Coraline Ada Ehmke

Last updated
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Coraline Ada Ehmke.jpg
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Born
Germany
Occupation(s)Technologist, speaker, writer
Known forethics, advocacy
Notable workCulture Offset, Contributor Covenant, Post-Meritocracy Manifesto
Website where.coraline.codes

Coraline Ada Ehmke is an American software developer, open source advocate, [1] and Founder and Executive Director of the Organization for Ethical Source, based in Chicago, Illinois. She began her career as a web developer in 1994 and has worked in a variety of industries, including engineering, consulting, education, advertising, healthcare, and software development infrastructure. She is known for her work in Ruby, and in 2016 earned the Ruby Hero award at RailsConf, a conference for Ruby on Rails developers. She is also known for her social justice work and activism, writing the Contributor Covenant and Post-Meritocracy Manifesto, and promoting the widespread adoption of codes of conduct for open source projects and communities.

Contents

Career

Ehmke began writing software in 1994, using the Perl programming language. She has since written software in ASP.NET and Java, before discovering Ruby in 2007. [2] She is the author of 25 Ruby gems [3] and has contributed to projects including Rspec and Ruby on Rails. She has spoken frequently at software conferences, [4] [5] and she has given keynote addresses at multiple technology conferences worldwide, including RubyFuza in Cape Town, South Africa [6] and RubyConf Brazil. [7]

In 2013 at the Madison+ Ruby conference, Ehmke was among a group of people who announced the creation of a community for LGBT technologists called LGBTech. During this announcement, she also came out publicly as transgender. [8]

In 2014, Ehmke created OS4W.org, a website to help all women contribute to open source by connecting them with mentors and pair programming partners, and identifying open source projects that welcome diverse contributors. [2] [9] [5]

Also in 2014, she created the Contributor Covenant, a code of conduct used in over 40,000 open source projects including all such projects from Google, Microsoft, and Apple. [10] [11] [12] In 2016, she received a Ruby Hero award in recognition of her work on the Contributor Covenant. [13] [14] After allegations of sexual harassment were made against the founder and CEO of GitHub and his wife in March 2014, Ehmke joined Betsy Haibel to create a service called the Culture Offset. Culture Offset allowed people who wished to boycott GitHub but were unable to do so because it was necessary for their work to "offset" their use by directing donations to organizations working to help underrepresented people in the technology industry. This project was featured in the Wall Street Journal and Wired Magazine. [15] [16] Ehmke is also the author of the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto. [17]

Ehmke is a founding panelist on the Greater Than Code podcast. [18] [5] She serves on the boards of directors for Ruby Together and RailsBridge. [19] [20]

In 2016, she joined GitHub as a senior developer on a team that develops community management and anti-harassment features for the software platform. [21] She was fired approximately a year later, and on July 5, 2017 published an article criticizing GitHub's culture and the circumstances surrounding her severance. [22] [23] [24] Her story was featured in a 2017 report on hush clauses and non-disparagement agreements published by CNN. [25]

In 2018 Ehmke participated in a debate at the United Nations Forum on Business and Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland on the topic of tech companies being a threat to human rights. [26] [27] [28] Ehmke created the "Hippocratic License" (described as "An Ethical License for Open Source Projects") and in 2020 founded the Organization for Ethical Source. [29] [30] [ non-primary source needed ]

Ehmke has been the repeated subject of negative reporting by far-right organizations and bloggers including Breitbart News , [31] [32] and has described herself as a "Notorious Social Justice Warrior" after being given the moniker in a Breitbart article about her joining GitHub. [33] [34]

Personal life

Ehmke is transgender, and began her transition in March 2014. [33] [35] She has been public about her transition in hopes of helping others, and has given several interviews about her experiences transitioning and working as a trans woman in technology. [33] [36] [37] She has also given a talk about her experiences titled "He Doesn't Work Here Anymore" at the Keep Ruby Weird, Alterconf, and Madison+ Ruby conferences. [38] [35]

Ehmke writes and records music and has released several albums under the name A Little Fire Scarecrow. [33] [36] [39]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruby (programming language)</span> General-purpose programming language

Ruby is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language which supports multiple programming paradigms. It was designed with an emphasis on programming productivity and simplicity. In Ruby, everything is an object, including primitive data types. It was developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruby on Rails</span> Server-side open source web application framework

Ruby on Rails is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages. It encourages and facilitates the use of web standards such as JSON or XML for data transfer and HTML, CSS and JavaScript for user interfacing. In addition to MVC, Rails emphasizes the use of other well-known software engineering patterns and paradigms, including convention over configuration (CoC), don't repeat yourself (DRY), and the active record pattern.

