Concrete The Studio

by Franz

As you may know, we’re jaded old web developers who have had a long history in commercial software and about two years ago decided to “go open source.” Well it has been an adventure, it goes well, and it is one of those things you have to actually live through before you fully “get it.” I’m not sure what we thought we were getting into, and we’re certainly not complaining because it is totally awesome to be loved by 23k people and be powering 50k websites, but we’ve certainly learned some lessons over the last two years.

We decided to start posting some of the more interesting lessons we’ve learned about open source to this blog so others can take advantage of our experiences, or just generally be amused. So to kick off our new post category, I present a life lesson that applies to almost anything:

Tip # 46 – Be a hot female.

Now I say this as a happily married man with two beautiful daughters. In fact we’re all married in this office and we’re all “good guys” too (hi wives if you’re reading this, we love you!) We provide what support we can unilaterally, ordering our time by severity of potential bug found. So with that outta the way I can tell you – for some reason open source projects tend to be real sausage-fests, and we’re not talking about a room full of male models either.

So, if you’re new to a project and you’re trying to get help from forums on something that probably has been answered a thousand times but just isn’t working for you, why not make some choices that improve your chances of getting a quick answer? A casual glance through our own forums will find a markably higher reply count to threads with a female avatar up top.

I know next time I need to find an answer on some forums, Ill be picking a suitably androgynous handle like “Erin269″ and using a Tila Tequila pic for my avatar. Maybe my post will inspire the curiosity of some brilliant developer who looks like they might have eaten their project manager for a coffee break snack, and I’ll actually get the answer I need. At the very least, I’ll probably get a lot of posts saying that no one can recreate my problem.

Hey, I didn’t make the world, I’m just sayin’ – it’s like a middle-school dance in there… Work-it girrrl!