Coding While Female

A subtle difference in reception.

Yesterday, I published my first grunt plugin. I am very proud of it. Not only am I now the only programmer at my company who has developed a custom Grunt plugin, it solves a major requirement challenge that our engineering team was facing implementing RactiveJS into our code.

I’ll go into more detail about what my cool new plugin does at a later date. Now, I’m going to change the subject from how awesome my plugin is to the subject of how it was received.

Yesterday, I started telling other members of the engineering department about my plugin. I started the conversation like, “oh, you are coding that new feature with Ractive. I just published this Grunt plugin that you should checkout. I spent the last week finishing it.”

So we discussed what my new plugin did for a while. Based on past experiences I made sure to mention no less than three times during this conversation that I had written it and that I had published it. When I had finished describing how it was used here’s the response that I got, “wow, this should help a lot. I’m so glad someone built it.”

I blinked. I had told this specific person I was working on a Grunt plugin several days before. For a minute I tried to tell myself that maybe he hadn’t heard me the multiple times I had mentioned I was responsible for it. “I built it.”

“oh.” and he shrugged. That was it. No acknowledgment ever. I sent them the link to the plugin. No one downloaded it.

Yep. That is what life is like as a female programmer. I’m tired.