diversity Award.

Twitter: @EricaJoy

Farrah Campbell

Why to follow: Starting out in tech as an adult, with two kids, Farrah carved her own path. Now she’s a leading light in the serverless community, an AWS Hero, and a gosh-darned treasure.

Twitter: @FarrahC32

Florina Muntenescu

Why to follow: Florina is an Android developer advocate at Google, working out of the company’s London office. Prior to that, she was a senior Android software developer at the news app upday for Samsung, where she implemented a large scale refactoring of the entire app and represented upday as a speaker at several Android conferences and meetups.

Twitter: @FMuntenescu

Helen Anderson

Why to follow: Helen knows so much and does so much to share it. A data hero at AWS, she also works to promote others and help the tech community.

Dev.to: dev.to/helenanders26

Jenn Schiffer

Why to follow: Jenn is director of community @glitch, a community app- and web-building site, a tech humorist, lifestyle blogger, and (at least on Tuesday mornings) a variety streamer on Twitch.

Twitter: @jennschiffer

Twitch: twitch.tv/jennschiffer

GitHub: github.com/jennschiffer

Julia Evans

Why to follow: Julia is a software developer living in Montreal, Quebec, a regular speaker in the developer community, and publishes a collection of awesome free programming zines about systems and debugging tools.

Twitter: @b0rk

Website: https://jvns.ca/

Kat Cosgrove

Why to follow: Kat's acerbic wit has made me laugh more times than I can count. They also make cool Python stuff and encourage us to do the actual work to make tech more inclusive. They may or may not be Ian Coldwater.

Twitter: @Dixie3Flatline

GitHub: github.com/katcosgrove

Lesley Carhart

Why to follow: Lesley works in the threat operations center at cybersecurity firm Dragos, Inc. She specializes in digital forensics and finds the critical thinking and intuition that goes into understanding the many technical and human elements in security investigations to be the most enjoyable part of her work.

Twitter: @Hacks4pancakes

Michelle Noorali

Michelle is a senior software engineer at Microsoft, currently sits on the Kubernetes Steering Committee, and holds the Developer Seat on the governing board of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Twitter: @michellenoorali

GitHub: github.com/michelleN

Mina Markham

Why to follow: Mina is a senior engineer at Slack. She is a keynote speaker and a remarkably self-taught technologist. Mina worked on the Hillary for America campaign, where she developed the revolutionary user interface pattern library fittingly named Pantsuit.

Twitter: @MinaMarkham

Website: mina.codes

GitHub: github.com/minamarkham

Nočnica Fee

Why to follow: Developer Advocate at New Relic and an AWS Community Builder. You think I’m going to compile a list like this and not put myself on it? I’m one of the few people doing AWS development on Twitch.

Twitter: @ServerlessMom

Twitch: twitch.tv/serverlessmom

Pachi Carlson

Why to follow: Pachi is a developer relations engineer at New Relic. You can catch her streaming on Twitch Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 10 a.m. EST, and 7 a.m. PST.

Twitter: @pachicodes

GitHub: github.com/pachicodes

Twitch: twitch.tv/pachicodes

Parisa Tabriz

Why to follow: Parisa is head of product, engineering and UX, @googlechrome, Security Princess @google, and responsible for Project Zero.

Twitter: @laparisa

Wiki page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parisa_Tabriz 

Rachael Wright-Munn

Why to follow: Rachael, a senior developer relations engineer at New Relic, has been building software and web apps since 2012. Now she builds her open source vue/rails app live on Twitch.

Twitter: @ChaelCodes

Twitch: twitch.tv/ChaelCodes

Sarah Mei

Why to follow: Sarah is a software engineer and the founder of RailsBridge, which provides free workshops to learn Rails, Ruby, and other web technologies. These events aim to increase diversity in tech, so that people of all backgrounds can feel welcome and comfortable in the industry. She is an architect on the product design team at Salesforce.

Twitter: @sarahmei

But wait, there’s more!

Gender, as we all know, is a social construct. Here are two people we absolutely love in tech who are non-binary:

Ian Coldwater

Why to follow: They’re literally the smartest Kubernetes hacker on Earth; they’re always funny, unfailingly kind, and punk as h*ck. On a more personal note: seeing Ian be a parent while also maintaining a wild schedule of cool technical work and constant conference appearances made me more confident that I could do the same.

Mia Moore

Why to follow: Mia is a developer programs manager at New Relic. Before joining New Relic, Mia was a developer advocate at IBM and has a background in content creation, marketing, and community management. They are enthusiastic about good storytelling in digital content.

Twitter: @xoMiaMoore

Twitch: twitch.tv/xomiamoore

This post, originally published on August 10, 2018, was updated on March 24, 2021.