I think you're right that it's a generally accepted fact that the average man has more testosterone than the average women.
Also I think you're right that it's a generally accepted fact that high levels of testosterone in animals is associated with more risky and aggressive behaviour.
But I'm very sceptical of the way you've linked levels of testosterone in average males to risky and aggressive behaviour, and additionally linked risky and aggressive behaviour to being more employable in tech.
However if you really believe this, I had a look on wikipedia and it links to a paper that says that men with high levels of testosterone are more likely to drink five or more alcoholic drinks a day, and to smoke. Also that men with low levels of testosterone are more likely to be obese.
Wikipedia also links to another study that says that mens' levels of testosterone generally lower when they fall in love, and recover about 1-3 years into their relationships.
Maybe you should consider this when you're next hiring, and go for a skinny, smoking, drinking male, who is not in the early stages of a relationship.
From my experiences with Haskell, it takes a long while to get used to Haskell, but once you do it really pays off, especially in the area of maintainability. It's actually one of the reasons I love Haskell so much. I've been where you are though, and I feel your pain - if you keep at it, it'll get good, promise.
Some things I find help with maintainance : * the type system allows the compiler do a lot of work for you, * types have to be concrete rather than abstract, * if a little effort is applied the unit tests can be amazing, * everything's clearly defined, * codebases tend to be a bit smaller, and once you're used to it, more readable.
In the particular situation you describe, maybe using the "take" function could work?
Yes, the IO stuff can be tricky, I agree, but with practise it's not too bad, and separating IO from pure code gives all sorts of goodness back. There's always Debug.Trace if you need to do a quick bit of debugging by print statements.
I feel the article was being unfair on Haskell there, after all the code example was being deliberately unreadable, and that's possible in any language.
I'm a Brit living abroad, and guiltily use one of the (probably illegal) methods already mentioned to watch the BBC - I feel bad, but I just can't do without it!
One thing to know, it's completely okay to listen to BBC radio from anywhere in the world, http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/radio. There's a sports station for the Olympic Coverage - Radio 5, and I also heartily recommend Radio 6 for music, and Radio 4 for excellent speech radio, including news, documentaries, comedies and dramas.
I find it slightly odd when developers resist caring about UX stuff, because in lots of ways we're already doing it whenever we code. When coding we worry about how to communicate the code's behaviour well, and whether it will work intuitive for other devs. In UX's and in code we strive to build a shared, useful and elegant mental model of the world. An API is just a UX for devs.
Apart from that, the ultimate purpose of our code is to serve the people in the world. Well, kind of, often it's just for fun. But generally the aim is to have a user using something; to exist as an entity in their lives and minds. Surely this means studying the user doing their using is just inherently fascinating? (If a dev codes in a forest, and no-one is around to use it ...)
I'm all for specialist UX folk, if resources can accommodate, they've put the time into their discipline, and will obviously do a better job than those who haven't. But when resources don't stretch, developers' brains won't explode if they start thinking about UIs and UXs. There's enough transferable skills there (methodical approach based on evidence, iterations, model building, communication), that I think it's something a lot of devs could get passably good at and enjoy without diverting too much energy away from their principle specialisation. In fact I've found that my experiences with UX stuff has improved my dev work.
It's important to consider how we treat the "odd ones out" in any group. Maybe we're on snowboarding holiday with friends who are all mad keen boarders, except for one who's never seen snow before, we'd probably adjust our behaviour and hang out on the baby slopes a bit and help out our friend. Or maybe we're organising a work party, and it would normally be a slightly boozy affair in a bar, but we know someone doesn't drink because they're pregnant/alcoholic/religious/don't like it/training for a marathon, so we might do something a bit different, like take everyone for a bbq on the beach. Maybe we own a cafe, and there's a step out the front, we might get a ramp ready, so that if someone in a wheelchair wants to visit they can get in okay.
For whatever reason, at the moment, being a female in tech means you're an "odd one out". The lack of women in tech is not the men in tech's fault, (the men in tech are mostly pretty lovely, certainly I like working with them). The lack of women is no-one's fault, the reasons run deep and are complicated. It's also not a terrible experience being a women in tech, it's a good job. I guess the worse you can say is that it's hard to be different to everyone around you. And let's face it women haven't got the monopoly on that, we all know what that feels like. It's not really about gender, I'm sure there's many men who feel excluded by the whole "brogrammer" thing too.
