So mst has launched the Iron Man competition and really I think it's an absolutely great idea. Us Perl folk should be blogging more about Perl, and these blogs should be more easily found. The idea of a simple reward (trophy image) for blogging consistently is a great one.
However, I'm not going to get involved. I think having an incentive like the above would be great for getting me to write more regularly; but I can't get past my issue with the title. I realise that mst has every intention of including women but I don't view that as enough.
As a woman in IT, I am regularly reminded that I'm an odd-one out because of my gender. I turn up to Perl Monger meetings throughout Australia and I'm usually the only woman there. Just as with many other smallish (less than 30 attendee) user group meetings. I get reminded that I'm different because well-meaning guys say to me "It's good to have some gender diversity here". Although I don't get hassled in online forums, on mailing lists and at conferences as some of the women I know have been; it's tiring to always be made to feel different, abnormal.
The issue here is pervasive in our society. It's the perception that male is general and that female is a specific case. I suspect this is partially because in the past we used male gendered words, in some contexts, to express gender neutral concepts. "Mankind". "The patient should advise the doctor whether he may have any contra-indicating factors such as pregnancy". "God is not male, he is spirit". However, despite your intention, I (and many other people - male and female) understand these male gendered words to refer to the male gender most of the time, and not to both genders. At least in sport they're honest about it. It's "300 metre sprint" for men, and "Women's 300 metre sprint" for women. Look through your event listing next time and you'll see that the general case assumes male and the women's events are special.
So even though there are "paper women" trophies and will probably eventually be "iron women" trophies (although you'll note that there are many levels of the male versions already created); I'm not participating. I don't want yet another endeavour to constantly remind me that I'm an aberration. Maybe I'll change my mind later.
A more inclusive name might be "Iron Perl" or "Iron Bloggers" or "Iron Perl Bloggers" with the planet renamed to something equivalent. I agree with mst that "Iron Person" sounds lame. I am particularly fond of "Iron Perl Bloggers" as I feel that it's important for someone first visiting the site to have at least a hint about the site's focus.
Update:
Matt's apologised for comparing me to Paul; for swearing at me and for the fact that his response was disproportionate. It took a while, but we finally are having the productive discussion he wanted.
You have a good point there.
And, for what it's worth, I find 'Iron Monger' fairly catchy.
Re:Iron Monger
rjbs on 2009-04-29T13:58:20
...but Iron Man is a hero and Iron Monger is a villain!
Re:Iron Monger
Yanick on 2009-04-29T15:47:13
Yes, but consider...
- who always has the most awesomest lairs located in the most gorgeous locations? (I mean, Syndrome had a tropical island -- with volcano! to himself. What goes Superman has? A shed in the Arctic!)
- who seems to be prone to collect prestigious titles like 'Baron', 'Count' and 'Prince'? (did Machiavelli wrote his book in honor of a do-gooder? I think not)
- who more often than not are filthy rich, throw parties left and right and indulge in every entertaining sins know to mankind? (okay, there are exceptions like Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne, but most heros end up being paperboys struggling to make ends meet)
- who are permitted, nay, expected, to have exotic pets and feed them a minion or two every week?
With all of that in mind, is joining the Evil League of Evilness such a bad move from our part?
:-) Re:Iron Monger
pjf on 2009-04-30T01:42:19
I actually find Iron Monger to be attractive on so many different levels. It's a great play on Perl Monger, it's a nod to the comic books, it's gender non-specific, and it means I have excuse for using an evil laugh when I go up levels. Muhahahaha... *ahem*
Re:Iron Monger
gabrielle on 2009-04-30T19:41:50
+1Re:Iron Monger
jarich on 2009-04-30T08:01:47
I think "Iron Monger" is perfect!Re:Iron Monger
Yanick on 2009-04-30T23:20:10
*^.^* v
Re:Iron Monger
mst on 2009-05-01T16:22:49
I think we'll be adopting that as a name for the contestants - it rings nicely for me as a parallel to the way the specific triathlon in question is called Iron Man but the athletes themselves are simply referred to as triathletes
Look out for updates to the planet and site (and of course my blog since I'm due a post again) as I spend some time scripting various things up to support this.
Re:Iron Monger
Yanick on 2009-05-10T23:26:02
I think we'll be adopting that as a name for the contestants
This is exceedingly cool.
:-) Beware, World, for the Iron Mongers are about to descent upon you!
... well, okay, according to the rules, it's going to be the Paper Mongers. But just wait for in a few months...
Somehow your rant seems self-contradicting from here..
"it's tiring to always be made to feel different, abnormal."
So why not accept the logical thought (well to me anyway), and assume that everyone is included, its just a figure of speach?
