Blazing The Trail For Female Programmers

Sarah Allen has been the only woman on a team of computer programmers a few times in the more than two decades she has worked in the field. Most notably, she led the team — as the lone female programmer — that created Flash video, the dominant technology for streaming video on the Web.

Allen got interested in computers when she was 12. Her mom was one of the first women to sell the Apple II, and she brought one home. Allen read the manual and taught herself to write simple programs. She says it seemed like magic to her: "I could wave my hands, and I could create this pattern in the machine, and then this thing exists that didn't exist before."

"If you're interviewing people for your job, and you haven't interviewed a woman, don't hire until you've at least interviewed one woman. And if your recruiter can't get you resumes that are diverse, find another recruiter," she says.

When asked if she has ever experienced sexism, Allen doesn't want to talk about it in those terms.

"I don't think you can be a woman in our society and not experience sexism, so, sure, but that's not the point," she says.

Sarah Allen’s reflections on internet software and other topics

Blazing The Trail For Female Programmers
A little over four years ago, Allen founded Blazing Cloud, which does design and development of software for mobile devices. The company's mix of 10 programmers and designers work with entrepreneurs and help them take an idea and turn it into software that works.

Recently they met with Estee Solomon Gray, the founder of a company called Mmindd. Solomon Gray is trying to create a sort of next-generation calendar that better reflects people's priorities. Allen and her team help Solomon Gray visualize what her software might look like. Allen will then help Solomon Gray design and build a product.

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Since they began in 2009, the workshops — they call them RailsBridge — have drawn thousands of women, among them Lillie Chilen. Chilen was an art history and opera major in college. A lot of programming workshops felt uncomfortable.



Now, Allen is also working with minority groups such as Black Founders to teach more people Ruby on Rails.

"If we persist in this notion that the people who should be making software in our world are these people with low social skills who are hard to understand, we're going to miss the boat," Allen says. "We're not going to be able to solve the problems we need to solve if we don't have just lots of people who know about the rest of the world."
 On the wall of Allen's office is a large photo of the ENIAC computer from 1946