by, for, and about women in science, technology, engineering, & math

The punchline: new to free and open source software development? Want help getting started? Come to the OpenHatch open house tonight, Sunday October 10th, at 8:30pm Pacific: https://openhatch.org/blog/2010/learn-more-sunday-monday-office-hours/

In full:

Free and open source software (FOSS) projects need all kinds of help — everything from coding and documentation to artwork and translation to helping users, encouraging new volunteers, and getting funding.

Contributing to FOSS projects is awesome for many reasons. It’s a great way to develop your software engineering skills and proficiency in a programming language. It’s a great way to gain experience with real-world development environments (revision control systems, patches, test frameworks, automated testing and build farms, communication media like IRC, release cycles, writing and maintaining documentation…the list goes on and on). It’s also a great way to meet new, smart, interesting people.

For many people, the biggest hurdles are 1) finding a first project to work with, and 2) getting comfortable enough within a project community to make the leap to speak up for the first time (be it submitting a bug report or patch, helping someone, or asking for help). If this resonates with you, have a look at OpenHatch: https://openhatch.org/

OpenHatch helps you find projects, bugs, and people in the open-source community. Browse projects matching your criteria. Tell projects you want to help and have them work out assignments that make sense for your skill set. Browse bite-sized bugs to get your feet wet, and search for bugs by type or programming language. Find people near you who are also contributing. Become a mentor or mentee.

If you want to learn more about OpenHatch, come to their virtual open house, tonight, Sunday October 10th, at 8:30pm Pacific: https://openhatch.org/blog/2010/learn-more-sunday-monday-office-hours/

The open house is on IRC. If you want help getting started with IRC, or want to practice chatting using IRC before the open house, send me a stemming.org private message and I’d be happy to help.

• A She’s Geeky unconference is coming up at the end of October in New York City!

• Geek Feminism commenters suggest technical blogs to follow and women-friendly open-source projects to contribute to

• Via Leslie Hawthorn on Twitter, two guides for IRC for beginners! (If you don’t already know, IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat — it’s a simple chatroom technology that’s been around for a while. IRC channels are common communication methods for contributors of open-source projects and also often serve as forums where experienced users of programs or tools hang out ready to give technical help to new users. A lot of people new to IRC find it intimidating at first, but it ends up being pretty straightforward once you get used to it!)

• Jezebel rounds up the 10 most patronizing technology ads for women. Ew. Advertisers often justify stuff like this by saying that most women don’t really understand or care about the detailed technical specs of their devices, but guess what? Neither do most men! But tech ads for men still focus on devices’ power or speed, rather than their ability to store recipes.

• Tom Forrister writes about how after his gender transition to male, he finds that it’s a lot more common that he’ll be asked for technical help. I find stories like this fascinating — the differences people who gender transition experience in how they are treated before and after their transition, while still being essentially the same person with the same skills and interests, say a lot about how our society still makes so many assumptions based on gender or perceived gender (and not based on other qualities of the person). (Another telling example of stuff like this is the experience of Ben Barres — a scientist who, after his transition to male, started hearing comments like “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.”)