Or people did not know, and were indifferent to, her gender and used the male pronoun because that is the correct grammatical structure when the gender is unknown.

I certainly never pay the slightest bit of attention to the gender of people I read. Does it make any difference?

On someone's personal blog, if you're going to comment, and the person's name and photo is right there, it's about the same as addressing a female in person as "Sir" (or in this case, "dude")

"Dude" works for women. How else are you going to call a female person in her late twenties? "Woman" is way too formal for many settings, "girl" can imply that you think she's not mature, and "gal" is just... no.

If anyone has a better alternative, do tell. I'm not too pleased with "dude" either.

Either be more specific (you, hacker, engineer, etc) or less specific (person, or leave off the pronoun?)? I mean, I don't think any of this is that important, and saying things like "the elevator has a 10 man capacity" is fine, but there is no reason not to try to be accurate when it costs little.

Your choices are: dudette, dudess, or dudine.

Miss.

> used the male pronoun because that is the correct grammatical structure when the gender is unknown.

According to the prestige dialect, yes. Not according to most of the more common dialects of English.

Oh? And what is the correct pronoun in that case?

'They', even in the singular.

I assumed the same. Then when I scrolled up to see who the author was I was pleasantly surprised that it's a woman who writes about this. (You usually only get to read meta-social-stuff posts from women.)

The bigger surprise was that she was self taught. (The surprise would be just as big if the author was a man.)

Well it's funny/sad if the commenters are not finnish, because 1919 windy@pentti~/koodi/redsea ) ./redsea.pl | grep TMC

Pentti is a finnish males' name not a womans' name, I was really confused when I found out in comments she is she not he.

Pentti is my computer.

What's Finnish for "horde of stalkers because I'm female and write about tech"?

Name a server after Simo Häyhä?

Making reasonable assumptions about that customized prompt:

Her host is named Pentti. Her username is windy. Her files are in ~/koodi/redsea (koodi = code).

(I usually have "ryan" as a username on unix hosts, so rather than putting my username in the prompt on every line, I just put a % if it's that, or a # for root, or ! for something nonstandard (like a role account, or one of the systems where I don't have my normal username.))