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

After years of making social networking sites for other people, I’ve finally launched one of my own! Stemming.org is a networking/community site and collaborative blog for girls and women interested in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). I’m super excited about this — I think it has a lot of potential to support and connect women and girls who are often minorities in their fields or discouraged in their interests.

So far, I’ve done all the design and development (in Rails) for the site — it’s been cool to be my own client and get a chance to explore some technical things I might not otherwise have learned. (And being my own client gives me added appreciation for my clients’ perspective when we’re working on other projects like this!)

Stemming welcomes blog posts from anyone who has something to say that would be of interest to women and girls in STEM; I’d also love for people to share the link and send me their suggestions/improvements!

For the past several weeks, I’ve been working on a particularly exciting new project: launching Parallactic Consulting — a new web design and development company in Boston and Chicago!

I teamed up with some friends and fellow U of C alums to form Parallactic; it’s awesome to get to work with this much combined talent and experience (as you can see). With both more personpower and a greater variety of skills and experience, we should be able to take on much larger projects than any of us can do as individuals. I’m pretty excited about what’s in store for this!

I’m still accepting small/mid-size projects as an individual, but for larger projects, I’m steering people toward Parallactic - spread the word!

I got into a discussion on Trogger this morning about the question of men far outnumbering women in computer science (in my experience, this is very true — in my college CS classes of 20-25 people I would usually be one of 2 women, and of the 20 or so people my year who actually graduated with CS degrees, I was the only woman); why is this, and what can be done about it?

I think a lot of this has to do with unconscious bias and role models. As Cassie pointed out in her original post, a big factor is probably stereotype threat — the finding that members of particular groups stereotyped at being bad at certain subjects actually do worse in tests of those subjects if they are told the tests show a gender/race disparity, or even just asked to list their race or gender, than if they take the tests without race or gender brought up. Research like the Implicit Association Test suggests that most people, even female scientists and mathematicians themselves, unconsciously find it easier to associate math and science with men than with women.

Implicit biases in a person aren’t evidence that the person is actively discriminatory — they’re subconscious ideas that we get from the racist, patriarchal society all of us are raised in. No matter how consciously convinced you are that women make great scientists and technologists, you probably also have the subconscious implicit biases that suggest otherwise. So it’s not so much a question of women thinking, “Hey, I probably won’t be good at programming because I’m a woman!”, as thinking, “Oh, I just don’t see myself as a programmer”, without realizing that this idea might come from subconsciously ingrained biases about what a programmer is like (male).

But these biases can be fought! Research associated with the IAT has shown that people show less evidence of implicit biases when holding counter-stereotypes in their minds; for example, you’re more likely to associate women with science if you read about Rosalind Franklin or Marie Curie right before taking the test. This is what Ada Lovelace Day is all about — promoting the women who are already successful in scientific and technical fields is a win for everybody. The more visible women in science and technology are, the less prevalent these implicit biases will be in the future, and the more girls and young women will be motivated to enter these fields.

It’s easier for women to feel motivated to pursue traditionally male-dominated interests if they can see other women working in those fields; but yet, women’s contributions to technical fields are often invisible. So Suw Charman-Anderson started Ada Lovelace Day to bring these women out of the shadows by encouraging as many people as possible to blog about women in technology on the same day.

March 24? Why, that’s today! Here are some of my computing heroines:

• Ada Lovelace herself, of course! She’s now thought of as the first computer programmer — she was friends with Charles Babbage and wrote a set of instructions for calculating on his Analytical Engine that’s thought of as the first program (although the engine was never built, so she would never get to test her code).
• Grace Murray Hopper was a freakin’ badass. She was a Navy admiral who pioneered the idea that computer programming languages should be similar to English (helping make possible COBOL’s leap away from assembly language to a new level of abstraction, which made programming a lot easier!). She was also one of the first people to develop and promote standards for computer languages and systems.
• Maria Webster is the author of the blog dotfiveone: Geekspace for Women, which covers everything from science fiction to hands-on electronic circuit building. By providing a space on the internet targeted toward women who are already quite geeky, thanks very much, Ms. Webster definitely helps to fill a niche that’s too often neglected.
• Valerie Aurora (formerly known as Val Henson) is a kernel hacker, filesystem geek, and Linux developer who also wrote this great HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux.
• Cathy Malmrose overcame childhood discouragement of her technical interests to found and run ZaReason, one of the few hardware vendors to sell systems with Linux preinstalled. Ms. Malmrose also makes a point of sharing information about open-source software in an open, friendly way to people in her community; as a t-shirt on her site says, “Friends help friends use Linux”!
• Everyone involved in LinuxChix, a great support/information-sharing organization whose motto is “Be polite, be helpful.” Words to live by!
• Gina Levow is an AI/computational linguistics researcher who was also one of my computer science professors in college; she gave me my first technical jobs, first as her research assistant (which is where I first learned UNIX-y command line magic) and then as a grader for an introductory CS class.
• Anne Rogers was another one of my CS professors; her Operating Systems (and Computer Architecture) classes were an intense boot camp for learning the inner workings of computers, and after taking them, I knew I was compelled to pursue even more technical knowledge.

