cwgem

I notice a few comments scattered about various parts of this thread so I'll try and address as much as possible here.

There seems to be confusion regarding the idea of a program to support female python developers. Why female developers? Why not male ones too? This is what is causing the confusion that there's some sort of discrimination happening. However that's not really the case, and you have to look at the whole picture to really see it.

So, there's a problem of equality in the workplace as a general philosophy. Sexism, Ageism, Racism, you name it. Taking from a Japanese proverb "He who runs after two hares will catch neither". In this case there's more than two hares, there's quite a lot in fact. So we have to break the problem down into manageable components. In this case someone decided to take the women in tech approach to the problem and focus on it. I'd consider it like taking someone with knowledge of databases and let them work on the database specific problems.

Now then, what exactly is the issue with women in the IT field? Up until the hiring chain and through the workplace experience, there are points to where women don't get the chance they should get. One reason is that people may not see engineering as a "female appropriate job", as though women should be working as secretaries or fashion designers. Another problem is fear. There is fear that going into a job a woman might get harassed or otherwise have difficulty fitting into a primarily male dominated environment. Start-ups for example often have laid back environments where the line between professional an personal gets somewhat fuzzy. Someone slips and lets out an inappropriate comment because they're having a conversation with another coworker which resembles a talk at a party, and are unaware that they're still in a professional environment. This becomes difficult.

So you have women who are trying to get their foot in the door, but are not sure how. That's why we need groups like this. First off we need people to show support. We need people to say "hey women in IT is possible, here's some of us that are doing it". We also need men in on this too so they can be educated on what women in IT may have to deal with and know what to avoid. They're also needed to show that not all guys have this thing against women in IT and that things can work out for the better. Finally we also need it so that women can do networking with companies that are more aware of the issues that women deal with in the workplace, and actively work to figure out how to deal with it.

This is why these sort of organizations need to be in place, and why they need to target women specifically. They need to see others like them working towards the same goal so they can achieve their dreams knowing they have support.

Now with that in mind there is point to watch out for, and what I believe is a valid concern. That is that we don't want the women in IT movement to become a "women are better than men" deal, we want it to become a "women should have the same opportunities as men". Equality is our main goal here. However, because of the environment I've mentioned above, we need groups that specifically target women to help the transition towards a more equality friendly environment.

Hope this gives a better sense of what's happening.

In general I make a resume targeted to the company I'm looking to apply for (or if it's a job site the type of position I'm most interested).

With that in mind I keep the main language that the company cares about front and center, and maybe a few supplemental languages if they are a multi-language shop. For specific positions I do research into what languages that position most requires. For sysadmin for example, I would most likely put Ruby (Chef/Puppet), perl (parsing, general scripting), and bash (general scripting).

If you really want to go into depth, there's always the interview for that.

I tend to take the open source project route. Basically I work on projects that interest me and take note of the companies that are major contributors to these projects. I find that, while not 100% the case, companies that allow their employees to work on open source projects tend to be a bit more developer friendly. It's how I found my current position that I'm quite happy with.

Granted this is for the IT sector, and you should always checkup on the company in more depth to ensure it's completely the right fit

Because the writer is accustomed to Python as their language of choice? Maybe it's a Python shop? What if they want to integrate it into their Django site?

If you're coming from a primarily Python background you won't just be waltzing right in and using CPAN modules right away. You have to understand the underlying language as well. Python and perl's object oriented systems for example are quite different (using Moose helps somewhat granted the person knows it even exists). Then there's the issue of understanding various contexts. These differences may take time getting used to depending on the level of the developer.

Python also supports regex as well, which can be useful for weird situations. Granted however it's not going to be as tightly integrated as perl. There's even a Natural Language Toolkit if you want to get really crazy with things.

TLDR: Right tool for the job should take environmental circumstances into account as well

Is there a print view or something of this article that doesn't make me feel like I've viewing the mobile version of this website? The text is squished into this narrow column from a confusing layout that it's annoying to read.

I checked over the reddit thread mentioned in one of the comments, and a few of the comments here, and notice people mentioning how outdated the information is.

Out of intellectual curiosity, what resources (books, sites, etc.) would be recommended for modern, best practices C++?

Well, I would say that something of a corporate patronage or making it big is a side effect of having a big idea that sells. If you want a business to give you lots of money you need to create something that will meet business needs. Not only that but you can't assume that businesses will find you're great idea and throw money at it, there's personal marketing involved as well.

Yes it's quite a shame that we may have lost a few projects that might have gone somewhere with investment, but I believe that to be the nature of the beast. Also my thought was that the open source movement was about contributing out of good will, and if you made some money off of it great.

I read this over, as well as the original blog post about the grails plugins and am not sure I can really agree. Personally I've always looked at open source contributions as a hobby, and in the end I'm doing it in order to keep the source open and available for those who wish to learn off of it / utilize it somehow.

In fact I would presume that the reason people are not going to pay up front is that they assume the developer is doing it as a favor to the community, and that giving them money for it would break the philosophy of giving out of free will. The real issue though seems to be an overall lack of resources. A one man shop, even with the ability to work on their projects full time, still has a maximum output capacity. Without others to assist there is the chance they would get swarmed with bugs and feature requests leading to burn out.

I think that open source developers need to step back and consider the costs and benefits of their projects. Doing a large amount of projects by oneself without a good job to support on the side will lead to burnout, as we've seen here. It may feel like bestowing a great gift on the community, but if you burn out and halt all development where has that feeling of contribution gone?

Which begs the question of which is more valuable: financial contributions or code contributions?