If my experience is any indication, Twitter has seen an uptick in spam lately. The Twitter spam that I see most frequently are keyword spam. The keyword that I’ve seen generate the most spam lately is “iPad”, although that’s obviously indicative of what I and my friends talk about.

I got a lot of iPad-spambot activity earlier this week.  At first, I was annoyed, since the pattern was easy to detect.  But then I noticed another pattern about the accounts themselves: of the 28 spam replies that I received, all but one of them had female names.

This is in stark contrast to the email spam sitting in my junk folder.  Looking at the first 50, only two have female names.  The rest are a mix of male names and company or product names (“Online Doctorate”, “Peak Performance”, etc).

Why do Twitter spambots apparently overwhelmingly choose female names?

With practice, you can identify a program manager in the wild.  This is a useful skill to have.

1. They have a BlackBerry¹in a belt holster.  They often use their BlackBerry while walking down the hall, which occasionally results in them walking into someone else or into the wall.  The former is annoying (especially when it’s you), the latter is entertaining.
2. Every PowerPoint presentation that they touch instantly uses the corporate template.  It doesn’t matter the audience, it doesn’t matter the topic.  Somehow, just by a deck passing through their hands, the corporate template is applied, as if by magic.  As a corollary, they’re appalled when someone doesn’t use the corporate template, even if it’s just a presentation for an internal team of four people.
3. They’re buzzword complaint in ways that mere mortals can’t dream of.  It’s no fun playing a game of buzzword bingo when during a PM’s presentation, because someone will win within the first five minutes².
4. Everything reduces to a feature set. User interface? Totally a feature. Bugs? Features in need of some love. Anything the customer says? Features-to-be. Anything that a competitor says? Features that aren’t nearly as good as our features.
5. They will never ever commit to anything. Deadline? Won’t commit. Feature list? Won’t commit. Timeframe for fixing something? Won’t commit.

I really don’t want to know what a PM would write about how to identify a researcher …

I’ve lived in the Bay Area for 10 years, and thought that I was safe from the snow.  I’ve been mostly trying not to laugh too much at my East Coast friends who have had much more snow this season than is really necessary.  Now, the Bay Area is looking at getting its first snow at sea level in 35 years: Snowstorm picks up speed, bears down on the Bay Area.

When I lived in Atlanta, any hint of snow sent the locals racing out to the grocery store to pick up milk, bread, eggs, and Coke.  I wonder what Californians will think is necessary to weather the storm?

If you don’t hear from anyone in the state on Friday, know that we’re snowed in under a half-inch or so of snow and thus think that the end of the world is nigh.

These are the five words/phrases that I’m entirely sick of right now, and that I’m seeing too much in the tech press and in my Twitter list.

1. “Curate” and its variants.  People, please.  Selecting a few things doesn’t mean that you’re curating anything.  You’re making a list, let’s not pretend that it’s anything more than that.  Skip the pretension.  See this list right here?  It’s not curated.  It’s me being cranky.
2. “Epic”.  The Odyssey is an epic.  The Loma Prieta earthquake probably qualifies as epic.  The dinner you had last night? Not epic.  It might have been good, or even great.  Let’s reserve “epic” for something that truly is awe-inspiring instead of devaluing it by using it on that’s even slightly good (or slightly bad).
3. “Fail”.  This is so very overused, especially when it’s all in caps.  And when combined with the previous entry, it makes me think that you just have no grasp of what a failure actually is.  Your boyfriend didn’t buy you flowers for Valentine’s Day?  Not FAIL.  Comcast missed their window for appearing at your apartment?  This is so expected that it can’t even remotely be considered a failure.
4. “Revolutionary”.  Egypt? Revolutionary. Your new iPhone app? Not revolutionary.
5. “FML”.  You forgot paper towels at Target?  Your kid is having a tantrum?  Barely worthy of an obscenity, let alone a repudiation of your entire life (unless you’ve got the saddest life ever).

I came across Jean Hsu’s blog post about her experiences as a female software engineer.  All I can say is: yes, yes, a million times over, yes!

I had been programming for years.  My parents bought a Timex-Sinclair 1000 when I was in grade school, and my dad and I learned BASIC on it together.¹  My parents didn’t make any comments about girls and computers, and they always encouraged me to do whatever I could.  I didn’t run into condescension until I took my first real CS course in high school.  At that point, I could program circles around most of my classmates, so I didn’t let it bother me.