Yikes, that list ended up way longer than I planned (I kept thinking of more awesome ladies to add)! I’d also recommend searching for more Ada Lovelace Day posts — I really enjoyed seeing other bloggers’ profiles of accomplished technical women.

I came across another zomg-your-Facebook-page-will-ruin-your-career article today. These articles usually bug me with their implication that employers are looking for employees who don’t have thoughts and feelings. I’m not a fan of employers being concerned about what employees are doing when they’re not at work — if you show up for work on time and do the job well, it shouldn’t matter whether you spent your outside-of-work time doing (or how “wholesome” it was or was not). But I’m optimistic that as more and more people who are used to documenting parts of their lives online enter the job market, employers will stop caring that there’s a photographic record that you were drunk at a college party once — after all, it’s not like anyone thought all pre-Facebook students spent their entire collegiate career soberly studying.

I’ll accept that for now it’s probably prudent to keep anything too risque off your profile, especially if you’re currently looking for work. And the author certainly has a valid point when she warns against letting your Facebook page betray lies you’ve told to your employers (”I was sick!”). But some of the quotes in this article really rubbed me the wrong way. “Try to list some favorite books, not just films and music. Employers will be impressed if you look well-read.” That sounds a little like you are trying to encourage me to lie about my reading habits! Even if you’re just suggesting I exaggerate, if someone’s not much of a reader and is applying for a job where that isn’t specifically part of the qualification, should giving the impression of well-read-ness really make a difference? Or should we be encouraging a culture of honesty on these sites, so that potential employers and employees can look for a legitimately good fit?

Then the article quotes another site’s list of ten turn-offs to potential employers. “Foul language”, “lewd jokes” — shouldn’t be a big deal, but OK, I see what you’re getting at. “Evidence of excessive alcohol consumption” seems pretty eye-of-the-beholder — it’s not necessarily obvious from a photo of a partier whether they’re overindulging or just tipsy, nor how often they’re found in this state. (I suspect they mean “Don’t let anyone see you with a beer in your hand EVARR!1!1″.) And then they add “Membership of pointless / silly groups”. Oh noes! I’d better resign my membership in “If this group reaches 4,294,967,296 it might cause an integer overflow”, lest anyone think I have a nerdy sense of humor!

Or maybe I’ll just let a personal profile reflect a little of my actual personality.

Before the Facebook platform was introduced, I knew plenty of people (in fact, I’m probably one of them) who had accounts, but rarely logged on — most people weren’t sufficiently compelled by the minute changes in their friends’ music taste to check it daily.

But once the platform was introduced, all my friends suddenly started finding reasons they NEEDED to check Facebook constantly (for most of these people, those reasons were Scrabulous). This is why the platform is such a brilliant business model. No matter what your obsession, Facebook can now target it. Not into “poking”? Fine, here’s some zombies. Not into zombies? How about political propaganda?

I never got into Scrabulous, but just as Long Tail advocates would predict, I’ve found an app that targets my obsessive streak. So far I’ve mostly percieved the platform as an opportunity to crankily delete dozens of invitations from people I’ve forgotten I ever knew to install apps I would never care about. But the allure of seeing my friends neatly categorized by type and temperament compels me to switch to the other side.

So if we’re Facebook friends, you should expect an invitation to add the “personality type” application. And you NEED to accept it.

I just got back from a week with some college friends on a yacht one friend’s parents had rented in the Virgin Islands for her college graduation — which is pretty much as awesome as it sounds. I caught up with old friends, swam with a turtle, learned some sailing, drank piña coladas, and many more adventures.

Another remarkable thing about this trip was that I had no laptop, no cell phone, no blogs, no webcomics, no email, no TV, for a week straight — a distinctive experience for someone who’s accustomed to spending hours tied to a screen every day. When we were first planning this trip, I was worried about being forced to be not working and out of contact with clients for so long, but you know what? It was fantastic. I even uncharacteristically declined the opportunity to check my email when it was available at some places we pulled into port — and since I’d warned my clients about my vacation plans and worked a little extra the week before, nothing urgent had piled up when I got home.

