Hiya.
First off - Jamie Lokier is male, and a very good friend of mine. :)
I'm a developer - C/C++ *nix - use KDE on Mandrake 6.1, with gvim as
editor and mozilla when I can get it to stay up, have friends, inc ESR, in
the open source movement and yet have never contributed to an open source
project.
For me its lack of confidence. Embarrassing to have such a shite reason.
:(
Even though I will happily talk for hours, I would rather ask questions
than suggest answers, unless with Jamie et al who are great people and
very supportive. The more I talk to them, and the more I hang out on
mailing lists or look at code the more confidence I have.
I only started programming 3 and a half years ago - before that my
knowledge of computers was almost zero. I can't recall whether I've
posted this to this list before, but basically it is gender related.
I was a nerd at school. I was intelligent, top at maths and physics.
And bullied. And the boy nerds would not have anything to do with me
either. Not that I tried too hard, but I can remember times of being
shooed out of the computer room. I was always pushed in an academic
direction, towards medicine and away from Physics. This was as recent as
the eighties!! I was in a small town, in the English Midlands (if that
means anything to anybody), at a small high school, with a very old
fashioned head master.
I was always going to go into medicine, but dropped out before even
getting to uni, bumed around Europe and a few other countries working in
factories and stuff, before ending up on a c programming course completely
by chance, and have not looked back since.
Where would I be had I started coding before I turned 20? Who knows.
However I have always felt like a newbie. Despite being able to answer
questions at work 9/10 when asked directly, I won't volunteer when they
are asked generally - too shy.
Is that an explanation of why though there are tons of us female coders
who use open source software, and love the idea, we don't contribute to
the projects?
æ
--
"Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
************
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linuxchix.org
