building your own rockstars
Yesterday was Ada Lovelace Day, and a number of people pledged to make entries about women in technology that they admire. I never know about or remember these things until I start seeing those posts come by, so mine's a little late...
I'll confess, my reminder about this came through reloading my standard search to see who's talking about Dreamwidth, because a number of people in my circle posted including Dreamwidth or people involved with Dreamwidth in their list. When xb95 and I started Dreamwidth, we agreed about many things, but one of the things we put very high up on the priority list was that the project would succeed or fail based on the community of contributors we could lure into playing with us. We both looked back at the history of LiveJournal's open-source development process, where it succeeded and where it failed; we looked at other Open Source projects to analyze the same; we looked at the history of LiveJournal's non-programming volunteer programs. I looked at the Organization for Transformative Works and how they lured people to the dark side set up their mentoring process.
One thing we saw, over and over and over again, was that the projects that succeed are not only the ones who are able to attract capable and passionate people, but the projects that are able to attract intelligent and motivated people who might not have as much experience and train them.
When we started this, we didn't explicitly think: we should concentrate on increasing the representational percentage of women contributing to an Open Source project. We were just looking for smart, capable, motivated people -- with or without experience -- who were willing to learn; we promised ourselves that we'd teach anyone who was interested, because we believe that the way to get good, solid contributors is to train them up yourselves.
But a weird thing happened. We looked around, and realized that an incredible percentage of our contributors, both new and experienced, were women. I honestly didn't realize it until Mark laughingly said that he was feeling outnumbered.
I've been a geek my entire life. When I was younger, I saw my grandmother, who had the hacker nature (she was an early adopter of Prodigy -- in her late sixties! -- and was the first in the family after us to own a computer and the first to own a computer with Internet access). I taught myself BASIC at age 11; I spent most of my teenage years in front of the keyboard. (How little things change.) I've been working in and around the field of technology for years.
I have had multiple moments in my professional life when I was harassed, denigrated, or simply ignored because of my gender presentation. I have never had a manager who was female; the only time I worked in a company with a female technical manager was when lisa was LJ's head of operations. In multiple jobs, at multiple companies, I have watched women who should have been promoted into senior levels of management passed over for men who were far less capable. I have been passed over for promotion into senior levels of management; I will never know how much of that was due to my gender and how much of it was due to other circumstances.
I am far from being the only one who can say this.
I am incredibly proud of the fact that Dreamwidth has managed to attract and retain so many talented people. I'm more proud of the fact that we've managed to build such a powerful and flexible mentoring program, where people with a lot of experience will bend over backwards to share their experience as widely as possible and people without a lot of experience will always take the time to share what they've learned and figured out.
The codebase we inherited from LiveJournal is complex, byzantine, and crufty; it grew organically over ten years, and it's a project of incredible complexity. We started off with a lot of barriers to entry: hardware/software requirements, multiple coding styles across the codebase, a maze of twisty little function libraries (not all alike, but very close), a number of interlocking, badly-documented custom languages/templating systems/secondary programs. (Let us not talk about BML. Please, let us not talk about BML.) If you asked me a year ago whether the LJ codebase was beginner-friendly, I would've laughed in your face. If you asked me a year ago whether I thought someone completely new to Perl could learn on Dreamwidth code, I would've said "hell no".
I just took a look at the 318 bugs we've resolved on the Dreamwidth project so far. Those 318 bugs were resolved by patches from 18 unique contributors. Twelve of them are women. Five of them have extensive programming experience; two have moderate-to-medium experience. The other five of us, me included, have never programmed in Perl before. There are others who are working on writing patches that haven't been committed yet; there are others who have just gotten their development environments set up for them and are working to teach themselves (with help) the basics.
The evidence that our mentoring program works is right there in the numbers. Every single contributor to the Dreamwidth project so far -- female or male, experienced or new -- has shared their information and their experience with anyone and everyone who needs it. We've managed to overcome all of those barriers to entry; we've managed to teach complete beginners on one of the most aggressively complex codebases I could possibly imagine. And we've had a hell of a lot of fun doing it.
So, for Ada Lovelace day, I name my list of women who inspire me in the field of technology: the women coders of Dreamwidth, whether experienced or just starting out. I have learned something from all of you. And I'm so incredibly thankful for everyone on the Dreamwidth project, their enthusiasm and their commitment to education and mentoring, but I'm proud of the fact that we've built a project where so many women can share their love of geeky things without having to face the kind of garbage that's so prevalent in the Open Source world and in the general professional/technical world at large, because I think that is fucking kickass.
I am inspired by:
* Afuna (afuna)
* Abby (aveleh)
* Dre (exor674)
* Fey (foxfirefey)
* Isabeau (isabeau)
* Jade Lennox (jadelennox)
* Janine (janinedog)
* Juliet (julietk)
* Owl (thewhiteowl)
* Phoenix (phoenixdreaming)
* Rho (rho)
* Sophie (sophie@dreamwidth)
* Stacey (chasethestars)
* Ursie (ursamajor)
* ...and every single woman who is looking at our development environment, our list of hosted developers, or our list of open bugs and thinking: I bet I could do that.
