Now… lots of hype.. Anyway… What he said to me about RailsConf was what I had largely noticed. Most of the attendees are basically kids with little or no practical industry experience who think Ruby on Rails is the up and coming thing and want to ride that wave. Because the VB programmers got found out for the lousy coders they are and got rousted out of the J2EE developer community?? However, Java was hyped so badly when it came out that it really hurt the technology and my ability to evangelize it.
So much so in fact that for a while I was having a hard time finding work. I think it is more likely that there are other career options which many women find more appealing. Some of pull for the minds of women might be related to social norms, but perhaps a significant amount is impossed by ones own neurological wiring. Perhaps understanding what programming lacks as a career choice for women would point the finger of blame away from poor Matt and his brave but ultimately insoluble combination of skin with code.
I am a father of three and one coming. One boy and three girls. In her 20ties my wife was amazingly beautiful by all standards and she remains a very attractive woman today.
My little girls are precious gold and I teach my boy to be a man and respect the mother and his sisters — by extension, all women. So from this position, as a husband and a father, I find the slide show tasteless, debasing and offensive. This guy insults women and my family. It is not a behavior or a community I would associate with. I urge the rails community to make a stand against this behavior and marginalize this guy and others like him.
When people like these become parents, they most likely will understand the value of a clean heart. After 3. All the women in my team are there because they were a fit. What got them to come was the environment which made them feel welcomed, in fact, would make anyone welcomed.
After a few hires, the word got out on its own yes, people talk with each other , and overtime, more resumes would come in and we just grew organically. Work life balance — the model does not work for women, they need to also have time for their families 2. Ability to raise a family without losing career opportunities i.
A respectful environment of peers 5. Access to career growth up to the top 6. Freedom of choice 7. A highly collaborative and open space. Now, I find a lot of the rhetoric that was displayed in the past week to be double standards. The open-space community tries to differentiate itself from the corporate world, yet, some of the behavior we saw is just the same as corporate if not worst when it comes to women and diversity.
Women have been fighting for their rights for centuries, so this is not new, and if anyone thinks that it would never get back to what it was is sadly mistaken, all it needs is enablement, after all, if it was such an easy issue to solve, it would not be centuries old.
If anything, I am glad that this entire issue took us up in storm, it made us realize that the problem alive and kicking. Sarah, I really encourage you to drop the guy from the devchicks panel at RailsConf. Because having him there simply gives him another opportunity to sound reasonable. OK, very off the cuff commentary over and out. And watch me get flamed for bringing up Bobbitt even as a deliberately extreme example. Gee, why DO guys get so fired up about that? Misogyny has no place in a work environment.
Shame on Matt Aimonetti for his presentation and his behavior. It might be useful to stop demonizing Matt and treating him as though he was the anti-christ. I find Erik and his girlfriend to be wonderful human beings, period.
Fairly recently, at a conference for a different technology, I said hello to several of the women in attendance and in more than one case was treated as though I was an asshole for approaching them. I hate being beaten down because I make efforts to be friendly to everyone at events. When I do a presentation my goal is to communicate first, and express myself second.
This presentation is perhaps an example of where that might well have been mixed up. I know many parents choose to not let their boys play with dolls or their daughters play with firetrucks.
There are fields which have historically been female-dominated maybe consider being a man in the nursing field? The English language itself is rife with gender-bias. Why would this be? We have plenty of fantastic female faculty in CS one of them is now an assoc. Most of us pick up an interest in CS in high school and are looking into it by the time we are thinking of what college to apply to.
Thanks to everyone who has commented. Given the sudden interest, we may have to adjust our plans. But I am optimistic that it will provoke some good dialog. There are some really exciting projects arising from the ashes of this firestorm, for which I am surprised and grateful. More details later. Tim, I am a neuroscientist turned computer scientist and there is no evidence that men are hardwired to do better at math and science.
Computer Science is not yet viewed as a profession the same way medecin is, or other sciences. This is a much bigger issue overall. Funny enough, we get a log of our best developers from the feilds of science such as physics.
We all feel these pressures well before even applying to college. I understand your frustration, but I think everyone involved should have a chance for redemption.
That can only come through communication. Spock, for their part, was fairly quick to respond sensitively. I am a female in computer science. Yes, there is indisputably a huge gap in the numbers of males and females in CS.
Also, there is a difference between smart women such as those in CS and women in the porn industry, and men generally get this. Yeah, that was kind of offensive and really damn stupid. Kate, what exactly do you mean by this? There are two implications that I take strong issue with. One is that women in the porn industry are not smart. Many women end up in the porn industry after growing up in abusive or poverty-stricken households, after growing up in an environment that did not provide them the opportunities to develop the self-esteem, self-confidence, and education necessary to choose to pursue an intellectual career such as CS.
Porn superstar Asia Carrera is a Mensan. From hearing her tell her own story she chose to be in porn because she could make a TON of money quickly, retire young, and move on to do other things.