IMO its much more of a compliment to have ones existance acknowledged by NOT being mentioned extra, by the speaker (or mst, whatever) just meaning everyone. "Man" is a race, as well as a gender.
I'd rather we did away with the -woman badges (it got started cos some *guy* said that women might be offended), and went back to the "its for everyone".
Jess - female, and just getting on with it.
Re:Contradictions..
jarich on 2009-04-30T07:59:11
I am an advocate for getting more girls and women into IT, and for keeping the ones we have. This is getting harder. The barriers aren't actually that big; but the biggest one is perception. If we choose words that suggest that something is for men only, that is how a lot of people will see it. When people talk about the "guys" or "blokes" or "men" at Perl Mongers and other IT related things, I presume that they're just being lazy with their words and that I'm included, but not everyone does. Some people may think it means that there are no women there, and the sad thing is that they're often right. Most women I know aren't happy to be the only woman in a crowd of men. I'm not thrilled about it either to be honest.
When you look - really look - at how people casually talk about the people in IT you'll notice that a lot of it precludes women - usually not on purpose. However this language does make it a really, really hard slog to get more girls and women interested in IT.
Currently the number of women entering IT is way down. Worse, we're losing women who were in IT to other industries. Melbourne Perl Mongers, as an example, used to have 6 or more regular female attendees. Now there's just me. A similar thing is happening in other groups. After a record turn out (10%!!) of women at linux.conf.au 2007, the number of women have decreased each year since. Some of those have changed industries or fled into management, but we haven't been gaining enough new people to replace them. Years ago, we'd usually have at least one woman per Perl training course. Now we're lucky to see a woman more often than once every three courses.
It really is that bad.
This is crazy on one hand, because most of the groups I associate with are way less sexist and obnoxious and flamey than their historical record suggests. The IT environment has improved greatly since I got involved in FOSS back in 1997. Unfortunately the damage from the obnoxious and flamey behaviour in the past is still making itself apparent.
We should be concerned that Skud's Perl census showed less than 6% of respondents were women. We should be doing everything we possibly can to show that not only is Perl still alive and vibrant, but that it's also welcoming. One little step to help achieve that is to not treat male as the normal, typical, and expected condition. I understand this to be the logic behind Camelia, Larry's suggested Perl 6 mascot.
When I try to encourage women I know who work in IT to come to a user group meeting they often ask first if there are any other women there. If I'm honest and say that it will probably just be the two of us, they don't come. If I lie, they often come and usually end up having a great time. It is my hope that if we make it look like women are a regular and normal part of Perl then it will be much less scary and daunting for new women to get involved.
So I can just get on with it, or I can keep pointing out that sometimes being lazy and using "man" to refer to both genders actually perpetuates the case where the female gender is massively under-represented. This does get me flamed sometimes, but I view it as extremely important for the future of women in FOSS and Perl in particular.
jarich
Re:Contradictions..
chromatic on 2009-05-04T06:16:05
We should be doing everything we possibly can to show that not only is Perl still alive and vibrant, but that it's also welcoming. One little step to help achieve that is to not treat male as the normal, typical, and expected condition.
That's difficult, but it's also very important. Sometimes even the choice of language helps. I'm usually not a fan of bending usage to fit perceived social goals, but I try in my writings to include women with the language I use.
It's worth trying, anyway, just to see how much casual language can exclude people unintentionally. (Observe for example how aggressive technical discussion can be in terms of metaphor and idiom.)
I guess since the term has a space in it then it refers to the super hero Iron Man but if it was all one word it would refer to the full distance triathlon which is how I initial read it. I'm surprised that no one else has pointed this out. It makes more as a sort of long-term blogging marathon.
I'd bring this up with MST personally but I'm currently not very happy with his inter-person behavior... The Perl community shall receive no blogs from me for a while thanks to him.
Re:Ironman vs. Iron Man
mst on 2009-04-30T00:25:45
bennymac2: why is every question I ask so fucking onerous?
mst: because they're all questions you could have answered using google or search.cpan with words that are in your question
mst: in spite of the questions almost invariably being extremely vague
bennymac2: i don't know man.. i think you just get a kick out of it. go get laid or something. get some sunshine. unplug for a bit.
And then you quit. I'm sorry you find doing basic research before asking the community for help onerous, and both my fiancee and my girlfriend would disagree about the "get laid" and "get some sunshine" part. I'm sorry you find being a help vampire better than showing a modicum of respect to the experts helping you for free, but that's your problem, not mine - maybe your comment that "bennymac2: I seem to be a magnet for that type of response" is an indication that the problem is yours, not ours.And even if it isn't really, every single serious helper of newbies that's turned up on the IRC channels I work on in the past three years is still here - because I prevent them suffering support burnout caused by ignorant, disrespectful, unwilling to learn people like you. And maybe that makes me a failure at "inter-person behaviour", but it makes us able to help more newbies more of the time. And I'm comfortable with that.
