Quick Hit: Toward a !!Con Aesthetic – new essay at The Recompiler

Over at The Recompiler, I have a new essay out: “Toward A !!Con Aesthetic”. I talk about (what I consider to be) the countercultural tech conference !!Con, which focuses on “the joy, excitement, and surprise of programming”. If you’re interested in hospitality and inclusion in tech conferences — not just in event management but in talks, structure, and themes — check it out. (Christie Koehler also interviews me about this and about activist role models, my new consulting business, different learning approaches, and more in the latest Recompiler podcast.)

Hacker School Gets an A on the Bechdel Test

NAND and NOR gate sketch, coincidentally in the shape of a heart – by me this week

cross-posted from Cogito, Ergo Sumana

When part of the joy of a place is that gender doesn’t matter, it’s hard to write about that joy, because calling attention to gender is the opposite of that. I want to illustrate this facet of my Hacker School experience: mostly, Hacker Schoolers of all genders talk about mostly the same things. And we talk about them in all gender combinations — including, just by chance, among women.

The “Bechdel Test” asks whether a work of fiction includes at least two women with names who talk to each other about something other than a man. Thus in my blog I have an occasional series listing topics I’ve discussed with other women. My life passes the Bechdel Test! ;-)

So here is an list of some things I’ve discussed with Hacker School women. (About half the facilitators, cofounders, participants, and residents are women.)

Some Things Hacker School Women Talk About

• why LVars and set operations relate to current work in distributed systems
• The Kids Are All Right
• IRC etiquette, and when to use IRC instead of a mailing list, videocall or wiki
• troubleshooting git-review
• the Haiku operating system’s key features (many of them similar to BeOS)
• refactoring a function a guy wrote so it doesn’t do everything in main() (technically breaks Bechdel?)
• whether to work at a nonprofit or for-profit
• where is that maple syrup smell coming from? (answer: someone was making oatmeal)
• our GitHub report cards
• how to use machine learning techniques to train a Markov chain to generate funnier sentences
• how the hell Makefiles work
• what the hell a cuticle is
• binary search and Huffman coding
• saving time with useful Python standard library modules (string, time, os, etc.) and packages, e.g., requests
• Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind
• where pip gets its info (PyPI)
• the Pythonic convention for reading from a file, with open('file','r') as f, and the fact that it’s a context manager
• when and how to use list comprehensions and dictionary comprehensions, generators and decorators, ord and chr
• why we use pass for stub functions or classes instead of return
• birth control amortization
• how you would override Python’s default behavior to raise an exception when slicing a list with a negative int
• how to write a hill-climbing algorithm and why
• G.K. Chesterton’s use of the mystery genre
• what the #! (hashbang) line at the beginning of a script actually does
• song currently stuck in one’s head (“Gettin’ Jiggy Wid’ It”) and confusing “Wild Wild West” with “Back To The Future III”
• what it takes to work remotely
• security issues inherent in creating a sandboxed version of an interactive Python interpreter
• who put this post-it note on the fridge saying “No Java on Monday”? When? Did the author mean the beverage or the language? Was it descriptive or imperative? Why did they never take it down?
• an awesome 1982 Bell Labs video about UNIX featuring Lorinda Cherry

I could make this list probably ten times longer. My point is, if you don’t care about gender, Hacker School is awesome. If you’re irritated by the tech industry’s usual gender crap, Hacker School is blissfully free of it and you can — if you want — turn into someone who doesn’t care about gender for three months.*

You can apply now for the next batch — apply by Saturday night, December 14th.

* an oversimplification! But you get what I mean.