Dyepot, Teapot

Recipe: Yogurt Cheese and Naan

July 2, 2009 · Leave a Comment

This is one of my favorite foods, especially in hot weather. You might be familiar with yogurt cheese as the Lebanese dish labneh, and the naan could easily pass for a Greek pita.

Yogurt cheese is just yogurt with the whey drained out. I put a funnel in a pint glass, line it with a coffee filter, and fill the funnel with yogurt (plain, unflavored—I buy Strauss’ whole milk yogurt in a big tub). Then I leave the contraption in the fridge for at least a few hours. The longer it drains, the thicker the result. When it’s ready, save the whey for the naan.

I used to think flatbreads were tricky, but here’s my method now: use a solid rolling pin, and a cast iron frying pan. The rolling pin is easier to handle than a tortilla press, and the cast iron pan ensures that the bread cooks evenly and quickly.

Making Naan

Naan recipe courtesy of my brother Peter, who helped out after I lost the bookmark for the one I’d been using.

Mix together:
1/2 cup warm water
1 tbsp. sugar
1 scant tbsp. yeast

Let the yeast proof about five minutes.

Then add:
2 2/3 cups flour
1/2 cup whey or buttermilk *
1 tsp salt

*To make this dairy-free, use water with a teaspoon of vinegar. The acid weakens the gluten bonds, which improves the texture and makes it easier to roll out.

Knead together until smooth, then let proof for about an hour, or until doubled.

Once it’s risen, squish the dough back into a ball. Cut it into 8 pieces. Heat the frying pan on medium, and grease with a little butter.

Flour your work surface and the rolling pin. Roll each piece of dough out flat, and fry until browned on both sides. I usually can tell it’s time to flip the bread because air pockets are forming on top. And that’s it. The whole thing goes pretty fast, and then you have a stack of naan, ready to eat.

Naan

The yogurt cheese and naan make a pretty good snack or meal on their own, but you could add olives, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, either on the side or rolled into a sandwich. Everything will store in the fridge for a few days, if needed. Reheat the naan in the frying pan, or wrapped in foil in the oven.

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Recipe: Blueberry Applesauce Cupcakes

June 26, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Blueberry applesauce cupcakes

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with the surplus of applesauce I made last fall. And the half-gallon of blueberries in the freezer, left over from last summer. All the conference prep has had me cooking less. But now that’s over, at least for a little while.

This is adapted from Two Vegan Sisters.

1/3 c. oil
3/4 c. sugar
1 1/2 c. applesauce
1 tsp. vanilla
2 c. all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/3 c. blueberries (fresh or frozen)

Preheat oven to 350F.

Blueberry applesauce cupcakes

Mix oil and sugar together in a bowl (or your stand mixer, if you have one). Add the applesauce and vanilla, and stir. Add all of the dry ingredients at once and stir until smooth. Add the blueberries. Ta-da, cake batter.

Line a 12-cup muffin pan with papers, and fill the cups evenly. Bake at 350F for 25-30 min. or until a toothpick can be removed without goop stuck to it.

The cupcakes with frosting

Add your favorite frosting (in my case, a highly improvised chocolate one—if you’re brave enough to work with out a recipe, I used 3/4 stick of butter, a splash of cream, and unmeasured amounts of powdered sugar and cocoa powder. it could’ve used more cream or milk).

Enjoy.

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Open Source Bridge Success

June 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Selena already did a great job of thanking everyone who helped put this on, so I’m going to cheat and just link to her.

Highlights for me:
* People took our directions to “go forth and talk to each other” seriously, and I heard so many good things from attendees about the conversations they were having. I hope that this will also turn into new collaborators and new projects.
* Sitting in on sessions about Couch DB, evil programming tricks, space geekery, and learning the ropes for PR. I can’t wait till we have the audio available so I can share these with people who weren’t there.
* All of the enthusiasm among my fellow organizers and volunteers for how we can make this even better next year.

Oh, and the food cart field trips.

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Make Your OSBridge Plans Now

May 16, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Yesterday we published the Open Source Bridge schedule. There’s two days of talks and a third day of unconference goodness to check out. Now you have no excuse to not go ahead and make your plan to attend. Do you really want to miss this lineup?

