Browsing all posts in "life"

someone get me a command line

Over on the Diversity in Python list (on which I am largely lurking, for reasons both various AND sundry), the question was raised: What brought you to Python? When you got to the fork in the road, what made the The Python Way more attractive than all those other ways? The people? The projects? The Django pony at the end of the rainbow? The assumption was that there was, somewhere, at some point, a decision that had to be made, and we pythonistas at least have that decision in common. After all, here we are.

Me, though, I never really made that decision. I went to journalism school (for what I believe is one of the only reasons people go to journalism school, which is to save the world). Yeah, while I was there, I built some websites and enjoyed it, but it was always a means to an end, always just another thing I could put on my resume for when I had to go out and get a real job. One of the almost-real jobs I had was at Playboy. I fell in with the programmer types on the pay site, and we stayed in touch, and when that internship was over, I went off to save the world.

Except that I didn’t have the stomach for world-saving. Working as a reporter in a courthouse on Chicago’s south side was grindingly, soul-crushingly depressing, and sometimes I still marvel that I came out of that alive. Illinois has the death penalty, and so I sat through murder trials that I still can’t talk about, and then sat through them all over again as people took the stand to explain why more death would make everything better. I realized that I could do it, if I wanted to; I could shut down the part of myself that threw up in the courthouse bathroom before calling the newsroom with my story. But I didn’t really like the person I would have had to become to do that, and so I walked away from hard-news journalism.

So then I thought, okay! Maybe science! Science can totally save the world! And anyway, mainstream reporting of the sciences often isn’t very good. So I did that for a while, working as a writer and editor for various scientific institutions and publications. It was fun and it was interesting and I loved going to work every day and learning new things and talking to amazing people and looking at experiments.

But in the end, I realized that I can’t write for a living. I can’t do it. It makes me insane, hollows out all the parts of myself I need to get through my day, leaves me empty and aching and scraped raw. Other people can do it — thank god — but I can’t. I can’t do deadlines, and I can’t do regular contributions to anything, and if I am to write, I have to do it on my own time and my own terms. I do, however, have to do it.

So, there I was, 20-something and lost, and those guys I’d fallen in with at Playboy (remember them?) had gone to a different company, and there was a part-time job opening for a contractor to come in and do straight black-box manual testing of websites. Okay, sure. I can totally click links, and I can blow my paycheck on ice cream and comic books, and everything will be super. Two things became clear quite quickly: One, they needed someone full-time, and two, clicking links is stupid. There must be a way to automate this. And there is! It’s called twill, and it’s written in python; what else do I need to know? Quick! Someone get me a command line.

And that gets me back to the beginning of this post: There wasn’t really a decision. I got a job, and I needed this tool to do my job, and here I am. It’s pretty nice here. I have the good fortune to work with many great pythonistas at my job, people to keep me interested and motivated and tell me when my ideas or code (or both) are full of shit. Many of them are active and involved with The Python Community.

When I put my roll-call for women in python, I really wasn’t sure what to expect. But the comments on that post, and conversations I’ve had about it have led me to believe that there are a lot more women using python than people think. But are we in python? Are we active and involved members of the community? Known and respected and liked (or, I suppose, loathed)? A few, yes, but not many. Why is that?

Me, I’m on the fringes. I could certainly become more involved if I were so inclined (and sometimes I am). But there are a few things keeping me where I am.

Communities are hard work. Participating is emotionally exhausting, and dev communities are largely based in mediums I don’t really enjoy all that much. I hate mailing lists. I swore off IRC sometime in the 90s. It drives me crazy to have to follow 270 different blogs and subscribe to RSS feeds for comments so I can follow conversations, or constantly refresh pages having discussions that I care about. Being in The Python Community (or, I assume, any dev community) is incredibly time-consuming, and I don’t have a lot of time. The Second Shift phenomenon is well-known, but for me, it’s more like my Fifth Shift.

And so, if I’m going to get involved, there need to be rewards. And there totally are. Support and encouragement for my projects. Answers to my questions. New friends. New ideas. New, better technologies. Cool software. Exciting travel opportunities and informative conferences. Possible job opportunities. The sheer joy of the thing itself, of a single, elegant line of code, of starting from nothing and building something cool, building something that works and that people can use and love and share.

I don’t know what other people get out of it. I assume others have similar reasons. (My straw poll on twitter largely confirmed this for me.)