There are plenty of people in porn who enjoy it as an industry and way to make a living, regardless of the body parts they possess. There are smart and stupid people in every industry. BBC2 presenter Louis Theroux did a show about the porn industry which was pretty fascinating. As they say, it takes two to tango. I know programming books both bad and good.
I can stand up and say that Agile Web Development with Rails is pretty good. Python, Groovy, PHP, etc. Seriously, how stupid do you think we all are? That was painful. I can tell the freaking difference people.
This works and it works well. PHP is a ghetto. Rails is like suburban wannabe ghetto. I think most of the whiplash you are seeing is the tail end of the hype cycle.
ActiveRecord seems to be the biggest sticking point. I'm not calling the dude a script kiddie either. I was pointing out the more general pattern of the sentiments Zed has shown in his posts. Kevin's obviously done a lot of useful work for the Ruby and Rails communities and I respect him on that basis the same way I respect Zed for his open source contributions.
Didn't say he was a script kiddy. I'm glad that there are people who will stick up for him. I think you are confusing sys admins with network engineers. Maybe I'm confusing beggars with choosers. I think he was lamenting the fact that pg didn't call him out.
Why would pg call him out? There's one thing that just doesn't seem right about this rant, which I think will make his whole argument fall to pieces. Before he wrote mongrel, it seemed like he had a pretty decent working situation.
After he wrote mongrel, he was jobless and nearly homeless for an extended period if time. That just doesn't sit right with me as being truthful. How can a person, who is otherwise a qualified developer, write one of the most well-known pieces of the Rails infrastructure, but suddenly be jobless? I wrote a shitty weather app and got 3 gig offers within a day. How can you be a household name within the Rails community and not have a job?
By being an arrogant asshole? By demanding outrageous fees? By demanding outrageous control over projects? All three? I suspect his problem is geography. I haven't lived there, but I can imagine that in NYC when you deal with Rails shops you get to talk to sleazy "MBA types" as opposed to traditional startup hubs like SV and Boston, where you typically have no problems finding cool hackers to work with.
I am tired of people bashing the startup culture here in NYC, I believe there is a healthy community of startups in NYC anything from etsy, kaltura, tumblr, buglabs, amiestreet, delicious started in NYC , hakia, viewdle,teachthepeople,clickable, wixi, commandshift3, and more By way of disclosure, I make my living off of Ruby on Rails. I'm not a mover or shaker -- not on the core team, and at most, I hang out on the rubyonrails channels.
I never met Zed Shaw, but I have known of him as the creator of Mongrel. The interviews with him about Mongrel were always prefixed by the author that he talks bluntly with a lot of zingers. Guess that meant he was really foul-mouthed. I have also read through this entire, long rant. I can't say whether he was being truthful about not having a job as a result of Mongrel though I don't doubt it.
I do know a lot of the things he ranted about in the Rails community were true, from my perspective. I thought that looked pretty ugly the first time I saw it.
When it got finally fixed in the 1. It said that it was "fixed" because some servers like Mongrel could not handle it, suggesting that it was a result of some brokenness on Mongrel's part. If anything, it is probably the world's most standards-compliant HTTP implementation. The 'Ezra' referenced as the creator of Merb is widely known as the go-to guy to make your Rails deployment scale. I don't know about the cgi bug.
I do know making the cookies-based session key default is really weird. You can also look at the record on the number of rejected patches on the Rails tracker. The general consensus among the folks who try contributing stuff, but not on the core team, is that if they don't use it, it is unlikely to make it in. In a lot of ways, that is similar to the way Linus Torvald's works with Linux kernel devs, with the exception that every Linux core dev has their own repo you can pull off of as an alternative to the "official" Linux kernel.
Finally, the bit about passive-aggressive behavior. That's something I see in any grouping of techies and geeks. I try to avoid it where I can, but it still gets under my skin. My tendency is to confront the issue and then be done with it. The first part of Zed's rant seems full of hate, but the boxing ring strikes me as a good idea. A good friend of mine once explained to me about the passive-aggressiveness at the local university's lan-gamer's club. Two brothers took official positions in that student club.
The older one is passive-aggressive, and the younger one is just aggressive. I perfer hanging out with the younger one. Sure, he can go beserk but at least he's honest about it :- My friend told me the older brother was a better fit as the club president simply because he knows how use passive-aggressiveness effectively.
That in a group like that with a high percentage of passive-aggressive people, these guys will not respond to any social sanctions unless it is in passive-aggressive form. Which is also why I don't really hang out with the gamer's club. Meanwhile, the younger brother is more marginalized when it comes to influencing that group. I can say that I'm not surprised that Zed got marginalized like this, even after writing awesome code like Mongrel.
I have been hearing about Merb for a while on rubyonrails. After reading this article, I think it is about time to take a serious look at it. I don't want to give up Ruby, but Rails has always been a means to an end. It stunk the first time I saw it.
But the point is that just because it was a bad idea, doesn't mean Koz is categorically a bad developer, or that he's any of the things that Zed called him.
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