Today: what we can do, how can we do it, socially and with our work: "How can we keep the web a welcome and open place?"

  • Be open
  • Be open to others
  • Listen. Men aren't good at this. There's some really great resources on learning about yourselves out there. Bottom line: listen, don't offer opinion or response.

This advice is optional, and is a lot easier when you're a position of privileged like me, but:

  • Use your access to raise the voice of others
  • Share what you learn: there's always someone that can learn from your experience
  • Blog, speak, evangelise
  • Follow people on twitter that you might not normally follow. I found through Twitter analytics that I had (approximately) 9% followers were women. This made me sad. I realised I also didn't follow a lot of women myself. So I changed this. Over time, that number has increased to 15%. (worthwhile???)
  • Learn about the use of language, tutorials with "just", "simple", "easy" don't always convey the right sentiment that really, as the author, I want you (the reader) to not be afraid and trust me as I guide you. Try dropping the words entirely
  • Make the web a welcoming place.

How do we make the web welcoming?

Keep it simple.

One source of complexity are build tools. I feelings on this are mixed. On one hand, I realise that they're an important part of a deployment system.

Myself, as a developer, I'm attracted to problem solving, to detail and the enjoyment I get out of solving a problem with the perfect most optimised answer. That's fine, but it's also sometimes a distraction. Sometimes, it's procrastination! The thing is, that build process, if it's assumed knowledge, then you lose participation.

A few examples. Nearly every single Python project I encounter on Github (and honestly, it's not many as I'm more often in JavaScript-land), none of them explain how to get the prerequisites on your machine. Because of this, I often go searching for an alternative or abandoning my intention entirely.

I've seen this myself, and heard it from peers a great deal of times: Spelunking into a module’s source due to bad docs, only to discover CoffeeScript