But because I’m a woman, I get other stuff, too: Constant questions about where the other women are, sexist comments on this blog any time I post, demands on my patience and my time to answer questions about what I’m doing, how and why I’m doing it, what is this whole “feminism” thing all about anyway, what about the mens, and on and on and on. For me, wading into the python community ends up being only a little about python, and a lot about women — whether I want it that way or not.

Usually, I don’t. I announced at the last pycon that the first dude who asked me where were all the women was going to get punched in the face. I managed to largely avoid the conversation, but it was hard work, and it kept me pretty cut off. I stuck with the guys I already knew, and I didn’t go to any parties or meet many new people or do much of the social stuff that makes pycon so awesome. I still had a good time, but it was a very controlled good time.

To be an active part of any community, python included, you have to want it. You have to love it and sometimes you have to hate it, but mostly, you have to want whatever it is you get out of it. And if you’re part of an under-represented group and you want to play, you’d better also want to save the world, because that’s the assumption everyone is going to make. You’re going to be the token, the anomaly, the exception to the rule, and people are going to ask you about it, and heaven help you if you don’t want to discuss it. They’ll call you names under their breath (affectionately) and roll their eyes (fondly) and pat you on the head (sweetly) and ask why you’re so emotional (seriously).

It’s hard, is what I’m saying.

Is it worth it? I don’t know. I cannot and will not speak for other women. For me, sometimes, yes, it’s worth it. I’m not opposed to work, and I neither expect nor want everything to be easy. But sometimes it’s not worth it. Sometimes I tell all my mailing lists to stop sending me mail and I quit out of my RSS reader and I pause twitter until I can breathe again. Maybe I knit a hat or read a book or study French or write a story or go to a play or hang out with my friends. Sometimes I pull back for a day, sometimes for a month. There’s no shortage of activity or community in my life, just a shortage of sleep.

I keep losing track of the point of this post. What am I even trying to say? I’m not sure I know. Communities are difficult. Being actively involved with python is a lot of work, all those lists and feeds and conferences and blog posts to write and conversations to have. It’s not remotely surprising to me that there are so many women using python without engaging with the community, awesome as it is. Maybe they use it at work, like I do, and they can get support and encouragement and help from coworkers. They can read everyone else’s blog posts for fresh ideas and new technologies. They use python like they use Firefox, as just another tool to get the job done, whatever the job may be. Maybe they have all the friends they need. Maybe they’d rather spend their time writing software than answering questions about feminism (or any other *ism). Maybe they don’t want it badly enough. I can’t hold that against anyone; I’m often in that boat. I’m sure everyone is, about something.

So if my point is (and I am pretty sure this is my point!) that dev communities are difficult and time-consuming, and moreso for under-represented groups, what can we do about it? [Please note that I am completely uninterested in explaining why we should care, and I'm not going to engage with anyone who thinks under-represented groups should just stay under-represented.] And that’s where, I’m afraid, I’m out of words. The diversity list is kicking around some pretty good ideas about this, like Python Open Mike for people who don’t want to (or can’t) maintain their own blogs. So that’s awesome. Is the wiki useful enough? Should there be better newbie guides? Is there some kind of This Week In Python thing that people can subscribe to for an idea of what’s going on in the community without drowning in Planet Python? Would that even be useful? Are there community-building and maintaining technologies out there that are better than mailing lists and irc channels and far-flung blogs? What else can we do to make engaging less of a pain in the ass?

inaugural post

Hello! I have no real clue what I plan to do with this site, but I figured I should have one. It took me a while to get this wordpress theme to do what I wanted it to do (and, in fact, it still doesn’t, but whatever! I have moved on); I think it’ll do for now. I even think it looks pretty okay, although I haven’t looked at it on a PC. I will be singularly unsurprised if it breaks in IE.

And because I know you’re all dying to know what I’ve been up to, I spent a fair amount of time editing, writing and reorganizing the nose documentation for the .11 release, which came out last week. With that out of the way, I plan to get back to work on twill, which I have been avoiding. I don’t know when .9.2 will come out, but if I have my way (and haven’t forgotten how to code), it should be in the relatively near future.

Other than that, I’ve been doing my usual thing: reading too much Shakespeare, watching too much television, and eating too many Dunkin’ Donuts breakfast sandwiches.