When college time came around, like Hsu, I didn’t consider CS.  I was planning on a dual major in biology and English, both classes in which I’d done well in high school.  I took a CS course during my freshman year to fulfill a requirement, and I was taking the standard Calculus course for the same reason.  Hsu says this about changing majors:

It was a sort of revelation for me–I was pretty good at most subjects, but here was the thing I could stand to work on (and enjoy) for 10 hours straight, forgetting to eat and losing track of time into the wee hours of the night.

My biology homework didn’t keep me up at night, and my English homework certainly didn’t, but my CS homework did.  I had the same thing happen to me later during my CS degree.  I was enjoying my math classes, and was well on my way to a math minor.  But then the head of the department collared me in the hallway one day and asked why I wasn’t majoring in math.  He dragged me back to his office and showed me that it would only take an extra semester for me to get the second degree.  I did it, and I loved every second of those courses.

Hsu also points out how bloody condescending some men, who are our fellow geeks, can be.  Knowing the deep innards of *nix isn’t appealing to me.  I can still bash together² some sed and awk, but it doesn’t excite me.  Software engineering is exciting to me because there are hard problems to solve, and I can solve them through logic.  Knowing the fine details of a given language (or OS, or vi, or whatever else a given geek want to rathole on) doesn’t make you a better software engineer than I am.  It’s a big field, and there’s plenty of room for both a type of deep love for C hacking as there is for my particular software engineering skillset.

Sadly, as you might expect, the comments thread on Hsu’s blog post is rather obnoxious, and just as condescending as Hsu was pointing out from some of her CS counterparts.  It starts off with someone who is spouting some nonsense about what evolution “proves”, having no idea that this theory has long since been debunked.

Hsu’s anecdotes about being a woman in software engineering, and my own experiences, match up neatly with much of the research that’s been done about the gender disparity across engineering and mathematics.  The most recent report, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, “demonstrates the effects of societal beliefs and the learning environment on girls’ achievements and interest in science and math”³.  Relatedly, xkcd has a great comic about how it works.

Oh, and a note to my parents:  Thanks for getting that TS1000, and for giving me the right environment so that I could get where I am today.

I noticed a piece on CNN about tracking down my online haters.  Jeff Pearlman, the author of this piece and a writer for Sports Illustrated, decided to go meet a couple of the people who slung insults at him.

Pearlman acknowledges that “insults come with the turf”.  He says that this happens when you write about sports for a living.  It’s just as true for those of us in technology, and I daresay that it’s not just sportswriters and geeks who have experienced this.  A friend who is a pediatrician once shared with me some of the comments that he deletes from his blog, and they’re no nicer than the ones that I’ve deleted from mine.

Pearlman quotes another sportswriter, a New York Times columnist, who says this:

People believe no one’s listening; they think we’re not people, they think there are these giant monoliths controlling thought. Then when they realize someone is listening, they rediscover their manners.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve experienced this.  I’ve been sworn at, I’ve been told that I should be sexually assaulted, I’ve been told that I have no ethics.  And then the person behind the comments meets me in person, and suddenly they realise that I’m actually human too.  And, of course, this happens towards companies as well.  How many times have you heard someone say something along the lines of, “everyone who works at [somewhere] is an idiot”?

One of my favourite experiences at Macworld Expo came while working in the Microsoft booth.  Rick Schaut, who is one of the nicest and smartest guys on Earth, was working in the booth that day too.  Someone came into the booth with a bone to pick about Word:Mac.  The guy swore and said that we’re all “jack-booted morons”.  Rick sat down with him, let the guy vent for a couple of minutes, and then walked him through all of the technical decisions that led to the thing that the guy didn’t like.  The conversation lasted for about a half-hour.  At the end, the guy apologised for what he said, and said that while he didn’t like the outcome, he understood how we got there.

I think that the reasons behind the insults are twofold.  The first is, as the NYT columnist notes above, conveniently forgetting that there’s other people in this world too.  The second is an assumption that there must be sinister motives behind something that you don’t like.  When you hide behind a keyboard and a veil of anonymity, it’s easier to spew vitriol that you would never say face-to-face.