Stormy by name, not by nature

By Sam Varghese
Monday, 04 February 2008 19:56

Opinion and Analysis

Stormy Peters is the director of community and partner programmes at a Colorado company called OpenLogic; she was down in Melbourne to give one of the keynote addresses at the Linux conference which was held in Melbourne.
She looks anything but the archetypal nerd, and would easily pass for the the average businesswoman - in casual attire.

Her real name is Robyn but she hasn't been called that except for a while when she lived in Spain as a child. And she still doesn't know why her parents chose to call her Stormy. "I figure it's either really embarrassing, or a bit of a letdown. This is from before I was born, so it's nothing I did, I don't think."

As a child, she loved mathematics. "I always loved math, and when computers first came out - when I was first exposed to them - I really wanted one," she said. "And I begged and pleaded and finally got an Apple IIe and I had great fun playing with it. And then we moved to Spain and I left it in the States. So I had to beg and plead all over again.

"In the meantime, I bought a book on basic programming, and learned how to program in BASIC on a piece of paper and a pencil. I was just fascinated not so much by how computers worked, but by what you could do with a computer - the problems you could solve, the calculations you could make using the power of a computer. I still am. I'm fascinated by social networking, by the applications you can generate, and the things you can accomplish for people, using a computer."

Her parents encouraged her to pursue her interests. "My parents were really good at helping to foster any interest I had. I've always liked math, I liked computers and my dad would find people for me to talk to, and people to work with. For a long time I wanted to be a teacher for the blind and deaf and so my dad took me to schools for the blind and deaf. We have good friends still that are blind. So he was really good at fostering any interest and making sure I was exposed enough to people in that area or field or whatever, so that I could ask questions."

Peters went into computer science in college because taking mathematics would lead to becoming a teacher - not a profession she was too keen to enter. "What's interesting with me is that there were a lot of women in the first year, and a lot of them dropped out of the major after the first year. So they asked me to make a 'women in computer science' group and find out why. And I never did figure out why they all left. But I got a lot of support from the professors and other students to help figure out where the women were going," she said.