Asymptomatic

Although it's not the topic of this post specifically, my workplace is currently all male. This is not by design. There have been occasions when we've attempted to hire competent people and they also happened to be female. The dearth of women in the software and web development industry is a sad fact that I believe is common worldwide.

Every so often the topic once again crosses my radar. This time, it comes in via an article unearthed by Chris Shiflett written by female developer, Nicole Sullivan. The article, "Women in Technology", has been quoted by many on Twitter with the phrase "Why is computer science a sausage fest?" The article itself was spawned by a comment made on twitter about Google's recent funding of a grant to allow female developers to attend JSConf on Google's dime.

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Saying this now basically dooms me to wandering once again into obscurity, but you might have noticed that I'm writing again more. These things usually come in cycles. I'll go through a period where I don't want to have anything to do with whatever else I'd do, and I'll write instead, since the time is free. Writing is not a chore, it's just something I don't have time to do unless I toss other things aside. Still, there are other things that I'm doing, trying to keep relevant.

Recently I started throwing a project onto GitHub in an effort to catch up on git. This should be useful with my Drupal work, since Drupal is switching their source control over to git. Anything is an improvement over cvs, and while svn is still my scm of choice, git doesn't seem too difficult to work with.

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“I am trying to port a WordPress theme over to Habari the only way I know how. Step 1- Make mess. Step 2- Flail around making mess worse. Step 3- Somehow clean up mess miraculously. Step 4- Make another mess and repeat process.”

This kind of thing is an indictment of what Habari is all about. our community has been struggling for some time to produce themes as easily as some other publishing systems. Since there are a lot of themers coming from WordPress looking into Habari, they're looking for similar features in Habari's theming system that aren't quite ripe for use. There are actually a lot of places in Habari's theming system that could use some work.

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I saw this posted in a couple of places, and thought it would be fun to give my own responses.

How old were you when you first started programming?

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I work on several projects, both for work and for recreation, that require code editing by more than one person at a time. Some projects I've created on my own, while others were well established long before I came upon them. There are common threads between them, and I would like to try to point out some things that I've learned along the way.

When working collaboratively, a source code control system is mandatory. There is simply no other way in my mind to efficiently collaborate on a project of any size without source code management.

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