It's not fucking sexism There's a lot of geek feminists (myself included) who get irritated about assumptions that all geeks/hackers/programmers are male. No a

It's not fucking sexism There's a lot of geek feminists (myself included) who get irritated about assumptions that all geeks/hackers/programmers are male. No amount of dictionary definition quoting is going to make me think it's not sexist to put a gender-specific joke in a generalised list of advice. post script: The dates on how long ago I started learning ruby are outdated. It doesn't matter if you learned ruby 3 months ago or 7 years ago. The point of my comment is this - instead of giving a laundry list of canonical "do this, do that, become 'a hacker'" you could give some advice on how you learned to hack, that you think might be relevant to others. The more recently you learned to hack, the more valuable that advice is. A generalised laundry list of "the path" is disingenuous. I don't care if it comes from you, me, DHH, Linus Torvalds, Donald Knuth, Jacob Appelbaum, RMS, Fabrice Bellard, Rusty Russell, Guido van Rossum, Jamie Zawinski, my mum, or some school kid. Everyone's path is different and personal, noone's is canonical. But therein lies the value.