Hiring women will make you rich.

Successful tech products that performed well with women (MovableType, Blogger, The Sims) had women playing key roles in design and implementation. To the extent that that’s true, you’d be shifting from a market of products designed by/for men to a market that’s much less crowded, and just as big. It’s actually better than doubling your opportunity because you’re both doubling the size of your market and shrinking the number of competitors.

I’ve worked with some great women in tech (director of the internet group at mastercard, sysadmin manager at mastercard, director of O’Reily’s internet group, CIO at O’Reilly) but I have almost no idea where you find these women.

Today, Gaba (lead tech for Babes in Toyland) sent us a link to some resources for hiring women.

All of this reminds me of a quip from my college advisor as they hired their fourth CS professor, “Today we’ve increased diversity by hiring a thin white male.”

Updated: Marc says not to forget Flickr (duh, i once sat awestruck on a panel with Caterina) and to check out Ben Trott’s take on Mena’s involvement in MovableType.

The Safari API can be really useful if you want to search within books. For example, in my POD search app I wanted to display books related to the current module. The Safari API let me search inside code examples for mentions of the module. It’s not just search inside the book – it’s search inside the code.

You can read more about the Safari API on the Safari site.

The software is alpha, and thus a little buggy. It doesn’t have the ability to edit EXIF data yet. The timestamps on the photos from me and my friends were all over the map, so I had to correct them with an outside program. However, f-spot didn’t recognize the new timestamps unless I removed and readded the pictures. Of course that meant readding my tags.

The other problem I had was that it wouldn’t generate my photo album. That’s a problem that mysteriously disappeared. Good thing too, the photo album that it did produce looks great.

Greg Moreno’s gaboogle.com blog turned up in my Steve McConnell watchlist with this list of quotes from software development experts.

The rest of his blog is quite good and worth adding to your rss reader.

Here’s the quick tutorial:

screen
start screen for the first time

screen -d -r
reattach to an old session

C-a
issue a command from within screen, important ones below.

C-a c
new window, (like a tab).

C-a “
prompt and switch to a new window.

C-a #
switch to the window at that number.

C-a C-a
switch to the last window

C-a ESC
scroll mode

He covers the genesis of his books and takes time to comment on Mythical Man-Month (turns out to be mostly about documentation) and Extreme Programming (just another tool in the toolbox).

http://www.technorati.com/watchlists/rss.html?wid=60721

I can recommend his Code Completee to nearly any programmer and Rapid Development to any programmer/manager who’s working on a project that’s behind schedule or suffering from irrational expectations (again, basically anyone). If you work in software and you laugh at Dilbert, read Rapid Development.

Next up: download link, use package name as bread crumb trail, reformat long method listings, related links (probably from del.icio.us although Perl.com articles would be nice).

This is all the POD on my server, converted into approximate Docbook xml, and then inserted into the free version of MarkLogic.

The speed still amazes me even though this is only 11MB.

Here’s the xquery code that runs the search.

The module, Net::MarkLogic::XDBC is an interface for running XQuery on a MarkLogic XML repository.

I’m super excited, stoked even, for the possibilities created by working with MarkLogic. Their CIS product can hold terabytes of XML and query it instantaneously with XQuery.

So now that the book is done and Jo and I are back from India, we’ve decided to make robots.

Mapping Hacks is out in June. He, wife Jo and cohort Rich Gibson are maintaining a weblog devoted to the state of geolocative hackery. And now they’ve decided to build robots.