Archive for February, 2010
Women in Startups
Sunday, February 28th, 2010Sarah Tavel has a good data-backed post about the general dearth of women in startups, and how the gender balance in a startup changes if the CEO is female. It would be fascinating to repeat the measurements for open source projects...
Humanitarian Free & Open Source Symposium
Sunday, February 28th, 2010The second annual HFOSS is taking place March 10 in Milwaukee (along with SIGCSE 2010). F&OS communities helped save a lot of lives after the Haiti disaster, and many of the social and technical tools developed for it (and earlier, Katrina) are being used right now to help Chile; hope ...
Summer of Code 2010
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010Google Summer of Code 2010 is now up and running. Mentoring organizations can apply March 8-12, and students can apply March 29-April 9 (but should start working on their applications as soon as the list of organizations is announced). The University of Toronto has always been a strong presence in ...
Times Nine in a Year
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010A talk I'd really like to see: Moving the Needle: How the San Francisco Ruby Community got to 18% In January 2009, the monthly San Francisco Ruby meetings averaged 2% women. In January 2010, they averaged 18%. What happened in a year to make such a big difference? Over the last year, Sarah ...
I Will Buy You Dinner…
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010...if you will translate the examples from Freeman and Pryce's excellent book Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided by Tests from Java into Python. There are already translations into Ruby, Scala, C#, and Groovy, and if I could find a few hours I'd tackle it myself, but I can't, so I'm offering ...
Kafka and American Airlines
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010We were an hour and a half late getting into Toronto on Sunday after PyCon: the de-icers on the first plane out of Chicago weren't working, so they had to put us on another one. Fair enough, but after we landed and taxied up to the gangway, the doors didn't ...
Twitter Makes Rhinos Of Us All
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010In Last Chance to See (the best book he ever wrote), Douglas Adams wondered what the world "looks" like to rhinos. Their nasal membranes are larger than their brains, but they have terrible eyesight. As a result, they would see Douglas like a poorly-rendered sprite on a low-res computer screen, ...
PyCon 2010
Sunday, February 21st, 2010It's a sunny Sunday morning in Atlanta, and I'm on my way home. I came down Thursday to: Raise money for Software Carpentry. Get people excited about Basie. Get people excited about UCOSP. Talk with Georgia Tech's Mark Guzdial about computer science education. #4 actually happened first. Mark picked me up Friday morning; we chatted ...