You can. We'll help.
I'll confess, my reminder about this came through reloading my standard search to see who's talking about Dreamwidth, because a number of people in my circle posted including Dreamwidth or people involved with Dreamwidth in their list. When xb95 and I started Dreamwidth, we agreed about many things, but one of the things we put very high up on the priority list was that the project would succeed or fail based on the community of contributors we could lure into playing with us. We both looked back at the history of LiveJournal's open-source development process, where it succeeded and where it failed; we looked at other Open Source projects to analyze the same; we looked at the history of LiveJournal's non-programming volunteer programs. I looked at the Organization for Transformative Works and how they lured people to the dark side set up their mentoring process.
One thing we saw, over and over and over again, was that the projects that succeed are not only the ones who are able to attract capable and passionate people, but the projects that are able to attract intelligent and motivated people who might not have as much experience and train them.
When we started this, we didn't explicitly think: we should concentrate on increasing the representational percentage of women contributing to an Open Source project. We were just looking for smart, capable, motivated people -- with or without experience -- who were willing to learn; we promised ourselves that we'd teach anyone who was interested, because we believe that the way to get good, solid contributors is to train them up yourselves.
But a weird thing happened. We looked around, and realized that an incredible percentage of our contributors, both new and experienced, were women. I honestly didn't realize it until Mark laughingly said that he was feeling outnumbered.
I've been a geek my entire life. When I was younger, I saw my grandmother, who had the hacker nature (she was an early adopter of Prodigy -- in her late sixties! -- and was the first in the family after us to own a computer and the first to own a computer with Internet access). I taught myself BASIC at age 11; I spent most of my teenage years in front of the keyboard. (How little things change.) I've been working in and around the field of technology for years.
I have had multiple moments in my professional life when I was harassed, denigrated, or simply ignored because of my gender presentation. I have never had a manager who was female; the only time I worked in a company with a female technical manager was when lisa was LJ's head of operations. In multiple jobs, at multiple companies, I have watched women who should have been promoted into senior levels of management passed over for men who were far less capable. I have been passed over for promotion into senior levels of management; I will never know how much of that was due to my gender and how much of it was due to other circumstances.
I am far from being the only one who can say this.
I am incredibly proud of the fact that Dreamwidth has managed to attract and retain so many talented people. I'm more proud of the fact that we've managed to build such a powerful and flexible mentoring program, where people with a lot of experience will bend over backwards to share their experience as widely as possible and people without a lot of experience will always take the time to share what they've learned and figured out.
The codebase we inherited from LiveJournal is complex, byzantine, and crufty; it grew organically over ten years, and it's a project of incredible complexity. We started off with a lot of barriers to entry: hardware/software requirements, multiple coding styles across the codebase, a maze of twisty little function libraries (not all alike, but very close), a number of interlocking, badly-documented custom languages/templating systems/secondary programs. (Let us not talk about BML. Please, let us not talk about BML.) If you asked me a year ago whether the LJ codebase was beginner-friendly, I would've laughed in your face. If you asked me a year ago whether I thought someone completely new to Perl could learn on Dreamwidth code, I would've said "hell no".
I just took a look at the 318 bugs we've resolved on the Dreamwidth project so far. Those 318 bugs were resolved by patches from 18 unique contributors. Twelve of them are women. Five of them have extensive programming experience; two have moderate-to-medium experience. The other five of us, me included, have never programmed in Perl before. There are others who are working on writing patches that haven't been committed yet; there are others who have just gotten their development environments set up for them and are working to teach themselves (with help) the basics.
The evidence that our mentoring program works is right there in the numbers. Every single contributor to the Dreamwidth project so far -- female or male, experienced or new -- has shared their information and their experience with anyone and everyone who needs it. We've managed to overcome all of those barriers to entry; we've managed to teach complete beginners on one of the most aggressively complex codebases I could possibly imagine. And we've had a hell of a lot of fun doing it.
So, for Ada Lovelace day, I name my list of women who inspire me in the field of technology: the women coders of Dreamwidth, whether experienced or just starting out. I have learned something from all of you. And I'm so incredibly thankful for everyone on the Dreamwidth project, their enthusiasm and their commitment to education and mentoring, but I'm proud of the fact that we've built a project where so many women can share their love of geeky things without having to face the kind of garbage that's so prevalent in the Open Source world and in the general professional/technical world at large, because I think that is fucking kickass.
I am inspired by:
* Afuna (afuna)
* Abby (aveleh)
* Dre (exor674)
* Fey (foxfirefey)
* Isabeau (isabeau)
* Jade Lennox (jadelennox)
* Janine (janinedog)
* Juliet (julietk)
* Owl (thewhiteowl)
* Phoenix (phoenixdreaming)
* Rho (rho)
* Sophie (sophie@dreamwidth)
* Stacey (chasethestars)
* Ursie (ursamajor)
* ...and every single woman who is looking at our development environment, our list of hosted developers, or our list of open bugs and thinking: I bet I could do that.
You can. We'll help.