Jono has been writing about discrimination and in particular discrimination towards women in technology. This is a subject that I have mixed feelings about. I don’t believe that anyone, male or female, should be treated badly simply because of their gender but I do think that it’s very hard to treat men and women in the same way as they are different. I’ll give you an example. As part of my job I used to have to move computer equipment between labs. Some of the men who worked with me found it very difficult to let me carry heavy equipment. Was this sexual discrimination or mere politeness on their part? Or was their reluctance to let me lift things something I should have been annoyed at or something that should have pleased me?

I also get concerned because we often overlook the fact that woman can discriminate against other women. I can remember working on a team at ICL were it was very noticeable that the woman on the team would only ever ask the men for help if they had a problem with their computer or printer or any other piece of hardware. They never expected a woman to be able to help with these things and I couldn’t quite work out why. But I did get the impression that they thought that if they didn’t know how to fix the computer another woman wasn’t likely to know either.

I also worked in a couple of schools and on more than one occasion found myself explaining to a female member of staff that I didn’t need to get help from one of the male technicians to fix a computer. They expected me to be equally skilled with using the computers but only when they were working.

I have been discriminated against in the work place regarding my programming skills but I never felt it was because I was woman. My male team mate just didn’t like me. This happens everywhere. You end up on a team with someone who treats you badly, puts you down and tries to make you look stupid. This is wrong but sometimes we are too quick to label this as sexual discrimination if someone of the opposite sex is causing the problem.

I am also guilty of making it look as if I couldn’t do something and needed to get a male member of the team to help. I used to work on a client’s site where women were expected to wear suits with skirts. I never wanted to crawl under a table and sort out cables dressed like that. So, if the problem was under the table I used to go and ask one of the men on the team to come and sort it out for me. The men I worked with knew that I just didn’t want to crawl under the table but I was probably making the customers think that it was part of the job that I wasn’t capable of doing.

I am also not sure how I feel about “women in technology” groups. Every time I hear about one of these I want to know where the equivalent “men in technology” group is. Why do we need separate groups for women? Does this separation promote discrimination? I’ve been to talks at conferences such as E-tech that were promoting women in technology but I usually end up feeling angry. I’ll give an example of a topic that really angered me. The underlying theme was that qualification requirements should be relaxed to allow more women into the software industry. How insulting. Why should the bar be lowered for women? We are every bit as capable as men to getting qualifications. It really offends me to think that any woman would think that other women are somehow not capable. I never want to get a technical job merely because I am a woman. I want to get the job because I am the best person for the job.

As I said at the start I have mixed feelings about this topic and I am never sure how to articulate them well. However, I do think at times I’m treated differently because I’m female but I believe that men and women will always be treated differently. I expect both to be treated with respect.

There are many things that we learn without ever realising that we have learnt anything. It isn’t understanding that we gained by going to classes or by actively researching a topic or by discussing it with someone else. Sometimes we mistakenly call this “common sense” when really some of the things we are referring to really aren’t going to be commonly understood at all. These are also things that hinder us from being able to communicate effectively with other people as we just assume that everyone knows these things. But of course everyone couldn’t just know as we have learnt these things through our own life experience and no-one else lives exactly the same life.

I realised that I spend quite a bit of time in Japan thinking about the weather. I haven’t got a clue what the weather is going to be like on any given day. Even looking out the window now I can’t tell if it’s going to rain – though it looks a bit overcast to me. But does that mean it’s going to rain or is it overcast because it’s inclined to be foggier here because of the heat? My tutor told me that it’s heading into the rainy season so I can expect it to get much wetter over the next month or so – but that doesn’t help me work out if it’s going to rain today.

But the Japanese know. I don’t know how they know. The best way to tell whether it’s going to rain is not to check the various weather websites but to stand on my balcony and watch the Japanese walk by. If they are carrying umbrellas – it’s going to rain.

This knowledge regarding the weather isn’t something that a normal person from Japan could articulate. They wouldn’t be able to tell me why they know it’s going to rain – it’s just something they know and not something they would be able to teach another person how to do. Unfortunately it’s going to take me years to learn this through experience and I suspect I’m going to end up very wet during the learning process.

I’ve been travelling a lot lately. I’ve only been in Japan for 21 days in the past three months. When I was back in Northern Ireland I did get asked on a few occasions how I felt being back home. I no longer sure where my home is. For some people home is nothing more than the place they are currently living in. Others attach a much more sentimental element to it with cliches such as “home is where the heart is”. I don’t know if I think of Japan as home yet but I realise that I no longer think of Northern Ireland in that way.

I’m looking forward to spending some time in Japan though I will be travelling again at the end of June as I’m speaking at YAPC::NA.

I always need to think about which hand is my left or my right but I didn’t realise until entering America that I didn’t know which finger was my index one. I need to know this as U.S. Immigration want to keep prints of my index fingers as I’m entering the country. When I presented the wrong finger to be printed the officer helpfully told me that I need to use the “pointy” one. All my fingers look pointy to me.

This made me realise that I don’t actually know how to describe my individual fingers. What do you call the finger between my middle one and the little one? Is this always known as the “ring” finger or does that only work in places where people wear wedding bands?

I should really be sleeping as I’m flying to New York in the morning. I seem to have spent quite a bit of this week in airports and early tomorrow morning I’ll be going to airport number 6. I’m sure that there are things I could say about the various places I’ve been to this week but nothing of any interest springs to mind.

It’s been over a year since Marty and I have been on holiday. Last year we spent a few weeks in Japan in the spring and I wouldn’t have believed anyone if they had told me that I would be living in Japan before the end of that year. Hopefully this wasn’t the beginning of a trend as I really don’t want to live in New York.