Hope That Helps. Have A Nice Day.
Re:Ironman vs. Iron Man
bennymack on 2009-04-30T01:31:46
First of all, my apologies to jarich for hijacking your journal comments. This will most certainly be my last response as, well, I simply don't care enough to continue. A zebra cannot change its stripes and I've seen MST's true colors.
@MST: You truly believe you're correct and by posting an out of context snippet you've coolly proved to everyone your correctness. The thing is, I didn't go into why I'm not happy and regardless of that no amount of arguing on your part is going to change the fact that I am. Quite the contrary in fact.
My "basic research" involved reading the POD for and the pertinent code for the DBIC Result, ResultSet, and ResultSource loading code for 3 FREAKING HOURS before posing my question. Not only that but it was the only question I had asked in days, maybe weeks. I get the impression that part of my problem is that my questions ARE well researched and generally result of running up against a brick wall in the capabilities of the software I'm asking about and the support experts whose advice I solicit become a little stumped IMO and they tend to react negatively to this in many cases but it varies almost entirely by individual.
I've have contributed bug reports and tests to various sub projects of Catalyst, DBIC, and Moose. I don't really see which of the points in the link you posted apply to me. I have spent a day and a half battling the crufty (yes, I'm going there) loading code to devise my own solution as there is no native way or CPAN package that provides the ability to do what I want to do. Will it or any of the other contributions that I and my $coworkers work on get sent back to the community? Most likely, not. And it's 100% thanks to you. I can't speak for them but as the only vocal proponent of the Perl community at my $job you can rest assured that if I do not, no one will. And now, since we can't expect to receive basic human courtesy for a software package our business relies on, it officially becomes a liability. But you appear to be comfortable with that. After viewing your behavior on IRC for some time I'm willing to guess that it's also partly your problem. But hey you've got like 75 applicants to your Iron Man thing so it's cool.
Re:Ironman vs. Iron Man
mst on 2009-04-30T02:56:32
Your problem was trying to do dynamic subclassing of DBIx::Class result classes. The first result for 'dbix class subclass' on search.cpan.org solved your problem as stated. I'm sorry that was too hard to find for you.
Hopefully your co-workers are capable of typing three words into a search box in less than a day and a half. They'll be welcome on #dbix-class if that doesn't solve their problem.
You no longer are. So shut up and fuck off.
(and I would echo the apology for the thread hijack, but apparently quoting your typical "let's accuse the guy who expected me to RTFM of not having a life outside of IRC" attitude wasn't sufficient to make the point)
In order to minimise the future noise caused by your inability to use a search box or to deal with people's frustration with said without resorting to insulting us, our attitudes, our professionalism and our personal lives, I will not be responding to you again, here or anywhere else.
*PLONK*
I had a couple of enquiries if there'd be * Woman badges as well for those who wanted, and of course there will be - but Mark Keating (who did the original set as a sort of pre-announce publicity thing) was away on holiday at our friend Jane's wedding, so didn't have time to create all of them. I should probably have waited, but I was asked by Paul Fenwick, for whom I have the utmost respect for his work on changelogging for perl core, (along with his choice to sign up to the competition
I am extremely sorry for any offence caused by the disparity between the pre-announce and the limited response we were able to provide in response to Paul's feedback without disrupting our friend's wedding, and hope that you'll be kind enough to forgive us for it provided we have blog appropriate Stone, Bronze and Iron Woman badges by the time the contest has been running long enough for those to be earned.
Any hate mail on the subject can be sent to mst (@) shadowcat.co.uk - or made as a reply here.
(ten minutes after my prior comment)
It occurs to me that my previous comment appears to be blaming Paul for what we did.
It isn't.
It's pointing out that among his several pages of constructive bitching, at least half of the points in which we've now addressed and the rest we're trying to as volunteers' time provides, the lack of female badges was one of them, and this is what we did about it given the resources available.
I take full and absolute responsibility for any and every gender related issue involved in the Iron Man competition. The decisions were all mine, and I am comfortable with them - and if you want to hate me for them, do feel free.
But Paul, and Jess, and Gerda Shank, and others, provided useful feedback direct to me and to the other organisers. You, instead, chose to complain in a public forum about how the contest was exclusive and you refused to take part, without ever contacting the organisers and explaining your reservations and seeing if we were able to find something we could do about them.
