On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 10:51:16 -0800, Bruce Byfield wrote: > Would anyone be willing to comment or share their experience?
Ok, here's mine too. First of all, I think I don't fit into Helen's description of women paths, but I think that other women might. I'm the youngest child of 4 siblings, when I was 8 (1988) we had a commodore 128 for all the family and we shared it. Around 1992, my parents had bought a PC and one of my brothers decided to join Fidonet, and since we had this "sharing" policy, he created accounts for all of us, including me (I was 12). Thanks to that, I became very involved in the Fidonet community that was quite thriving at the time, I spent a big amount of time writing on the lists, and working on hosting our BBS. I spent most of my hours out of school in front of the computer. At the age of 15, I started going out with a guy from Fidonet who taught me a bit about programming. I started with Pascal, which is a language that I know despise, but I didn't know better at the time. I spent a lot of time learning how to program, and experimenting the things I was able to do. When I finished high school (at 18) I started learning some other languages (Java and -may God forgive me- Visual Basic, mainly), and after a short while, started to make a living out of it. So, while I was working as a programmer of propietary software, around 2000, I came into contact with the Free Software philosophy, and after the initial shock, I became a big fan of it. I realized how much time I had been wasting on the things I'd been programming in the past, how many more things could be achieved when working together, and all that. In practically no-time I became a Free Software "taliban". After that, I decided that if I wanted to help the Free Software community, I had to learn some "real man's languages" and learned C and C++, Perl and Bash. So, I became involved in open source through the philosophy, but mainly because I felt really frustrated as a propietary software developer. Making closed software is frustrating. Making free software can become an awesome experience. I didn't came into the Free Software community because "Windows crashed on me a lot", it didn't (I don't know why, I guess I'm just lucky), I didn't came into the Free Software community because I preferred the console to the graphic environment or GNOME's interface to Windows' one. I came into the Free Software community because I feel that once you've understood the free software philosophy, you realize how much more satisfying it is to use and write free software than use and write closed software. -- Besos, Marga -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
