Astrid

Memories of Ada (by Astrid)

 
I first met Ada before I actually met her. And that was through her standing up at TGIF and asking a question that challenged our leadership in regard to investing ourselves into helping those who might need technology support more than anyone else. Ada told her personal story in front of Google at that TGIF QA and her quest was one of the moments that motivated me personally the most to invest my very best into accessibility and making technology work for everyone including all the people who have ALS. I also cried when she spoke. Remotely while watching. And I remember how I told others about that inspirational engineer from YouTube who got up in front of Larry and Sergey and raised her voice for many others.
 
A few weeks later Eve introduced us to Ada in person. Ada was joining our team. From the very first moment Ada enriched the team with her humor, her smile and her great thoughts, ideas and engineering work. While it was painful to see how she lost more and more of her mobility and abilities, it was inspiring to see how she managed it.
 
And Ada didn’t only manage herself, she even continued to work. Dasha developed under her leadership further because she was the user herself. I know it gave her strength to know that she spent her time and energy on developing a product that will help many other people in similar conditions. And I hope it will give you comfort to know that your mother, partner and friend was a highly respected engineer that we as her last team will never forget and that people who have never met her would say thank you to if they could for all her great work in the space of accessibility.
 
Ada’s email signature always contained a smiley at the end. And that is how I remember her.
 
— Astrid was Ada’s coworker at the Accessibility Engineering team at Google