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Should You Go Completely Insane

May 14, 2009 · 2 Comments

… and decide that what your massively overscheduled life really needs right now is to start a glossy print-on-demand magazine about Portland’s food cart scene, I can tell you that it is completely possible to mock up a fake cover image, recruit interested contributors over Twitter, register the domain, set up hosting, and create a simple landing page, all in the time one might allot for a lunch break.

Just in case you wondered.

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Learning iPhone Development

May 9, 2009 · 1 Comment

iPhone Simulator
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I’ve been wanting to try it for a while, but the last few days I’ve actually had time and opportunity to work on iPhone app development. Picking up Objective C has been interesting. I did some C/C++ in college, but never got especially comfortable with it, and since then it’s all been scripting languages. On Reid’s recommendation I’m working through the Stanford iPhone course materials, and I’m really happy with the pace and progression. I keep waiting for the massively painful moment when I have no idea why my code won’t compile, and it hasn’t happened. This probably has something to do with being a better programmer than I was 10 years ago, but a good curriculum helps too.

We have an iPhone app in progress for a work client, so I’m hoping to pick up some UI tricks I can contribute to that. I’d also like to do a Calagator app, something that tells you what events are happening today, and how to get there. After that? There ought to be a lot I can do with a computer in my pocket, that hasn’t been tried yet. It’ll be fun to explore.

The irony of working with something as closed off as the iPhone platform is not lost on me. Lucas just upgraded from his fairly low-tech Nokia phone to a G1, built on the open source Android system. But I love the iPhone interface, so I’ll be looking for ways I can contribute openness where possible. Maybe someone would like to collaborate on that Calagator phone app with me?

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Building the Community We Need

May 4, 2009 · 1 Comment

In the past week, I’ve been involved in a number of conversations about how we can build welcoming, inclusive communities, within Rails, Ruby, and technology in general. I am not the only one who is tired of arguing about appropriate behavior. I am not the only one who is already working on positive community-building. And I am not the only one who believes Rails can do better.

So we will. RailsBridge is a new, informal group with the mission of creating “an inclusive and friendly Ruby on Rails community”. We are building resources for mentoring, education, and other outreach to help aspiring developers become contributing community members. If this interests you, or you’re already doing something that matches, I invite you to join us.

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The Modern Professional Developer

April 30, 2009 · 7 Comments

In some of the responses to my earlier post, I felt that people misunderstood what I meant by “unprofessional”.

Many people jumped on this as something stuffy, that keeps us from being expressive and creative (the complaint was often expressed as a desire to be able to say “fuck”). I was surprised, because that’s not what I meant at all. I start my working day in my pajamas, and listen to whatever music I like. I click on NSFW links if I want to, because my officemates are a pair of cats. I’m involved in a ton of extracurricular tech activities, and we drink at our planning meetings ’cause we’re adults and we can.

When I say professionalism, I mean the social practices that permit each of us and our colleagues to earn a living. All of the things I’ve described above don’t affect my ability to get a paycheck, nor does it impede anyone else. What does have that effect is exclusionary behavior, and technical communities that allow said behavior to persist, even when called on it.

This is not just a club. Rails is how I earn my living. My call for professional behavior isn’t a call for us to button up our collars and be sure we keep our language clean. I’m asking that we make sure the events and activities where we learn the tools of our trade are open to everyone.

On its own, this doesn’t dictate any particular standard of content (”edgy” or not). You have to pay attention to your colleagues, listen when they say, “that makes me feel unwelcome”, and negotiate a respectful solution.

In my professional life, I work for a distributed company with people in other cities. We talk about code and share links to interesting things in Campfire. Text-based chat makes it easy to skim when people are talking about something I’m not interested in, and tune in again when they are.

I go to user group meetings that start with code and move on to drinking at the pub afterward. The meetings provide an opportunity to share what we know, and learn from others’ experiences. The pub gives us a chance to talk about the recurring frustrations in our work, and get to know each other better. Some of the people I’ve met through user groups have become good friends, while others remain acquaintances.

I post to Twitter and Flickr and my blog, and trust that people I work with will subscribe or ignore based on their own interests. I combine my personal and professional interests when I write online. It’s okay if you like my code but not the cat stories, or vice versa.