I'm sorry you think that public complaining that I just happened to come across thanks to Jess is a more useful contribution to open source marketing than a suitable bug report to the authors of this scheme. I'm not sorry you aren't taking part; this competition is for people who want to do something for perl, who want to collaborate and help each other achieve a better marketing image for our language, not for people who think that public complaining without bothering to speak to the people or contacting the organisers or maintainers you're complaining about is a net positive.
You just stood up as a representative of every person who has ever posted "$module is shit" on a public message board without ever mailing the CPAN RT queue. I gave you an email address. I'm fucking obvious on IRC or you wouldn't have used my nickname in your post. But no, rather than saying "well done for making a start, can we fix @these things" like Paul did
Well, fuck you. You're part of the problem.
So if you don't believe in this, let the people who actually give a flying fuck about community and collaboration, the people who've meant we're pushing seventy five signups so far and five more every day since I announced it, get on with marketing our language, with showing the world that perl isn't the pissy, insular, self hating dead system half the world thinks it is.
And if you change your mind, then please do mail your grievances to ironman at shadowcat.co.uk where I'll still be as willing to respond to them in a constructive fashion as I always was, and perhaps the next public statement from both of us can be "bug resolved" like I love to for the CPAN modules I help look after. Maybe you could talk to me and we can collaborate. Or you can just bitch here some more and I'll listen and laugh it off just like I do every other person who would rather complain than help, rather ad hominem than try diplomacy, rather put down and blame than try to find a way forwards.
The choice is yours. I'd much rather you'd have chosen to email me in the first place so we could have discussed this, but apparently that was too much to hope for.
Yours, more interested in a better future than complaining to the ether about the present, mst
Re:Sorry, context
Alias on 2009-04-30T04:53:34
jarich is married to pjf.
I think you'll find that much of the useful feedback you mentioned that pjf provided was a product of both of them.
Couples, collaboration
mst on 2009-04-30T13:55:01
I hadn't made the connection - I've only ever seen the nick 'jarich' on identi.ca and then here complaining about this. I was enlightened fairly shortly after I posted -
On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 11:26:42AM +0930, Paul Fenwick wrote:
> G'day Matt,
>
> Matt S Trout wrote:
> > pjf is jarich's husband:)
> >
> > shit.
>
> Oh my! I think that's the closest I've ever come to death from laughter.;)
>
> Jacinta's e-mail address is (redacted, fuck you spambots), although it looks
> like she's writing out a friendly and explanatory e-mail to you now.And indeed she has, and we're now having the nice, constructive discussion over further feedback from her via e-mail that I wish had happened in the first place.
jarich++
This doesn't even pass the laugh test
btilly on 2009-04-30T05:55:29
The White Camel awards last year made it clear that jarich is not a part of the problem. The fact that she chooses not to participate in your project in no way means that she isn't doing a heck of a lot for Perl. And the fact that you don't realize that just makes you look bad.
As for her complaining in her journal, the way that I read that is that she is trying to raise awareness in the Perl community in general. As a way of reaching you it is spectacularly inefficient. But emailing you as a way of reaching a wider audience is also incredibly inefficient. And as noted already, you should view Paul's feedback as coming from jarich as well, so she already did the private feedback bit of it.
Re:This doesn't even pass the laugh test
mst on 2009-04-30T14:09:52
Except Paul's feedback just said "change the title of the aggregator to 'Planet Perl Iron Man'". And actually, no, the reason she complained here rather than direct to me is that she assumed I wouldn't listen. Amazing how easily even the best of us can be messed over by implicit assumptions, eh
:) - fortunately as I noted above, this ones now corrected and we're having what will hopefully be a very productive discussion via email. The best way to raise awareness in the perl community would IMO have been to subscribe to Iron Man and make a first post roughly entitled "I care about getting the word out about female perl heads more than I do that Matt's a sexist bastard, and here's why". And I'm currently, in between discussing what language changes we can make to be more inclusive without resorting to weasel words, trying to convince her to do exactly that - the perl community has spent too long not having strong opinions in case it treads on other people's toes, and I'm hoping that if she chooses to join the competition she'll offer more well written dissent on other topics as well.
Oh, and I was there when the award was presented and when PJF went up to collect it on her behalf, and I applauded like hell for the work she'd done - I just hadn't connected the realname and the nick. Which, admittedly, was fucking retarded on my part, but y'know, welcome to being human.
There's going to be no barrier for how badly written it is. None of us are good enough, and that isn't a problem. What matters is we try. What matters is that we make some fucking noise.
There are billions of people on the Internet. It's a terrible idea for all of them to cough out badly written posts every week when they have nothing to say. Please, people, blog when you have something interesting to say. Subscribe to an aggregator if you want wider distribution.