why the lucky stiff Artist and computer programmer

Jonathan Gillette, known by the pseudonym why the lucky stiff, is a writer, cartoonist, artist, and programmer notable for his work with the Ruby programming language. Annie Lowrey described him as "one of the most unusual, and beloved, computer programmers" in the world. Along with Yukihiro Matsumoto and David Heinemeier Hansson, he was seen as one of the key figures in the Ruby community. His pseudonym might allude to the exclamation "Why, the lucky stiff!" from The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Hub</span> Public directory of free and open source software (FOSS)

Black Duck Open Hub, formerly Ohloh, is a website which provides a web services suite and online community platform that aims to index the open-source software development community. It was founded by former Microsoft managers Jason Allen and Scott Collison in 2004 and joined by the developer Robin Luckey. As of 15 January 2016, the site lists 669,601 open-source projects, 681,345 source control repositories, 3,848,524 contributors and 31,688,426,179 lines of code.

The following tables list notable software packages that are nominal IDEs; standalone tools such as source-code editors and GUI builders are not included. These IDEs are listed in alphabetic order of the supported language.

Rubinius is an alternative Ruby implementation created by Evan Phoenix. Based loosely on the Smalltalk-80 Blue Book design, Rubinius seeks to "provide a rich, high-performance environment for running Ruby code."

IronRuby is an implementation of the Ruby programming language targeting Microsoft .NET Framework. It is implemented on top of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), a library running on top of the Common Language Infrastructure that provides dynamic typing and dynamic method dispatch, among other things, for dynamic languages.

Benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) is a title given to a small number of open-source software development leaders, typically project founders who retain the final say in disputes or arguments within the community. The phrase originated in 1995 with reference to Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GitHub</span> Hosting service for software projects

GitHub, Inc. is an AI-powered developer platform that allows developers to create, store, and manage their code. It uses Git software, providing the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.

Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages. As one of the first cloud platforms, Heroku has been in development since June 2007, when it supported only the Ruby programming language, but now also supports Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python, PHP, and Go. For this reason, Heroku is said to be a polyglot platform as it has features for a developer to build, run and scale applications in a similar manner across most of these languages. Heroku was acquired by Salesforce in 2010 for $212 million.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sinatra (software)</span>

Sinatra is a free and open source software web application library and domain-specific language written in Ruby. It is an alternative to other Ruby web application frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Merb, Nitro, and Camping. It is dependent on the Rack web server interface. It is named after musician Frank Sinatra.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zed Shaw</span> Software developer

Zed A. Shaw is a software developer best known for creating the Learn Code the Hard Way series of programming tutorials, as well as for creating the Mongrel web server for Ruby web applications. He is also well known for his polemical views on programming languages and communities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tom Preston-Werner</span> American software developer & entrepreneur

Thomas Preston-Werner is an American billionaire software developer and entrepreneur. He is an active contributor within the free and open-source software community, most prominently in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives.

James Nolan Weirich was a software developer, speaker, teacher, and contributor to the Ruby programming language community. He was active in the Ruby community worldwide, speaking at events in Asia, South America, Europe, and the United States.

RethinkDB is a free and open-source, distributed document-oriented database originally created by the company of the same name. The database stores JSON documents with dynamic schemas, and is designed to facilitate pushing real-time updates for query results to applications. Initially seed funded by Y Combinator in June 2009, the company announced in October 2016 that it had been unable to build a sustainable business and its products would in future be entirely open-sourced without commercial support.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Wanstrath</span> American technology entrepreneur and co-founder and former CEO of GitHub

Chris Wanstrath is an American technology entrepreneur and programmer. He is the founder of Null Games, and the co-founder and former CEO of GitHub, an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. Wanstrath co-founded GitHub in 2008 and sold it to Microsoft in 2018. Before starting GitHub, he worked with CNET on GameSpot and Chowhound. In addition to GitHub, he created the Atom text editor, Ruby's Resque job queue, the Mustache templating language, and created the pjax JavaScript library. According to Forbes his net worth is estimated at US$1.8-2.2 billion and is listed in America's richest entrepreneurs under 40, as well as Fortune's 40 under 40 and he was named in CNBC's Disruptor 50 list.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diversity in open-source software</span>

The open-source-software movement is commonly cited to have a diversity problem. In some ways it reflects that of the general gender disparity in computing, but in general is assumed to be even more severe. The same can be extended to the racial and ethnic diversity of the movement. "Diversity" in this article uses the academic Critical Theory definition.

Sage Sharp is a software engineer who has worked on the Linux kernel, including serving on the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board for two years.

The Contributor Covenant is a code of conduct for contributors to free/open source software projects, created by Coraline Ada Ehmke. Its stated purpose is to reduce harassment of minority, LGBT and otherwise underrepresented open source software developers.

