Category: Education
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A Man’s Guide to Helping Women in Tech
What can men do? Other than not harass women? Although not harassing is a surprisingly good start. TL;DR: Step 1 – Don’t drive women away. Step 2: Don’t stand by and watch other men drive women away. Step 3: Give women a reason to stick around. Step 1: Don’t Perpetuate Understand the range and extent…
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GHC13 – What Are You Going to Do Differently?
I have a bunch of posts to write up from GHC last week, which was as usual, awesome. But the question I was interested in people I went with answering was – what are you going to do differently when you get back? For me, it was a reminder about the takeaway I got from…
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Three Phases of Technical Women
Amongst other technical women, I’ve observed three broad phases when it comes to their feelings and attitudes with respect to the issues of women in tech. These are my unscientific and generalised observations. Ignorance is Bliss This phase is where women deny that there are any issues facing women in the industry, and sometimes even…
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Pycon AU: Planting Open Source Seeds
I found this talk by Kenneth Reitz one of the most interesting at Pycon. There was a comprehensive breakdown of the different strategies people take to create and nurture (or not) open source projects, and tales from maintaining them. You’re probably better to just read Kenneth’s notes, but for what it is worth – here are…
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Pycon AU: Making Python More Fun for Everyone
Interesting talk from the creators of SingPath – games to help people learn to code. Left me wanting to try the game! Some insights about women and what they find off-putting – nothing unexpected. Notes below: Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, purpose (Dan Pink’s book – Amazon). Want to extrinsically motivate people without killing…
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Book: Unlocking the Clubhouse
I’d heard about this book (Amazon) for a long time, but especially since I arrived here – the other women in the office are huge fans, and talked about it a lot. And I kept thinking I would get around to reading it, but no hurry, I’ve read a lot of the research, I think…
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Fighting Monsters
A long time ago, when I was training in China, I was struggling to learn a form correctly and my master threatened me with no food until I got it right. This seemed like a terrible idea, I mean, it was hard enough to focus and be physical on the small amount of food (mostly…
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Why I Cut Down On Public Speaking
Last year, I gave a lot of talks. I averaged about one a month, but it wasn’t spread out evenly. In October, I gave four talks. And then I stopped, and since then I’ve been putting off talks I intended to say yes to, or just outright saying no (I know, unlike me). There were…
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12 Angry Men
As part of the course I’m taking, we watched 12 Angry Men. I don’t watch many movies in general, and I’ve barely seen any black-and-white ones so it was weird. The whole movie was set in one room, and they showed the heat by having the men sweat copiously (like, wet faces, one guys shirt…