Ada Lovelace Day is a brilliant concept, executed brilliantly on the web.

Suw Charman-Anderson is a woman working in technology, in social media consultancy and journalism. One day, she got angry. Angry about how woman working in technology felt disempowered, ignored, objectified by the very community of tech professionals they work in. And when Suw got angry, she got blogging. And twittering. And PledgeBanking.

The concept was simple. Inspired by the idea that women in tech needed more female role models (backed up by some peer reviewed research ), she thought about getting 1000 people to talk about “a woman in technology whom they admired” – a role model. And on a very small budget, using all the social media tools available, she got, as of 1,907 people to pledge, and 754 (755 when I finish this) to blog. Computer Weekly, the Guardian, (and again ), the Science Museum, the Wellcome Library, and even the Royal Society got involved.

And me. So who’s a woman in technology I admire?

Well, this is where it gets tricky. I am, and have been for a while, a fan of Ada. As someone with a computer science degree (then I drifted), I’ve always been interested in the history of computing, and the characters that fill that. Ada Lovelace writ large in that. She (and Charles Babbage too) certainly sounded like someone it would have been fun and interesting to know.

And that’s when I realise that when it really comes to it, the people I really admire aren’t those in the distant past, but those I’ve interacted with, those I have got to know well. And when I think about what this Ada Lovelace Day is about – the abject and implicit sexism, the lack of visible role models and the vestiges of the past when the only piece of technology that a woman was meant to use was a stove – the women in technology I really admire, are those that I know. Especially the women on my computer science courses, the three or four per lecture who stuck out in a sea of male faces – Hiroko, Doris, Katherine, Kate, Christine, who made it through to the end, and who are now all working in technology.

If I had to pick one, I’d pick Kate. Kate’s not only a brilliant computing teacher in a pretty tough secondary school, but also because she’s doing fab teaching stuff in Second Life in her “spare” time. And it’s the former that swings it for me in the invidious “pick a favourite” nature of the pledge. She’s a role model to the kids in her class: being a woman who can do stuff with computers and have a life too.

And she was the one who persuaded me to blog. So she’s even been a role model to me.