New data suggests women write better code:
A group of student researchers set out to determine whether people are biased against code written by women, and discovered the opposite: Code written by women has a higher acceptance rate on the social coding site GitHub than code written by men.
But there’s one tremendous caveat; this is only the case when the individual’s gender is unknown to GitHub users.
Source: dailydot.com
New data suggests women write better code:
A group of student researchers set out to determine whether people are biased against code written by women, and discovered the opposite: Code written by women has a higher acceptance rate on the social coding site GitHub than code written by men.
But there’s one tremendous caveat; this is only the case when the individual’s gender is unknown to GitHub users.
Source: dailydot.com
Perhaps one problem is the increasingly dominant role of competitive hackathons in computer science education, training, and recruiting. Hackathons—events typically centered on coders competing against one another to build a new product or service—are very much in vogue right now. The word is invoked in the context of all sorts of different events and sectors to lend them a young, energized, and anti-establishment aura. Come hack the breast pump! Hack the medical system! Hack the newest, coolest, next billion-dollar startup!
The hackathon fantasy—and, often, its manifestation in reality—centers on a crowded, cluttered gymnasium-type room, filled with tables and laptops and folding chairs and pizza and soda. There are corporate recruiters and free T-shirts and participants stay up all night and curl up in hoodies on the floor to catch an hour of sleep when they absolutely can’t keep their eyes open a second longer. There are public presentations and internship offers and prize money and, of course, winners and losers. There are not, by and large, a whole lot of women.
Source: Slate
Why Teaching Girls to Code Is Not the (Only) Answer:
It was just two years ago that the United Nations declared October 11th the International Day of the Girl. Among the most popular new initiatives to help girls build the skills they need are the efforts to teach computer coding. We’ve heard the mantra again and again: Not enough girls choose STEM fields, not enough girls are brave enough and prepared enough to break the tech boys’ club wide open. But is the obvious solution—teaching girls to code, now an idea on fire—enough to solve the gender gap in tech, especially at the top? Not really.
Source: psmag.com
Meet Alex, the Javascript Tool to Make Your Code Less Offensive:
A Dutch developer has written a script designed to catch potentially insensitive language.
Alex—the script’s fittingly androgynous name—will alert you if any input text contains offensive phrasing, and suggests neutral alternatives. For example, an input of “businesswoman” suggests “entrepreneur” or “business executive” as viable options instead.
But what if a gesture-control system was purposely built to be as inconvenient and exasperating as possible? That’s the idea behind Bodyfuck. The gesture-input scheme was created to develop programs for an existing language called Brainfuck, which is also deliberately maddening.