International Women's Day: Celebrating all the women in the LLVM Community!
Today is International Women's Day! To all the women in the LLVM community, thank you for all your contributions!
The LLVM Foundation values diversity within the LLVM community and the field of compilers and tools. Our Women in Compilers and Tools program began in 2015 with a birds of a feather discussion during the US LLVM Developers' Meeting and we have been expanding it over the years.
In 2017, we were a sponsor of the Grace Hopper Conference. With the help of community members Anna Zaks and David Blaikie, the LLVM Foundation had a booth at the career fair to introduce women to LLVM and encourage them to become contributors. It was very exciting to learn that many women knew of LLVM, were using it in their classes or research, using it in their career, or were interested in learning more. We hopefully encouraged more women to get involved with LLVM, compilers, and open source.
The LLVM Foundation was also a sponsor of the Programming Language Mentoring Workshop at SPLASH 2017. Our sponsorship went towards the travel costs for many women and other minorities to attend this workshop. The workshop focused on encouraging and preparing students to enter research careers in the field of programming languages, compilers, and related fields and to provide first hand perspectives on graduate school.
We hosted our first Women in Compilers & Tools reception before the 2017 US LLVM Developers' Meeting. Anna Zaks and Alice Chan participated in a panel discussion about the challenges and experiences that they have encountered in their careers and within the open source community. The event was attended by 60 members of the LLVM community.
In 2018, we look forward to another year of expanding our program. The LLVM Foundation will again sponsor the Grace Hopper Conference and we are looking for LLVM community members to help out at the career booth (more details to come). We will be having two Women in Compilers and Tools events. The first will have a reception and panel discussion before the 2018 EuroLLVM Developers' Meeting. Get your tickets here. The second will be before the 2018 US LLVM Developers' Meeting and details will be announced in the coming months.
The LLVM Foundation thanks the LLVM community and its sponsors for supporting this work. If you want to participate in the discussion or receive notifications on events, please join the Women in Compilers and Tools mailing list.
Question for the LLVM Foundation? Email us at llvm-foundation@lists.llvm.org.