Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

A couple weeks ago I attended Boston’s Software Freedom Day event — a day-long meetup/conference for local free software users, developers, and supporters.

I’ve been using and thinking about and talking about and installing and writing about free software for a few years now, but this was my first experience meeting up with a group of people who I could already assume subscribed to the free software philosophy, understood the motivations behind it, and used free software in their daily lives. Which was awesome! The feeling of community in the room was quite cool.

The event was set up so that pretty much anyone who had something to say could give a short talk at some point; there were also pre-planned longer speeches and a keynote by RMS (which was pretty ranty and non-technical, and included a characterization of using “their” as a gender-neutral third-person singular as “absolutely disgusting” — I’ve been losing some respect for RMS lately). Most of the speeches were super-interesting; there was a talk about antifeatures, with some pretty egregious examples from a variety of fields, and I learned about OpenLibrary — psyched to have an API to access book info without being forced to use Amazon’s API!

There were also a heartening number of women there &mdash about 20% of the audience, and a few of the speakers (only about 1.5% of F/OSS participants in general are women — way fewer than even the small number of female programmers in general). I got to talk to FSF membership coordinator Deb Richardson about some of the interesting initiatives being taken to increase women’s participation and comfort in F/OSS, which I definitely hope to get involved in!

What I’ve been reading this summer:

• Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day – Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin: One of the main takeaways from both this book and my own experience is that it helps your search ranking a lot to have a lot of indexable pages with different titles and content — like a blog! In fact, many of the visitors to this site come through the blog first, since there’s a lot of interesting content there for searchers to find. Other than that, the book mostly covered the technical basics that I already knew — page titles, h1 tags, etc. — but it’s nice to be reassured that I’m not missing something crucial.
• Shop Class as Soulcraft – Matthew B. Crawford: For book club. This is basically a polemic about how the author finds his work repairing motorcycles more satisfying than the white-collar jobs he’s tried, and he thinks everyone should consider the value of manual labor. Even though I agreed with some of its points, I found this book very frustrating, mostly because I thought it was intellectually dishonest and lazy. The author rails about the pointlessness of academia, yet is trying to write an academic treatise; it seems like he gets around this hypocrisy by not doing a very good job of organizing his argument and applying academic rigor, as though writing a sloppy philosophical book is his rebellion against the problematic institution of philosophy. He critiques all white-collar jobs based on a soul-sucking cubicle drone experience; and while such jobs certainly exist and aren’t beneficial to anyone, Crawford doesn’t put in the thought to consider whether this problem applies to all white-collar jobs, a particular type of them, or just some small random subsection. While this book’s assertion that manual labor and vocational education are undervalued in our society is well worth exploring, I don’t think Crawford does a very good job writing about it.
• Herland – Charlotte Perkins Gilman: My partner Jesse is a teaching assistant for a course in Science Fiction this fall, so I decided to read along with some of those books; this one we read aloud in the car during a summer roadtrip. It’s an early feminist utopia (written in 1915!) about a remote land that’s been populated only by women for the last 2000 years (they reproduce through parthenogenesis). The writing style is engaging, and I was impressed by the sophistication of feminist ideas Perkins Gilman had almost a century ago (though also somewhat depressed by how little has changed in society in some respects, sigh). One of my main critiques would be that she doesn’t distinguish the characteristics of her general social utopia (progressive education, communal child-rearing, no war or conflict ever) from those that she thinks would naturally follow from a land of women specifically — we don’t get much of a sense of how a similarly isolated and progressive-minded “Hisland” would be different. But her points about many of the supposed “defects” of women actually resulting from their societal disadvantages and oppression are spot-on. Overall a fun and thought-provoking read (and not too long).
• The Second Sex – Simone De Beauvoir: Early feminist theory; De Beauvoir is one of the first thinkers to systematically analyze the “othering” of women in society (the default person is male, and woman is just a counterpart to him, defined by her relation to him while he has his own status). 700+ page monstrosity, so this was my major reading accomplishment for the summer (OK, so I like really abstract beach reading). De Beauvoir tries to say basically everything there is to say about women — and comes pretty close, with sections/chapters like “The Data of Biology” (she starts with insects and works up), several historical chapters, “Myths: Dreams, Fears, Idols”, “The Young Girl”, “The Lesbian”, “The Married Woman”, “The Mother”, “Prostitutes and Hetairas”, “The Woman in Love”, “The Independent Woman” — and I am only naming a few. While it’s sort of more like a huge infodump than one argument running throughout the book, each chapter is jam-packed with interesting thoughts and analysis.
• Ubik — Philip K. Dick: Another book from the science fiction course. I thought it would take longer to read, but I got engaged in the story and blew through it in a day — oops! I don’t want to give spoilers, but this is a fun, creepy, trippy thriller/mystery/dystopian fantasy. Recommended for spending an afternoon creeping yourself out for the fun of it.