I use this mixing of personal and professional life to build relationships that turn into other project opportunities. It gave me a pool of people to go to when I wanted to address Portland’s need for a tech community calendar. It manifests as sessions on knitting at BarCamp and ambitious plans for open source world domination.

I get to do my work in an environment that is, on the whole, flexible and engaging, and has positive effects on other areas of my life. That’s why I feel so strongly about building that environment in the Ruby/Rails community as a whole. We should all be able to share and experience this.

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So Now What?

April 26, 2009 · 26 Comments

Thank you everyone who stopped by to read my post yesterday. I think most people got the point that I wasn’t talking about just one presentation—but the cultural pattern it (and how people respond to it) reveals.

Sexism is endemic in the tech industry. This can mean that people who aren’t trying to act in a sexist way sometimes do, because they aren’t stepping so far outside the cultural norm that they realize how their comments or actions will seem. I’ve seen a pattern in past controversies where the offending person is called out, people argue back and forth over whether the behavior is inappropriate, the person apologizes, and that’s the end of the story. Maybe people drag it back out later to say, “yes, remember that thing that happened?” but I don’t see that as change. I see it as acceptance.

Commenters on the previous post rightly pointed out that these problems exist elsewhere, in other technologies. This is absolutely true, but I don’t work with Django, I work with Ruby and Rails. For better or worse, this is my community. And wouldn’t it be awesome if we could be a model for the rest of our industry? That doesn’t happen by accident, it’s something we can work toward.

For the general “why aren’t there more women in tech?” and “how do I encourage more women in tech?” questions, Google is your friend. This is not a wild, unexplored area of inquiry. There’s actually a lot of research on the subject, and if you’re interested enough to leave comments on my blog, you should be interested enough to do a little reading. For bonus points (one commenter said, “WTF is a “gendered identity”?”), you can read up on gender. Also, Yay Genderform, because it’s amazing and geeky.

So what can the Ruby community do to address these issues?

I want us to do a better job of reaching out to the rank and file female Ruby programmers, who do this for a living but don’t present at conferences or write well-linked blog posts. There are more of us out there than you think, and we need to get over “rare unicorn” mentality that makes it impossible to have a normal conversation. If you don’t know any women working with Ruby, this is a great time to start. We’re on Twitter, we have blogs. Don’t assume that because you’re not working with or friends with one of us, we don’t exist.

I want us to call bullshit on the ego-laden drama that often passes for tech discussion. Don’t link. Don’t comment. This isn’t helping anyone write better code, it’s a distraction.

I want conference organizers to make an effort to recruit women to speak. Some of the regional conferences do, but there’s so much room for improvement, especially at national-level events. Reach out to groups like DevChix and ask, “Does anyone want to be on a panel about git vs. svn?” or “What are you working with that we’re not addressing in these talks?”. Check out the listings on GeekSpeakr. Women are often shyer to put themselves out there and claim expertise, and may need more mentoring to know how to get involved. Recruiting for diversity of all sorts is smart; we want to bring in up-and-coming topics and ensure that we don’t see the same faces doing the same talks every single time.

Don’t assume that more women would participate if only we wanted to. That idea is deeply flawed and assumes a level playing field, which we don’t have (see above re: sexism, endemic).

I want project leaders to mentor women toward becoming contributors. Open source projects always need more people (I know, I run one). Is there a friendly way to find out how to contribute a patch or documentation? Are you looking for women who use your code in their work? Provide entry points to go from user to co-creator.

I want us to have fun. I started in the Portland Ruby Brigade around the same time Topher Cyll was collecting ideas for his Practical Ruby Projects book, and I was completely drawn in by the fun, interesting, experimental nature of what people were doing. As I got braver about asking questions and getting to know the other people in the group, I realized, “I can do this too.” There are some great things happening in Ruby, both technologically and culturally. Let’s work on making that accessible to everyone.