In some ways, this email-less week was similar to the “Electro-Sabbath” that Jesse and I instituted a few weeks ago: on Wednesday nights after 9pm, we don’t check email, use the internet, or watch TV or movies. The idea is to clear our heads from the addictive and attention-fraying 20-open-tabs lifestyle of the everyday and free up time to dedicate to non-electronic activities we want to pursue (reading, painting, chatting, going for walks). It’s relaxing to do this once a week, but an entire week without the electronic tether is unbelievably refreshing — obviously something I can’t do often in my profession, but something to keep in mind for the occasional vacation.

It’s a familiar adage that an effective user interface is designed to be familiar; users don’t like to encounter systems that make them think on the first try, which usually means they like to encounter interfaces that are as close as possible to the ones they’ve encountered before. This is on my mind because I’m currently learning the interface for a new music player; it has quite a learning curve, based in large part on its unfamiliarity (not that “File” is the most reasonable choice, in hindsight, for a menu name, but is “Engage” really any better?). But the more I dig into Amarok, the more I realize that it’s incredibly full-featured, and it’s just not possible to display every feature in a commonly-understood way; once I learn the basic operations, they seem straightforward and natural.

I’m reminded that the high learning curve is a common criticism of Linux — you’ll have to learn the command line, or my favorite text editor (of course! Ctl-@ Ctl-n Ctl-n Ctl-w Ctl-y to copy and paste a couple lines!), or the Gimp, or any number of unfamiliar solutions to familiar problems. But many people, once they learn these solutions, realize that the initially tricky solution can be more efficient in the long run, and that difficult-to-figure-out interfaces are often so because there are so many things you can do with them (Photoshop’s advanced features aren’t too intuitive to figure out, either).

Building a familiar interface will allow quicker adoption of your product; but a lot of the software people are loyal to the longest doesn’t necessarily have the most intuitive interface, but the one that helps you get things done once you’ve learned it.

Now that allofmp3 is no longer available, I don’t know where to buy new music. Allofmp3 was perfect — inexpensive, DRM-free, convenient to download, and it even let me buy music in my favorite non-proprietary format. But alas, such perfection went hand-in-hand with questionable legality, and US users can no longer add money to their accounts.

Since I manage my music collection on a computer, buying music on CD would require tedious additional steps of ripping the music to my hard drive and leave me with an inconvenient physical artifact. The iTunes store isn’t compatible with my computers’ software or the OS I prefer to run on my iPod — I refuse to by any kind of DRM’d music, anyway, since DRM means you don’t really own your music. I tried eMusic, which is where I got most of the new songs on this mix, but their selection was constrictingly small, and their pricing scheme (different subscription levels get you different numbers of per-month downloads, that expire at the end of the month) created some perverse incentives. Amazon and Yahoo! sell DRM-free music, but at $1+ a song it’s a bit pricey for me (perhaps the conclusion to this dilemma is that I can’t actually afford to buy much new music!).

Mostly I’ve been listening to Pandora and music I already have lately, but if anyone knows of an alternative place to buy music that doesn’t have the issues outlined above, let me know!

Using the command line rather than a graphical interface is one of the things that a lot of people find most intimidating about the idea of using Linux. While (my last post notwithstanding!) you can accomplish most things without ever opening up the Terminal, I’ve grown more and more enamored of using the command line whenever possible.

I found gaining fluency with the command line to be like apprenticing to a magician; at first, you utter the magic incantations syllable by syllable knowing only what will result from the whole. But the more spells you learn, the easier it becomes to notice that each part has meaning, eventually acquiring the knowledge to recombine them in ways you’ve never seen and feel confident that you can predict what will result. Once you gain experience, it’s simply faster to rattle off a handful of magic words than to navigate through the space of the graphical desktop.

If you have a Linux or Mac OS X machine, you can try this at home (Windows has a command line too, but it’s not as integrated with the rest of the system and uses different syntax). Open the “Terminal” application and give it a try:

echo 'hello world'

will print the phrase ‘hello world’

pwd

will give you the name of the directory you’re currently in

ls

will list all the files in your directory

cat groceries.txt

will print the contents of groceries.txt (if groceries.txt is a text file) to the screen

man grep

will print the manual page for the command grep

Commands can have arguments that modify their functions:

ls -l

will list all the files in your directory, in a longer format

firefox &

will launch firefox in the background

The output from a command can be piped into another command:

cat groceries.txt | grep apples

will grep (search) for the phrase ‘apples’ in the printed text of groceries.txt

ls | grep groceries

will search for ‘groceries’ in the list of files in the current directory

echo 'bananas' >> groceries.txt

will append the line ‘bananas’ to the bottom of the file groceries.txt

Not only that, but commands can be used to search for other commands:

man -k search

will give you a list of the names and short descriptions of all the commands whose short descriptions include the phrase ’search’