605 karma · joined December 9, 2008
https://fiasco.social/@selenamarie
There's a great quote in http://computinged.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/playing-the-card... about relevance of instruction:
"Students abandon classes that they perceive as being irrelevant to them."
App Camp is obviously relevant and is targeting an age group that is vulnerable to permanently dropping out of math and computer-related education.
What I've seen in the Postgres community is a group of developers that takes an aggressive stance against companies "taking advantage" of the developer community. Companies that invest both time and money in development get far more attention for their patches than companies that try to either throw code over the fence, or do "drive by" development projects.
Tom deciding to take this job indicates to me that it is because Salesforce is making a significant investment in open source Postgres.
My hope is that people see these statements for what they are: disgusting personal attacks.
http://adainitiative.org/2012/09/when-sex-and-porn-are-on-to... (This post predates the BSides incident by 5 months.)
And, about BSides:
http://adainitiative.org/2013/02/keeping-it-on-topic-the-pro...
http://adainitiative.org/2013/03/clarification-on-the-ada-in...
And to be fair: http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=mysql
PostgreSQL major versions are represented by the first two digit groups of the version number, e.g., 8.4. PostgreSQL minor versions are represented by the third group of version digits, e.g., 8.4.2 is the second minor release of 8.4. Minor releases never change the internal storage format and are always compatible with earlier and later minor releases of the same major version number, e.g., 8.4.2 is compatible with 8.4, 8.4.1 and 8.4.6. To update between compatible versions, you simply replace the executables while the server is down and restart the server. The data directory remains unchanged — minor upgrades are that simple.
As stated in the announcement and Tom's email to -hackers, the reasons for advanced notifications are as follows:
* People watching for vulnerabilities and contributors are going to notice that we've stopped automatic updates -- it's better for our project to just tell them all why
* Upgrading relational databases is often not trivial -- we want to give our users time to schedule an upgrade rather than just dropping an important update suddenly
https://twitter.com/jessenoller/status/314417532842950656
This is just awful. And the people who are taking part in the harassment are responsible, not anyone else.
It's an unfortunate fact that speaking up often has far more downside than upside for women professionally. It's only recently I think that women have had enough status in the tech community to speak up and not be a) blacklisted or b) harassed by whoever they spoke up to. Clearly, this thread demonstrates that lots of people still feel that their ability to say whatever they want, whenever they want, trumps all. It makes me sad, to say the least.
This is a big community, and I hope you find a new job soon. If there's something I can do to help, you can ping me on twitter or gmail.
Basically, it comes down to helping someone who is part of a cultural minority maintain their identity (in this case, women's culture) while they are dipping a toe into the waters of the different culture. That's why groups like PyLadies are useful and important.
The research supporting creating these groups is why I believe they ultimately will work to increase the number of women involved in open source, and the tech world in general.
Now we just have to collect data about what we're doing that works and what doesn't, and try to spread the knowledge as fast and as far as we can.
I will bring this up with all PyLadies - but for my part, yes! We don't have a global charter, so I will seek clarification on this and express my opinion.
The wording that I have tried to use is "primarily woman-identified" or "not primarily male-identified". If you have better wording suggestions, please share!
It would be so cool to have campus groups. I'll bring that up to the other organizers. There are a handful of students who already come to the Portland group. We should figure out some ways of capturing the imagination of more students.
Here's some reading that might help you get started with educating yourself:
* http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/mar/22/techno...
* http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/business/global/measures-p...