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List:       kde-women
Subject:    Re: [Kde-women]Website
From:       Eva Brucherseifer <eva () rt ! e-technik ! tu-darmstadt ! de>
Date:       2001-03-15 10:36:04
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Hi Trish,

cool to see you on this list :-) I hope to meet you soon in real life as well 
(maybe at the CeBIT?). 
Here is a late answer... I was quite busy the last time ;-)

> But on the other hand I don't like the idea of females pushing other
> females in exactly this direction "Go and help the boys by writing
> documentation, go and organize things for "the boys"". I'd like to see
> KDE women as a forum to encourage to write (well documented) code,
> to encourage females to actively take part in the KDE development
> process and not just lending a helping hand with documentation
> and stuff. 

Well, I already changed the statement on the first page. I was not very happy 
with this and still at some points I would prefer to do no statement at all. 
To me the content is much more important than stupid statements about women 
and computers ;-)
Maybe anyone else has some comments, so far I mainly got male feedback on the 
first page (mostly positive, except one...)

> Don't misunderstand me: documentation is important
> (at least it's my job). But in my sparetime I'd rather write my own stupid
> (hopefully better documented) KDE program (I hope one day I will...) that
> possibly will never reach the quality of say Konqueror instead of
> writing documentation for a boy who liked coding but disliked
> documentation.

You are very right. On my job I just threw away a program and started from 
the beginning since the guys working before on the stuff didn't make good 
documentation on the source code (only on the use) and what was even worse: 
the design of the program had "grown" and was therefore hard to understand.

So since I am started from the beginning with this app, I am trying to have a 
design that is understandable in the first place and then I try to add some 
documentation to the code. Actually I made the experience that the first 
thing takes more time...

Still I am not sure about what good documentation is and how it is made 
(although I have some ideas):

- What should be documented? (ok, that is a big question ;-) ) 
I'd like to work on some guidelines about that, maybe someone else likes to 
join?

- Which tools can be used in the open source world?
Does anyone have links? I never worked with sgml - are there any tutorials?
So far I only use doxygen and write the documentation directly into the code 
and extract it with doxygen. I read a lot about UML, but used it only very 
little. One of my students worked a lot with that. 

Actually I made the experience that some KDE programmers are somehow afraid 
of talking about code design and code structure. We had a big discussion at 
the meeting in Darmstadt because I said that the most important to learn for 
coding is to learn how classes and objects play together. The guys said 
instead that it is better to simply start coding and you can learn the rest 
by looking at other peoples code.


>
> I hope you get the point :) To sum it up I'd like to see two
> aims for KDE women: 1) encourage other females to actively take
> part in the (male driven) KDE development process, and
> 2) to give documentation/organization
> and all these "female" tasks the credit they deserve (after all
> code isn't everything).

Yes, that is my main point as well :-) Annma's tutorial was the first step 
into this direction and it shows that not only women are interested in these 
things. 

Another point I am still missing, which has a similar impact are the graphics 
and the IT journalism. When doing the webpages I learned, that design is not 
that easy and realizing it with technical means is even harder. 
The same is journalism, to write a review or tutorial  about an app or a 
package takes a lot of computer knowledge and a lot of time to test it. You 
have to be very correct in the details since every error falls back on you.

So this might be another direction of kdewomen, as these jobs are often done 
behind the scenes, but are *very* important as well. I think the latest 
announcement of KDE Leage, kde-promo, kde-magazine show that. And the dot 
already has a very important part of kde.

By this I come to the last possible aspect of kdewomen - the social part. It 
is a very "female" topic, but it seems, we're good at it. That is what I like 
about the chatroom - I can simply talk about *everything*, I don't have to do 
advanced tech-talk. I can simply talk about the good or bad day I am having. 
And the men that are there say the same ;)
To me it seems, that women need some social stuff around a technical thing 
(at least I do ;-) ) and a lot of men do too, but often they don't admit....
This is, what I experienced at the exhibitions as well.

ok, this was a long writing... and I have to go back to coding (and 
documenting) now ;-)
see ya,
eva

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