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Nothing in those guidelines prohibits mentioning who you are. I thought the point of upvoting was that readers use their votes to decide what's relevant (as op

Nothing in those guidelines prohibits mentioning who you are. I thought the point of upvoting was that readers use their votes to decide what's relevant (as opposed to outright censorship). Why are people allowed to talk about beer, "orthokeratology", et al, but mentioning gender is "irrelevant" (cf. "bloggergirl" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1836538 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1836538, which is reposted like six times) Furthermore, my being a girl IS relevant. The Rails community has tons of initiatives to try to balance the gender ratio -- for example, the presentation at RailsConf 2009, an SF ruby workshop specifically for women, etc (really just google 'ruby rails women'). I've never been able to attend that stuff (due to being in the Midwest, which was also censored out of my title), but I'm still interested in reaching out to whoever I can to get advice. I thought that could include HN.

cheald 16y ago
While it's cool that you're a girl and taught yourself Rails - the community needs more female influence - it's not relevant to "where do I go from here?" unless you want misogynistic answers like "an app to get me a sandwich!", and I rather suspect that's not the sort of thing that you're fishing for here. My advice, on that front, though, is to find an itch you have and use Rails to scratch it. Indexes/databases of information that's useful to you are often a great place to start. The sandwich crack reminded me of a project I've had back-burnered for a while now (please don't take it as "lol you're a girl, kitchen app") - I'd love to have a tool that lets me input the contents of my fridge/pantry, and have it spit back a list of potential recipes, sortable by calorie content, preparation time, cuisine style, etc. Maybe even include an option to include recipes that are missing a couple of ingredients, so I could make a shopping list. There are some very interesting data problems and interface problems to solve there, and it would be enormously useful to boot. I suck at meal planning, and it would be amazing if I could use a tool to plan out the next week's meals based on target caloric content and prep time per meal, with a knowledge of what I have in my pantry (and the ability to tell me what I need to shop for). I suspect that a lot of people would find that sort of thing terribly handy.

cheald 16y ago

While it's cool that you're a girl and taught yourself Rails - the community needs more female influence - it's not relevant to "where do I go from here?" unless you want misogynistic answers like "an app to get me a sandwich!", and I rather suspect that's not the sort of thing that you're fishing for here. My advice, on that front, though, is to find an itch you have and use Rails to scratch it. Indexes/databases of information that's useful to you are often a great place to start. The sandwich crack reminded me of a project I've had back-burnered for a while now (please don't take it as "lol you're a girl, kitchen app") - I'd love to have a tool that lets me input the contents of my fridge/pantry, and have it spit back a list of potential recipes, sortable by calorie content, preparation time, cuisine style, etc. Maybe even include an option to include recipes that are missing a couple of ingredients, so I could make a shopping list. There are some very interesting data problems and interface problems to solve there, and it would be enormously useful to boot. I suck at meal planning, and it would be amazing if I could use a tool to plan out the next week's meals based on target caloric content and prep time per meal, with a knowledge of what I have in my pantry (and the ability to tell me what I need to shop for). I suspect that a lot of people would find that sort of thing terribly handy.