Long ago,  I worked for a couple years as a professional ballet dancer with a small company. Reflecting on this, I have an interesting perspective of working in field were woman are the majority and also one where women are in the minority. I thought I would dedicate this post a few observations of similarities between men in ballet and women in software development.

Men in Ballet

http://www.cballet.org/about/dancers/principal/amador

• Have some lame people think ballet is just for girls and make assumptions about them based on cultural stereotypes
• Have to have a sense of humor to handle accidentally injuries due to kicks or slips while rehearsing choreography with women.
• Clearly love what they do. Otherwise, they most likely would have never overcome the social pressure to pursue their craft.
• Partner when ballerinas to create great performances. The diversity of having men and women dance together allows more freedom of expression in the choreography. Ultimately, that produces a show that is more valuable and pleasing to the audience.
• Usually have no wait in line for the men’s restroom during ballet performance intermissions.

Women in Software Development

• Have some lame people think software development is just for boys and make assumptions about them based on cultural stereotypes.
• Have to have a sense of humor to handle accidental insensitive remarks due to slips in conversation when working with men. (Ex: hot chicks, rude jokes, etc….)
• Clearly love what they do. Otherwise, they most likely would have never overcome the social pressure to pursue their craft.
• Partner with other software developers to create great software. More diversity*, allows more freedom of expression in understanding and applying technology to solve business needs. Ultimately, that produces software that is more valuable and pleasing to the business and user.
• Usually have no wait in line for the women’s restroom during technical conference breaks.

Since joining EdgeCase, I have shelved my heavy Intellij and Eclipse IDEs in favor of Emacs. Overall, I have enjoyed moving to the light-weight but powerful editor. There is one thing that I did miss from my IDEs – that was the ability to search projects for string occurrences and being able to click navigate to them through the editor. Fortunately, one of the strengths of Emacs is it’s infinite configurability and extensibility. Even more fortunate, one of the guys in our shared office, Doug Alcorn of Gaslight Software, had already written just this feature for his Emacs. I installed it and was so pleased with it, that I thought I would share …

https://github.com/dougalcorn/emacs.d/blob/master/site-lisp/misc/project-grep.el

To install:
Download project-local-variables.el and project-grep.el
In your init.el file: (require ‘project-grep)
Create an empty .emacs-project file in your directory

To use: meta-x project-grep

Project-grep