Infuriatingly inane, trivial, and reeking of bullshit. I’m ashamed I deigned to link to it.

I’m not generally a follower of the election year news cycle, because it’s almost entirely 8 months of [expensive] hot air. However, being a strong believer in equal rights for all and an advocate against violence against women, this article struck a chord with me.

What concerns me is the desperation evident in Dowd’s writing. She tries to communicate that the awful ideas these hateful people have voiced aren’t just untrue, but are so ludicrous that a rebuttal shouldn’t have been required at all. It begs the question: why are we backsliding so horrendously as a nation that this rhetoric can be voiced and people actually listen and believe it to be true?

I’m not sure the article was necessary. If you’ve ever read the real-name comments on Techcrunch, you know what I’m talking about. Commenters on the site still sling huge amounts of shit at each other, despite the fact that it all shows up on their facebook pages.

So: stop commenting. React from your own space. You give yourself a chance to re-frame any topic and determine the context without being included with the trolls and neckbeards. Most importantly, you’re forced to think about your response. That in itself is good enough reason to dismantle all commenting systems worldwide.

TL;DR: The remedy to the exclusionary sexism rampant in the tech world is for women to spend more money!

Tl;DR;WTF? Sexism isn’t the problem, you lazy women! If we were only more classist, things would be better!

My favorite reaction so far: from The Awl

For those who know me, you know that I’m a Product person with a QA background and just enough programming knowledge to be dangerous. For those who don’t, I’m also a highly motivated individual who is tuned into the tech scene with a laser focus, so that’s where I plan to spend my time.

The most important fact I learned about myself is that I don’t want to take a job that I have to force myself to fit into. Like in a good relationship, there should be some give-and-take, but the job and I should be intrinsically interested in each other.

So, here’s what I’m looking for:

• Contract QA work for small startups: Most early-stage startups don’t have the resources to hire QA engineers full-time. That doesn’t exempt them from needing to release a product with a high level of quality, though, so I would love to help. I have experience with manual testing, UI automation, API automation, and building full regression test suites. I am also a usability/UI/UX guru, so you can expect quite a bit of extra peace of mind. You need to focus on coding, and I’d love to help. Email me at blog@samgimbel.com with inquiries.
• Product Management: This is second-nature to me. I’ve been a Product person at Hashable for over a year now, and I’ve released Hagar as a side-project. I know how to write a good user story and get the whole team on the same page. You can also expect me to say “no” to new features almost obsessively until the right feature comes along. Even then, expect iteration and refinement before implementing the darn thing. You have a product you care about, and I know how to maintain it and help it grow. Email me at blog@samgimbel.com with inquiries.
• QA-to-Live-Code: I’m a great QA Engineer. I’m also a budding programmer. I have experience writing Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and Objective C (iOS). I’d love to start by automating your QA process and diving into your codebase in the process. By the end of that cycle you can expect me to be able to write live code for your product, and I won’t let you down. You need QA people who can code, and I can be one of them. Email me at blog@samgimbel.com with inquiries.

It feels good to be making moves. Have a great idea you’d like to collaborate on? Definitely email me at blog@samgimbel.com. I’d love to help.

TL;DR: kids aren’t living up to the expectation that being immersed in technology from a young age should prepare them for college and the professional world.

I’m sure it’s true. The assertion that kids really only have mastery of social media by the time they graduate high school is believable. But it’s also pretty silly to assume that a largely broken education system is going to prepare students more in the realm of technology than in any other way.

For instance, how many kids go to college knowing complex math without specifically preparing to major in a related field? Math is taught in schools from beginning to end, but kids still don’t retain it at any level that could be considered “successful.” Technology has it even worse: it’s expensive and programs traditionally lag behind other areas of study because of the cost involved, a phenomenon which the article makes note of.

What irks me most is this line:

But the real answer is for the great majority of students to recognize the importance of technology productivity, not just amusement.

Oh. So pre-college students should focus their free time on learning Word and Salesforce rather than learning to become social creatures. That’s kind of like expecting water to run uphill, and kids will never make that change. It would be much easier (but still not easy) to get appropriate funding and attention at the scholastic level and have colleges tune in to the gap between reality and where students should be technologically. Again, the system is broken. Kids are fine.

What’s interesting is that the tech landscape caters almost exclusively to people who value ease-of-use and “magic” presentation of the “right” data. That leads kids to understand technology as something that “just is.” It’s only outliers who recognize how much time and work goes into building products like Facebook, which explains why outliers are more likely to become involved in the tech scene in the first place.

We can learn from this, but we need to ask the right questions:

1. How can the tech industry make itself more available and more transparent to kids?
2. Are there things existing social services can do to give students a peek into the “magic” of their favorite diversions?

1. An API that tells you if someone is reachable on any device. Takes Skype, Gchat, Facebook, AIM, Google Talk, etc. and returns “YES” or “NO.”
2. A box for landlords/owners with a switch for every apartment they own/manage. Each switch has two positions: “rented” and “free.” Has a wireless connection to write to an online database with contact information.
3. A mobile app that pings you as you near a crowded subway station. You can curate a list of stations you care about.

Simple ideas are great. Simple ideas that fulfill a real physical need are better. Simple ideas that fulfill a real physical need AND can be easily prototyped and demonstrated are better. Owning an existing product based on one of these ideas is best.

But what’s with the tone of this article? The title is “See what this guy’s girlfriend built 3 months after learning how to code.” Why do the authors think he’s important?

Neat, right?

Granted, the boyfriend did post the story to Hacker News, but that still doesn’t make his relationship to his hacker girlfriend even the slightest bit relevant. For comparison, consider a hypothetical article about Kobe Bryant’s collection of sports jerseys relayed by his mother. The story isn’t “Kobe’s mother gives us a story,” it’s “Kobe collects famous jerseys.”

What really sucks about this kind of coverage is that the sexism is so subtle it feels like nitpicking to call it out. The inherent marginalization is rather serious, though. Women are becoming more and more rare in the tech world, and the industry is fraught with sexist educational, hiring, and workplace practices. This article accurately reflects the prevailing view of women-in-tech as being defined by their male counterparts and somehow turns Alice’s achievement into a kudos for her boyfriend, whose contribution to the project doesn’t seem to be significant.

This woman is clearly an awesome hacker. I’d like to see more from her in the future.

I agree one thousand percent. Klout is useless.

The takeaway image is probably this one:

Click to expand

This depicts all of the android devices that have downloaded the opensignalmaps app out of a sample size of 681,900, and that’s a lot of data.

What’s great about this diagram is how well it drives home the reality that Android fragmentation exists.

Surprisingly, the author has a hopeful takeaway:

Developers tend to bemoan Android fragmentation yet there’s much here to be celebrated.

We’ve collected signal data from 195 countries – the variety of Android devices and manufacturers has been crucial in allowing the OS to reach so many markets. For example the 5 countries where OSM gets most use are: US, Brazil, China, Russia, Mexico. From what we’re seeing the developing world is no longer developing but leading Europe.

I, for one, welcome our new Android [optimists].