Sometimes the discourse around the whole "women in tech" thing makes me scared, I feel like it's stirring people to feel accused or hurt or angry or confused, and causing them to divide. It shouldn't really be about women, it doesn't even make sense, we're half of humanity for goodness sake, 3.4 x 10^9 very separate people, why consider us to be such a coherent group? It should be about trying to understand those around us as individuals, who are not necessarilly the same as us, and seeing if there's any small adjustments or accommodations we could make so that they can be themselves, and also a part of our group. And we should be doing this, just because it's right, and that's the sort of world we want to live in.
The problem though, is empathy is going to be really hard for men -> women or women -> men; both sexes are remarkably different culturally.
What you see is a large number of socially awkward and inept people flocking to industries where being socially tact is less valued over intellectual prowess. Women have always been more socially tactful than men - it's how our society is set up, women are treated as a valued commodity.
She did a remarkable job of actually experiencing what being a man in our society is like. I would be very interested if someone of the male sex were to do something similar and write a book about it, this article doesn't cut it IMHO.
Excellent point, and well articulated. I think we can take a lot of edge off this problem by restating it more neutrally - don't be a jerk towards anyone, if a person is worth having around, they are worth the effort of providing sensible accommodations. The non-drinking friend and wheel chair ramp are great examples of such rule.
I feel like your product is possibly amazing, but for some reason your front-end stuff just isn't hitting the spot or communicating what you're about enough.
I think you should try out your site on some random everyday folk, pretending like you're not hugely emotionally invested in it, and watch, listen, and ask lots of questions. Just go to a cafe or pub, and ask nicely, people are often kind. Even if you don't get any golden information, it's amazing to see what you do through someone elses eyes.
I'll be brave, reveal what an idiot I am, and honestly explain my "man on the street" experience:
* I follow the link on your blog post
* land page
* What is this? "have the best vacations..." hmmm, maybe holiday booker (meaning flights + hotels)
* 1. blah 2. blah blah 3. blah, video. whatever, no time, I'm ignoring
* oooh, I like this search box. I type: "berlin on sunday" (true, I do in fact want to buy a flight to Berlin on Sunday)
* results page
* I get "Birmingham to Berlin" results
* I happen to have my browser window small. All I can see is something for typing in an email. I don't want to type in an email or read the text about why I should type in my email. Also I'm in London not Birmingham. I wanted something better than a box to type my email into. I think, "this is rubbish", and go back to the blog post.
* After finishing blog post. I think "maybe if I say I'm in London it'll work better". So I go to front page, and scout round for something to say I'm in London. Find it, and use it.
* results page again
* I get "London to Berlin" results
* I heard someone say something about a graph in the blog comments, so I scroll down
* Ooooooh, nice graph! Wow, I really like this.
* Now what?! Another scout around, and I figure out to scroll down some more to view the flight details
* Top item is a cheap and correctly timed flight. I am extremely pleased and impressed.
* I find myself opening up another tab to go to that airline's page directly. It was done automatically. I'm not sure why, I think it's because I don't quite trust your site enough and wanted to go to a "proper" site to do the actual buying.
So some clear problems:
* I totally didn't notice/get the following flights idea
* Small UI niggles, and I guess maybe general look of the site, led to a general feeling of distrust
* You communicated some important stuff using text (following feature), and I didn't read any of it
* You're UI required me to know to scroll down
* You quickly asked for an email. But at that point I hadn't experienced any useful functionality, didn't trust you, or understand what you would do with it.
Also I think you're right that it's a generally accepted fact that high levels of testosterone in animals is associated with more risky and aggressive behaviour.
But I'm very sceptical of the way you've linked levels of testosterone in average males to risky and aggressive behaviour, and additionally linked risky and aggressive behaviour to being more employable in tech.
However if you really believe this, I had a look on wikipedia and it links to a paper that says that men with high levels of testosterone are more likely to drink five or more alcoholic drinks a day, and to smoke. Also that men with low levels of testosterone are more likely to be obese.
Wikipedia also links to another study that says that mens' levels of testosterone generally lower when they fall in love, and recover about 1-3 years into their relationships.
Maybe you should consider this when you're next hiring, and go for a skinny, smoking, drinking male, who is not in the early stages of a relationship.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone#cite_note-pmid1019... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone#cite_note-pmid1517...