As a female computer scientist, I would be very sad if a speaker I was very much looking forward to hearing at a conference opted out because there happened to be no women on the panel. This seems to be an inappropriate level at which to demand action or try to intervene. How about a pledge instead to mentor some young women so that they go into the field and then go on to become part of the panel?
Here is an interesting thought for the discussion: in fact, the more highly skilled women I see in tech, the less I feel I should be in this field unless I am as good as them, which I simply am not. If there were more average chicks doing average tech things, I would feel much better - but as it is, I feel like I need to be some sort of super women who speaks on a panel in order to fit in.
> while a programmer who is not concerned with design is little more than a line cook following instructions.
I disagree with this and am inclined to take offence. Programming is not at all like following a simple recipe. Perhaps if the chef specifies that the line cooks must raise special chickens to be slaughtered for the main dish, keeps a herb garden that the line cooks have to maintain, puts the line cooks in charge of estimating and purchasing ingredients, and gets them to experiment with genetically engineering food to taste good in the dish, maybe then there is hope for a comparison.
Sorry, I did not mean to offend. And I admit that in hindsight it is a weak analogy at best.
When I wrote that, I was thinking of consumer software specifically, and by a "programmer who is not concerned with design" I had in mind those that just care about implementation details, while not valuing the importance of end user experience. And I've met quite a few programmers like this, mostly in larger companies. You know you've found one when their sentences start with "Why doesn't the user just..."
In your expanded example, the fact that the line cook is concerned with the taste of the dish (e.g. after genetic modification) already implies that they care about the "design" of the dish. If, however, there is much more concern around how the cookware is organized in the kitchen, or which brand of vegetable oil should be bought, that has almost no tangible benefits to the person eating the meal.
>If, however, there is much more concern around how the cookware is organized in the kitchen, or which brand of vegetable oil should be bought, that has almost no tangible benefits to the person eating the meal.
I think you are only looking at one side of the multiplier effect. Yes, organizing cookware does not prepare food, but have you ever tried to cook when all your tools are in a drawer, piled together? Design leads implementation and implementation gives substance to design. Valuing one over the other is like saying a car's engine is more important than it's gas pedal.
So, why not have specialized workers? It makes sense to me that the people who don't understand the needs of the average user would be the perfect people to have slog through the mess of poorly designed APIs that pretty much every project ever will have to deal with at some point.
This happened to me recently with a WP blog. It happened quite by accident, however, since the client just didn't want the website field. When comments still came in with a URL, the client was concerned that I had screwed up - but it clicked right away for me that these must be bots. It might have been a little disheartening for the client, since a number of these spam messages were along the lines of "I have never read such a great article. I have bookmarked your blog and will come back every day to read more of your insightful posts." What unaware blog owner wouldn't want that on their comments? Crafty spammers.
I think there should be a distinction made in this discussion between the technical use of dates for the purpose of storage, and display of dates for the end user.
Why don't we display dates as seconds since epoch? Because people don't recognize that format.
For technical purposes, use a date format with technical advantages (YYYYMMDD). For displaying the date for the user, format it so people can understand it (ex. January 10th, 2013) - and localize it if you have that information, or allow customization, or it all else fails, provide and explanation.
Why I don't wear the same shirt everyday: I think shopping for clothes is fun. I'm not awake enough in the morning to do anything but pick out clothes. My company doesn't have branded T-Shirts?
I guess if I tried to do a start-up, it would surely fail as I stare bleary eyed into my drawer of shirts, having just been distracted from the most important idea I've ever had.
