No more verbal abuse

by Sage

I’m standing up against verbal abuse on LKML.  I will happily stand alone, however you can also support this cause.  Please speak up, either by resharing this post, or commenting on this post with words of support.  If you dare, you can also reply to my LKML email.

“Where do I put this fire? This bright red feeling? This Tiger Lily down my mouth? He wants to grow to 20 feet tall… I’m so tired of being shy; I’m not that girl any more. I’m not that straight-A anymore.”

Update

Examples of verbally abusive behavior on the Linux kernel mailing list:

Don’t be a Jerk: Responding to Ally Criticism

by Sage

You are racist.  You are sexist. You are homophobic.

Now stop.  Analyze your response to my words.  Is your heart racing?  Do you feel tense, ready to fight?  Are you already in my comment section, blasting off a response about how you have plenty of black/gay/disabled/women friends and of course you don’t stereotype?  Are you ready to find holes in my argument and punch right through them?

If you want to be a true ally, you need to realize that this type of response is happening.  When someone questions you, or calls you biased, you immediately have physical and mental urges to defend yourself, to fight and stick up for yourself. This immediate defensive response is not conducive to having a well-reasoned discussion about whether you actually have a bias.  You are likely to shout at your ally, find excuses, and otherwise alienate them.  If you truly care about your allies, you need to learn how to suppress that response.

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Preventing Violence Against Women

by Sage

Trigger Warning: Violence Against Women, Rape & Victim BlamingThis week, Facebook came under fire for not pulling several pages that promote violence against women.  Pages like “Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs” remained up, even after they were reported to Facebook.  After a dedicated campaign to get ad sponsors to pull their ads, Facebook said they would retrain staff to take down pages that promote gender-based violence.

That’s not enough, in my opinion.  Sending the message that violence against women isn’t socially acceptable on Facebook is a step in the right direction.  However, silencing the conversation on social media does not change how our culture views violence against women and rape.  Thoughts on how to prevent rape and violence are below the cut.

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Linux Kernel Internships (OPW) Update

by Sage

A month ago, Amanda McPherson and Greg Kroah-Hartman from the Linux Foundation asked me to coordinate an internship program aimed at getting more women to participate in the Linux kernel. In order to be considered for an internship, the applicants need to submit patches to the Linux kernel, and get them accepted.

The results have been amazing:

  • 41 women applied for 6 Linux kernel internships.
  • In 13 days, 374 patches were submitted, and 137 patches were accepted.
  • Diff stat for accepted patches:
    105 files changed, 3889 insertions(+), 4872 deletions(-)

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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.

Reporting Linux Kernel Bugs

by Sage

Hooray! +Linus Torvalds pulled my first patchset sent directly to him! Usually I send +Greg Kroah-Hartman patches, and he sends a pull request to Linus. It’s a trivial thing, but it means my pull request flow is fine for more than one maintainer. 🙂

ReportingBugs looks much better now, and I hope this rewrite will help explain who to contact about bugs, and what time frame to expect responses back.

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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