Having read some fascinating and inspiring blogs to mark Ada Lovelace Day I was inspired to write my own blog post. Ada was the daughter of Lord Byron and wrote the world’s first computer program in the 19th century. Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in science and technology. Rather than discuss specific achievements I thought I would share the top five forms of technology that I use in my work, in an effort to dis-spell the myth that science and technology is different for girls.

Evernote– even if they don’t actually use elephants to process the information Evernote is still pretty impressive. It is simply a virtual place to store “stuff,” from websites you have visited to a book you saw and keep meaning to buy. I take photos of things I need to remember and add them to Evernote and I can can see them from my mobile or my PC. The technology actually reads the text in any images so they are then searchable. Great for business cards you receive so you can search later. I find it is much closer to how my brain remembers things than the filing cabinet style of Windows Explorer and I can also access it anywhere. True genius and the basic version is free!

Agree A Date– not a dating site but a neat website that helps you organise a meeting or a social event without endless tooing and froing. You can set reminders, ask it to chase those who have yet to reply or have a web based page for open meetings. You can add a poll to the meeting so people can comment on the venue or decide the choice of biscuit for the meeting, or whatever you like. It saves me hours and is free for the low user version.

Project Clock – this is something you do have to pay for but for me it has paid for itself many times over. It is project time recording that is incredibly simple and helps me track both fees due to clients for time charged work and to track the actual time spent on lump sum projects. I have years of data and it makes pricing new work much easier. It isn’t a flashy system but has never crashed and is simple to use. The technical support is great as they respond in person to your emails and they have even added a feature that I asked for. If you are organised you can connect it to your accounts software so it knows how much to bill your clients, but I’ve not sorted that bit out yet!

Feedly– I read a number of blogs, have various RSS feeds and also some twitter searches and I view them all in one place via Feedly. You use your web browser to view your blogs and it looks like a magazine with thumbnails of the blogs you have yet to read. It is a stylish site and links well to Twitter, Posterous and Facebook.

NBS Software– This won’t be of interest to anyone outside the construction sector but I have used NBS Landscape to write my specifications for a number of years. It has built in quality assurance so you can’t miss out any details and the details are updated to reflect changes in British Standards or legislation. I have been lobbying them to produce a web based version for collaboration as for me that would be a great addition.

You can read more Ada Lovelace blogs here.