All posts by Julie

The question without an answer – Women in I.T.

Just Rambling

I think that the more people are willing to discuss the question with no answer, not just say what they think and walk away, but really discuss it, perhaps eventually we will have some understanding.

I love what I have been seeing in the past few days and the question is being discussed and asked in our blog community.

the question, of course, is why are there not more women programmers? Why don’t we see more women at summits/at conferences/publishing books/writing articles?

Here are a few of the things I’m seeing that are of interest.

1) “Why is this important?”  I wonder if Rob knows that I am not the only chick who actually counts how many women there are every time we walk into a room filled with programmers. It’s a totally fair question, Rob, and an important question to start a new round of discussions. I call this the Libertarian argument. I dated a guy who I had endless discussions with on questions like: “Why do women need a ‘Women in Business’ meeting? There isn’t a ‘Men in Business’ meeting!“

2) “Imagine how you would feel if…” Ted totally gets the “damn! I feel like an alien here” part of this.

3) “Why is the industry turning women away?” again from Ted. I also like to add to this “IS the industry turning women away? Actively? Passively? Is there something about women that keeps us away or at least on the outer edge?“

4) “Historical fact and the chicken & the egg theory” I love how Alex Lowe thinks in essay form. He is correct, in my mind, about the chicken & the egg theory, which I talked about in the interview that set off this latest dicussion.

5) “Tech is for the unemotional” Jason Mauss talked with his wife about this after thinking about it for a while himself (I love that…yeah Jason) and this was her instinct on why there aren’t more women in tech.

6) “12 men named Brian“ Nothing against Brian’s , really (btw, did you know about this re-release?). It was just that I tried to count how many women I could identify by trolling the list of speakers at TechEd. Granted, I bet I missed one or two. But I counted 12. And since the list was sorted by first name, I happened to notice that the largest collection of guys names was Brian (including one Bryan) and that, too, was 12. Which is where I came up with the statement that there are as many Brian’s speaking at TechEd as there are women.

Why do I care? Am I hoping to see pure equality in the tech field? 50/50? Heck no! I just want to make sure that there aren’t any misconceptions that actually prevent women who want to program from doing it. I think we hold ourselves back when we perceive that this is just not a field where women can be successful. Why do we perceive that? Well even if you don’t read my entire interview that was published on DevSource yesterday (where I talk about a lot of other things besides women in computing, by the way!) , at least read that last question and answer. I have already said what I think, there.

Jay Glynn – I’m outting you – he’s a TabletPC User

Tablet

Okay, another one out of the closet. Heh heh. Not really. Jay’s been doing pen based computing for 10 years and has a hot new Toshiba M200.

And here is the power of a developer who is “one with the tablet” – his company is rolling out 7,000 tablets (early 2005).

So from a guy who knows what he’s talking about to those of you who say “huh???”:

The biggest argument that is heard is that I can type faster then I can write. Well no kidding. Anyone that spends 15 hours a day in front of a keyboard should be able to type fast. Ink and speech are called “alternate” input, not the only input. Ink is just another way to interact with your computer. If you look at in that way, then you can start to see some of the advantages.

Jay – if you are going to TechEd, would you like to help me lead the Tablet PC BOF?

TabletPC Design Considerations BOF at TEchEd 2004

Tablet

Oh, and whadya know. I am also going to host a TabletPC BOF at TechEd!

Want to come drool on my TabletPC? Ummm – I’ll bring the protector sleeve. Want to see how easy it is to ink-enable your existing apps? Want to see what you can do beyond what the tablet already does by itself? Want to talk about some of the things you need to think about when you are designing for tablet pc use? Don’t get why I think Tablets are pretty cool? C’mon to the session.

I’m sure that I can convince a few other TabletPC people to bring their toys and experience with them, too.

But you gotta go vote if you want to see this happen.

Women Who Code BOF at TechEd 2004

Just Rambling

It looks like people are a suddenly little curious about either why there aren’t more women coding or why we aren’t aware of all of the women out there who are coding or some who just don’t understand why this is even an issue for many of us.

So, maybe this is a good time (or maybe a bad time?) to bring this up (heh heh) but I just HAPPEN to be running another Women who Code BOF at TechEd 2004. Why don’t you all just come to the session and we can talk just about this ONE topic for a little while. I would love to see some people who are wondering *why* we even care about this issue come to this session. Or just understand what some of us think these issues actually *are* rather than reacting based on something different.

It looks like they have worked out the the hiccups of dual servers, so go see all of the great BOF sessions so far and vote as you wish.

DevSource .NET Rock Star Interview

dotNET

This* is a humongous honor, especially since I am third in line after Chris Sells and Paul Vick.

I’m a little embarrassed by that title, but it’s just what the article is called.

I’ll be hanging around DevSource’s forums for a few days if you really want to harrass me or anything. It might be a good way to promote a few things, like BOFs at TechEd or whatever.

*that’s the home page link and of course that page will eventually change, so here is a more permanent link…

 

Jimmy Nilsson’s Test Driven Development VSLive presentation

Tools

Jimmy Nilsson presented on TDD at VSLive recently. He writes in his blog “a couple of guys told me that they love the idea of TDD, but they have a hard time getting started each time they try. One of them said that he had a couple of setters and getters, some add methods, and some calculations, but it’s very hard to know where to add tests.”

I understand this fully! It is something you need to cut out a large chunk of time to get started up in and I have never gotten very far. I do unit testing in .NET the hard way, still. Write a little code, compile and run the whole damned application. In VB6, you could run chunks of code from anywhere from the immediate window. But the way the CLR works, you can’t do that in .NET.

Jimmy postulates that the problem is very much like error handling. If you have already got a ton of your code written, it’s a real pain to plug in the TDD code after the fact. His advice is here. (same link as above)

Also, he talks about the presentaiton and posted the his transcript from his talk here.

 

John Bristowe on TechEd fashions…

Just Rambling

…and I thought it was only us chicks who worried about this stuff! I actually wore my first geek t-shirt ever in public at PDC – the “I’m blogging this” shirt. I even wore a t-shirt from the .net 1.0 shipping celebrations to my user group last month because it was kind of funny. It says “Ship, Shower and Shave. Well, the last two can wait”. It was a gift from the BCL team — I think in thanks for my .net namespace poem I wrote in January. That was a result of having the WinFX Developer PReview poster hanging on my wall for a while.