Programming is often touted as a smart and lucrative career path. It's a job that (sometimes) offers flexibility and great benefits. But it's far from sunshine and Nyan Cat rainbows. The hours are long. The mistakes are frustrating. And your eyesight is almost guaranteed to suffer. These memes cover most of the frustration (and funny moments) of programming. At least we can laugh through the pain.
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The book "Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer" sounds promising from the title, but as many have discovered, the plot turns out to be a misogynistic disaster.
In the story (which was released in 2013), Barbie is designing a video game (yay!), but instead of doing the coding herself, she requires the help of two men (boo!). Because try as she might, it takes more than a silly girl with a heart-shaped flash drive necklace to do the heavy lifting, according to the children's story.
After infecting everyone's computers with a virus, and begging for help from her friends Steven and Brian, Barbie ends up taking all the credit for her completed game.
As a result of this discovery, the Internet has decided to re-write the book.
On the site "Feminist Hacker Barbie," users can submit their own take on the story, to "help Barbie be the competent, independent, bad-ass engineer that she wants to be."
Casey Fiesler, a PhD student at Georgia Tech, has also remixed her own version of the story.
Her main issue with the book:
The problem isn't even that Barbie isn't a 'real' computer scientist because she isn't coding. (I am one of those mostly-non-coding computer scientists myself, though now I'm tempted to make a game about robot puppies shooting lasers anyway.) The problem is the assumption that she is a designer, not a coder, and the coders are boys.
Maybe the new "normal Barbie" Lammily will be more successful at an engineering career.
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