Kelsey Hightower is also notable as the man that pioneered the use of Kubernetes at many businesses through his book.
Marian Croak is the pioneer of VOIP and now heads SRE among other things at Google.
Mark Dean pioneered ISA which is still the leading standard today in industrial applications.
(Non-exhaustive list, but these are the programmers that are Black that I know of off the top of my head)
I'll caveat this with my own take: all these folks worked in what is in the industry referred to as Systems Engineering, which is very much still a "working man's" profession when compared to traditional software engineering and prior to things like SRE paid accordingly less. It's also how a lot of vets, POC, and people without degrees enter the industry.
Not refuting this take as it's accurate, but if you're looking for someone that's Black in early computing I'd recommend free software pioneer Brian Fox (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Fox_(computer_programm...) best known for inventing Bash.
Kelsey Hightower is also notable as the man that pioneered the use of Kubernetes at many businesses through his book.
Marian Croak is the pioneer of VOIP and now heads SRE among other things at Google.
Mark Dean pioneered ISA which is still the leading standard today in industrial applications.
(Non-exhaustive list, but these are the programmers that are Black that I know of off the top of my head)
I'll caveat this with my own take: all these folks worked in what is in the industry referred to as Systems Engineering, which is very much still a "working man's" profession when compared to traditional software engineering and prior to things like SRE paid accordingly less. It's also how a lot of vets, POC, and people without degrees enter the industry.