I was in Heathrow a couple of times in March and I cannot understand why it is such a horrible airport. At first I thought it was because it was so busy – but I’ve been in busier airports which are serene in comparison. I still haven’t worked out what is happening but I can only assume it’s a combination of being overcrowded, under staffed and having insane security precautions.

I spent some time in Terminal 3 before flying back to Tokyo. This looks as if it’s recently been refurbished but that doesn’t mean that they put in enough seats for people to sit in just that there are now around 15 shops to buy a new pair of sunglasses or a ridiculously expensive handbag. But the thing that summed it all for me was the notice taped in each toilet cubicle:

    BAA Heathrow is committed to providing excellent services across our terminals.

    Please help us by leaving the toilets as you wish to find them.

As well as expecting me to spend over an hour getting through security they also want me to clean the toilets before I get on the plane.

Marty was concerned about speaking at YAPC::Asia this year as last year both his talks were too short. This must have been a one off thing though as this year, true to form, he ran over. He spoke about three things that he considers to be the main culprits for making Perl code ugly and hard to maintain: variables; regular expressions; and object orientation.

The audience responded well to his talk and I was surprised that they even clapped at one of his jokes. The part that I liked best was his use of an acronym for Perl Object Orientation. He went on at length about POO! Hopefully he will decide to do some work on this talk and give it at one of the other conferences this year.

I have a Japanese teacher who comes to the apartment twice a week and I do seem to be making steady if somewhat slow progress with the language. I make at least one very silly mistake each lesson – but that helps me to remember the correct way to say something. Today I managed to confuse the words for beautiful and disliked. I also managed to write my first sentence in Japanese. It was a simple sentence that I’ve been able to say since my second lesson but before I could only write it in a romanised version of Japanese. Now I can write it using hiragana and katakana. My teacher was so thrilled with this that I ended up spending the rest of my lesson translating sentences and writing them in Japanese.

I also learnt today that the word Marty told me meant husband really means master (shujin). My teacher doesn’t think her English is very good so we only had a limited discussion about this word. It’s still used commonly in Japan to mean husband but it’s not favoured by young women and my teacher feels that Marty should never refer to himself as my master – though it’s fine if I want to call him that. I’m going to have to research this word to see what I can find out about its various meanings.

Marty might be using a word for husband that I think we’ll change in future but at least he’s using a word that is accepted in Japan. I, on the other hand, made a really silly mistake when trying to use the word for wife. My teacher and I were role playing and she wanted me to pretend to ring Marty’s office and to say the following – “Hi I’m Marty Pauley’s wife, may I speak to Marty please?” I made a blunder. I used kani instead of kanai and ended up saying – “Hi I’m Marty Pauley’s crab…” I’m not convinced I got to finish the sentence because my teacher was laughing so much and making little pincer movements with her fingers.

Why do so many software companies treat management as if it’s something that people are just born knowing how to do? It seems that the standard career path is – programmer, senior programmer, team leader, project manager, and then senior manager. This is just ludicrous. What is it about software that makes us think that the only people who can manage a software team are people who, given enough time, could sit down and write all the software themselves?

I believe that I learnt how to manage by working with musicians and not because of anything I was taught whilst working as a programmer. I did learn that programmers think managers are stupid – which is interesting as nearly all the managers I know in the software industry started their career as programmers. And yes, it is possible for someone who has been a programmer to become a great manager but I believe that this is not the norm.

The skills required for being a manager are not the same as those required for being a programmer. This isn’t a shocking thing and seems almost self-evident. When have you ever seen a university course in programming that had a management module attached to it? The top management skill is probably communication and I don’t mean being able to write a tool that allows you to produce automated emails so you don’t have to respond to idiots. There are so many jokes around the fact that programmers are anti-social and find it easier to communicate via electronic means that it seems possible that programmers are maybe not that good at communication. To be an effective manager you need to be able to understand people and not machines.

I’ve put together a short list of the skills that first come to mind when I think of managers and programmers. As you can see from my lists I can’t see why anyone would think that their senior programmer is the obvious choice for their next manager.

Management Skills

• Communication
• Time Management
• Leadership Ability
• Delegation
• Common Sense

Programming Skills

• Attention to Detail
• Problem Solving
• Abstract Thinking
• Logical Thinking
• Creativity

I knew that my Christmas Eve in Japan was going to be different but I really didn’t expect to be spending it ironing shirts for Marty. We are in the process of moving to our new apartment and we need to be completely moved by tomorrow. So instead of spending tonight wrapping presents, as I do every year, I’m going to be spending most of it packing bags. I also needed to iron shirts because Marty’s non-iron shirts came out of the dryer so wrinkled he thought that they had shrunk about two sizes. The dryer in this apartment is the most inefficient dryer I have ever come across – it takes around 3 hours to dry a shirt. The washing machine isn’t much better with the shortest wash taking over two hours! But at least I have a washer and dryer; tomorrow I won’t have anything like that. In fact the only thing in our new apartment is a bed.

Our sea freight hasn’t arrived yet and we have started to order things for our new apartment, but so far only the bed has arrived.

I will be glad to move away from Roppongi Hills. Tonight I had hoped to go to my favourite restaurant but instead we had take away pizza from Dominos. There are tens of thousands of people out on the streets as we are living in a tourist attraction and tonight there were free open air Christmas concerts. Getting back to the apartment this evening was a nightmare. I had to wait for four changes of the crossing lights before I could cross the road because of the length of the human traffic jams outside.

Anyway – it’s still Christmas and Marty did get to have his picture taken with Santa. Merry Christmas!