Hacking the Gender Gap

by Sage

At AdaCamp D.C. last year, there was a really awesome session where we created a “Gender Gap Timeline”.  Basically, there was a timeline that included early childhood, high school, college, and career.  Each woman was given a pink notepad and a green notepad.  They recorded positive experiences with technology and the tech community on the green notepad, and put negative experiences on the pink notepad.  The page was placed at the woman’s age where the experience took place.

It was really useful to see the spikes in positive and negative experiences laid out in chronological order.  For the tech women who made it through their careers to attend AdaCamp D.C., there were a lot of good experiences in early childhood.  There were also some very common negative experiences, and even trivial negative experiences with a person of power (teacher, parent, mentor) stuck with the women.

Now the people who put on the session have made an online version, and it’s pretty awesome.  I think they may be looking for people to help out with it, so contact +Georgia Guthrie if you’re interested in hacking on it.

There’s also a background video if you’re interested.

Patchsets for Dinner

by Sage

Oh, I just came up with a really good metaphor for how to create a good looking patchset:

A patch should be one logical change. For example, you should put all whitespace changes in one patch. If you’re changing variable names to avoid CamelCase, you should do only one variable name change per patch. Basically, you’re breaking up patches into the smallest logical unit necessary, in order to make it easy to read and review. A patch that’s over a hundred lines is going to be pretty hard to review.

Think of it this way: you’re preparing a big meal for a friend, and you have many different dishes you want to serve them. You don’t throw all the food into one big pot and serve it to them. Instead, you serve each part of the meal on separate plates, so that they can admire your cooking, and you take the time to explain how you prepared each dish, and why it’s tasty.

A good patchset is like a well-prepared meal. You provide a menu (cover letter or patch zero) that explains what you’re going to serve (what the overall goal of the patchset is), and bite-sized portions (one logical change per patch) beautifully arranged (documented, signed, and up to coding style) in a particular order (numbered patches, with bug fixes and refactoring first).

It takes a while to learn how to cook a full course meal, and even longer to figure out how to present it with a flourish. People new to Linux kernel development should work on sending bite-sized, smaller patches, with one logical change per patch. Once you’ve got that down, you can work on presentation of multiple patches.

Linux Kernel Internships for Women

by Sage

Want a summer internship working on the Linux kernel?

Internships are available for women and genderqueer/genderfluid people for summer 2013, from June to September. They come with a $5,000 stipend.

We have some pretty awesome projects and helpful mentors, so please apply to the FOSS Outreach for Women (OPW) page.

Please complete your initial application by May 1st. We’re still working on some details, so you’ll be able to update your application until May 17th.

Please share this with any of your friends that might be interested!

Update: If you’re interested in being a mentor for kernel interns in any capacity, or helping review applications or documentations, please let me know. My email is in MAINTAINERS.

The PyCon Incident, Lizard Brains, and Bad Jokes

by Sage

+Peter Senna Tschudin asked (about the Pycon incident):  “What I can’t understand, and I would like help to understand, is how talking about big dongles to a friend in a conference can become a real problem to a women who is listening. Why did she felt uncomfortable about that? Did she felt threatened? How the dongle size talking could turn into something against her? Can the content of the two guys talking be considered a lack of respect? What are the limits to what can be considered offensive?”

I’m going to take you at face value, and assume you really do want to understand how making simple jokes can cause issues for women in tech.  I’m making this a post, because I think lots of my male friends are worried about cracking jokes right now.

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It’s a delicious job, but someone has to do it

by Sage

Honey Harvest, CC BY-NC, Sarah Sharp I didn’t harvest any honey from my top-bar beehive last summer/fall, and this spring it was chock full of honey! I have seven honeycomb bars in the hive. Out of those, three were almost untouched and full of over-wintered honey, two were half-full and had new honey on the bottom, and one was nearly empty. Since the nectar flow is starting here in Portland, Oregon, I decided to harvest two bars.

If you’re interested in beekeeping, or the process of harvesting honey, there’s more details after the break.

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xHCI spec is up!

by Sage

I’m pleased to announce that the eXtensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) 1.0 specification is now publicly available on intel.com. This is the specification for the PC hardware that talks to all your USB 3.0, USB 2.0, and USB 1.1 devices. (Yes, there are no more companion controllers, xHCI is the one host controller to rule them all).

Open, public documentation is always important to the open source community. Now that the spec is open, anyone can fully understand my Linux xHCI driver (although it’s currently only compliant to the 0.96 xHCI spec; anyone want to help fix that?). This also means the BSD developers can implement their own xHCI driver.

Curious what a TRB or a Set TR Deq Ptr command is? Want to know how device contexts or endpoint rings work? Go read the spec!

LCA 2010

by Sage

My Linux Conference AU slides are now posted on my server. The USB 3.0 talk went really well, and I look forward to sharing it when the LCA videos go up in the next couple weeks.

LCA was a total blast! The speakers were wonderful, and I really felt integrated into the conference and social events by the techie women of LCA. Thank you to Sara, Jo, Jacinta, Liz, and all the other Haecksen of LCA2010!

The only downside is the weather. It’s really quite rainy here, although it’s 10-15 degrees warmer than Portland. I think Jamey and I are going to skip the Tongariro Crossing and go straight to the glow worm caves at Te Kuiti/Waitmo. At least we’ll be in a cave while it’s raining!

A New Years Update

by Sage

*tap tap* Is this thing on?

Choose your excuse:

I haven’t posted in about six months, because

a. I bought a house,

b. I acquired two cute kittens (Derek and Elisa),

c. The acquired house needed a ton of work, including taking down a 30 foot “hedge” in the backyard,

d. I’ve been experimenting with all kinds of cooking,

e. I’m lazy.

What’s next for me?

I’m presenting about Linux USB 3.0 support at Linux Conf AU 2010. If you’re going to LCA next week, you can check out my talk at Friday at 10:30am in the Ilott Theatre. I’ll have a USB 3.0 demo for the brave souls that make it to morning talks. ^_^ If you miss it due to being hung over or not being able to attend LCA, I believe they’ll be video taping it.

LCA is being held in Wellington, New Zealand, this year. Jamey and I are going bike camping for two weeks afterwards. As Martin Short put it, “I planned a spontaneous adventure.” Let’s hope Captain Ron doesn’t screw it up. 😉

Any suggestions of cool things to see on the North Island? We’re probably going to National Park, Te Kuite, Auckland, and the Coromandel Peninsula. Anything else in that general area?