ap0's comments

Showing that women have great technical aptitude by giving a legitimately interesting tech talk is much better for the cause of promoting diversity than just talking about being a woman or minority in tech, IMO.

I worked at a large online retailer that catered primarily to women, and internally there was a large push to hire more women. We hired two women on my team. One was fantastic, one was horrible. The fantastic one passed the interview loop without reservation, and would have been hired regardless of her gender. The other did not do as well and multiple people had reservations, but she was hired anyway. She was an immediate burden and terminated after three months.

The first one didn't need any sort of handicap for being a woman -- she was qualified and competent. The other one just didn't belong in this role. But management aimed for diversity over competence, and ended up hurting morale.

Treating people like equals is the best way to achieve equality. Don't insult them, and don't let those who legitimately don't have the skills necessary through because of their identity. Seems pretty common sense to me.

What card are you using with universal 2% cash back?

I agree; it's a little tedious to have to write the boilerplate required, but in the end it works fine. I know exactly what queries my code is running rather than potentially being surprised by what a package/framework may be doing.

The biggest irritation I have is dealing with null values, but the built-in null types in the SQL package are adequate, and there are packages that make them play nice with JSON as well. JSON and array types in Postgres can also be a little cumbersome, but the database packages I've tried don't seem to properly handle them anyway.

There's nothing wrong with learning to first code on Windows. If it is easy for a kid to get going and start making stuff, they have a much better chance of sticking with it long enough to actually be interested in it as a hobby or career. My first programming experience was VB6 on Windows 98. I went from there to C in Visual C++. Fast forward to today and I write Java on OSX that is deployed to Linux machines. Most of this stuff is pretty transferable. Starting on Windows by no means stops you from exploring Linux later.

CS fundamentals can be taught on any system. Most kids don't have really technical people in their lives to get them past some of the hurdles of even getting started. I think we sometimes forget that the whole world doesn't want to be Linux gurus -- they want to be able to watch their cat videos and check their Facebook accounts. Most people don't care about the technical parts. If we can try to make the more technical parts accessible to a wider audience, I think that's moving the needle in the right direction.