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Dear Fellow Rubyists

April 25, 2009 · 78 Comments

Today someone sent me a link to a post from a GoGaRuCo attendee who is upset about one of the presentations. This talk is titled “CouchDB + Ruby: Perform Like a Pr0n Star”. The attendee says,

“If he had left it at a few introductory jokes, I would be writing a very different post. Instead the porn references continued with images of scantily-clad women gratuitously splashed across technical diagrams and intro slides. As he got into code snippets, he inserted interstitial images every few slides. The first time it happened, he mentioned that he wanted to keep everyone’s attention. It had the reverse effect. This technique was distracting and disrespectful to an audience who, frankly, is turned on by code. This crowd had just watch hour upon hour of code slide shows and live irb sessions, often on the edge of their seats as they absorbed the latest whiz-bang plugin or coding technique from one of the masters.”

You can go to the post and read the comments. In fact, go read it and come back to this. The reaction (from women and men both) is mixed, and heated. No big shock, right? If I knew the presenter, I’d want to tell him, “Seriously? Didn’t you see this one coming?”. Because here’s what I see:

I’ve been a member of the Ruby community for three years, and for the first year of that, I didn’t know any women working with Ruby. This has changed, especially thanks to DevChix, but it’s still pretty normal for me to be the only woman in the room at Pdx.rb meetings. Women are a tiny minority in the Ruby world, and we know it. Even before someone says, “hey, it’s cool to see women working with Ruby”. (These sorts of comments are often heard as “holy cow, there’s a chick in this room.” It’s not an issue of intent. It’s that we already felt like we have a blinking arrow over our heads.)

And since we’re a minority, and we often encounter awkward responses to that, we feel marginalized. We also tend to feel marginalized when we encounter sexualized images when we’re in a room full of men we don’t know very well. Even women who like porn can feel that way. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether we like sexual content, it’s whether we’re okay with seeing it in a professional context. Some women may be fine with this (especially if they know the presenter), some may find it tacky and awkward, and some may have the immediate urge to flee the room and be anywhere else right now.

I struggle constantly, as a member of this female minority in Ruby and technology in general, to negotiate a representation of my sexuality that gives me a comfortable working space, but without feeling like I’ve compromised some part of my identity. I’m not female by default (because of my physical body); I have a gendered identity. I have a sexual identity too, parts of which used to be more public before I started working in the technology world. I know I’m not the only one who is frustrated trying to deal with this.

“Being professional” for women often involves making sure we dress to an appropriate level of modesty (the men I know worry more about hygiene and not being too casual or formal). Similar standards apply to content and communications. NSFW is the shorthand for “sexual content found here” for a reason. We can argue about what the appropriate level of sexuality in professional contexts should be, but for many people this is already set, either by their employer, their colleagues, or their own comfort level.

Here’s another problem in this tangle: Ruby (and Rails in particular) loves the rock star image. You see it in job posts, how people talk about their work, and the way Rubyists rant on their blogs. It’s macho, it can be offputting to both genders, and it makes it easy in this kind of situation to say, “what’s your problem? I’m just busy being awesome”. It’s also a significant barrier to adoption for people who aren’t already a part of this culture, and don’t find it appealing. There’s a great comment on that blog post:

“I understand that the ruby community prides itself on its un- or anti-professionalism. But some professional norms exist for very good reasons: because they make it easier for people of different backgrounds and life experiences to come together and work productively and respectfully.”

I care about all of this because I love Ruby. I love the work I do, and I think I’m good at it. I want everyone to be able to experience the joy of working with Ruby, including other women. Like I said above, I have a gendered identity, it’s important to me, and I don’t want to have to “act like a guy” in order to be here. I am very frustrated that the Ruby and Rails leadership is male-dominated and does not seem to view the lack of female participation as a significant threat to the health of the technology (as well as the community). Over the last three years, I’ve carved out a pretty good space for myself. I’m even working on a conference about open source world domination. But world domination requires an inclusive culture, and I think the discussion about this GoGaRuCo presentation demonstrates how far Ruby has to go still.

I’m not mentioning anyone’s name here because I think the presenter, the GoGaRuCo organizers, and everyone involved is trying their best. I’m writing this because we have a serious cultural problem (which is a microcosm of some bigger cultural problems, outside Ruby) and so far we have failed to address how we can work toward keeping Ruby fun, without excluding who want to work with the technology but find these aspects of the culture unwelcoming. Let’s start talking about how we can make this better.

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