References

  1. ↑ "Who is welcome online?" (PDF). Internet Health Report 2019. v.1.0. Mozilla: 46. 2018.
  2. 1 2 Ehmke, Coraline Ada (October 7, 2015). "Refactoring to a Happier Development Team" (Interview). Interviewed by Gareth Wilson. Fog Creek. Archived from the original on July 12, 2017. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
  3. ↑ "Coraline Ada". RubyGems. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
  4. ↑
  5. 1 2 3 Knowles, Bryan (Spring 2018). "Coraline Ada Ehmke: Promoting Richer Open Source Communities". XRDS . 24 (3): 60–61. doi:10.1145/3186707. S2CID   4697200.
  6. ↑ "Rubyfuza". Rubyfuza. Archived from the original on July 6, 2017. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
  7. ↑ "RubyConf Brazil". Archived from the original on January 12, 2018. Retrieved January 13, 2018.
  8. ↑ Ehmke, Coraline Ada (September 2, 2015). He Doesn't Work Here Anymore (Videotape).
  9. ↑ "About". OS4W. Archived from the original on May 27, 2018. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
  10. ↑ "Contributor Covenant: A Code of Conduct for Open Source Projects". Contributor Covenant. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
  11. ↑ Evans, Jon (March 5, 2016). "On the war between hacker culture and codes of conduct". TechCrunch. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
  12. ↑ Bostick, Chad (November 4, 2016). "GitHub's Anti-Harassment Tools and the Open Source Codes of Conduct". Hello Tech Pros. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
  13. ↑ "2016 Ruby Heroes". Ruby Heroes. Archived from the original on June 10, 2017. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
  14. ↑ RailsConf (May 12, 2016). Ruby Hero Awards (Videotape). Confreaks. 3:52 minutes in.
  15. ↑ Wells, Georgia (March 21, 2014). "In Wake of GitHub Incident, Coders Launch 'Culture Offset'". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved July 9, 2017.
  16. ↑ Finley, Klint (March 17, 2014). "An Advocate for Women in the Valley Quits GitHub, Citing Harassment". Wired. Retrieved July 9, 2017.
  17. ↑ Robertson, Adi (September 21, 2018). "With Linux's founder stepping back, will the community change its culture?". The Verge . Archived from the original on 2018-09-21. Retrieved October 4, 2021.
  18. ↑ "Panelists". Greater Than Code. Archived from the original on June 25, 2017. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
  19. ↑ "Ruby Together Team". Ruby Together. Archived from the original on July 6, 2017. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
  20. ↑ "Team". RailsBridge. Archived from the original on July 6, 2017. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
  21. ↑ Ehmke, Coraline Ada (February 24, 2016). "I'm thrilled to announce that I will be joining the team at @github next month to work on community management and anti-harassment tools". Twitter. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
  22. ↑ Ehmke, Coraline Ada (July 5, 2017). "Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub". where.coraline.codes. Archived from the original on July 5, 2017. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
  23. ↑ Jao, Charline (July 5, 2017). "Former GitHub Employee Writes About Company's Failure to Uphold Its Own Values". The Mary Sue. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
  24. ↑ Bort, Julie (July 6, 2017). "A GitHub programmer turned down a severance check so she could speak out about her frustrating experience". Business Insider. Retrieved July 8, 2017.
  25. ↑ O'Brien, Sara Ashley (July 8, 2017). "Why Sexism Has Festered For So Long in Silicon Valley". CNN Tech. Retrieved July 8, 2017.
  26. ↑ "Forum Debate: Are Tech Companies a Threat to Human Rights?".
  27. ↑ "Forum debate: Are tech companies a threat to human rights?". Archived from the original on 2020-09-19. Retrieved 2018-11-28.
  28. ↑ "Human Rights Microaggressions in the Tech Industry". Archived from the original on 2021-05-10. Retrieved 2018-11-28.
  29. ↑ "Hippocratic License" . Retrieved July 14, 2020.
  30. ↑ "The Ethical Source Movement" . Retrieved July 14, 2020.
  31. ↑ Finley, Klint (September 26, 2018). "The Woman Bringing Civility to Open Source Projects". Wired. Retrieved November 14, 2018.
  32. ↑ Seavers, Kris (October 2, 2017). "How 'social justice warrior' went from hero to joke". The Daily Dot. Retrieved November 14, 2018.
  33. 1 2 3 4 "Coraline Ada Ehmke". where.coraline.codes. Retrieved July 7, 2017.
  34. ↑ "@CoralineAda". Twitter. Retrieved July 7, 2017.
  35. 1 2 "Talk: He Doesn't Work Here Anymore". Alterconf. 2015. Retrieved July 9, 2017.
  36. 1 2 Ehmke, Coraline Ada. "Interview with Coraline Ada Ehmke". Geek Girl Rising. Retrieved July 9, 2017.
  37. ↑ Heidel, Evelin (September 30, 2016). "Your presence as a political statement: the story of Coraline Ada". GenderIT. Retrieved July 9, 2017.
  38. ↑ Madison+ Ruby (September 23, 2015). "Video: He Doesn't Work Here Anymore by @CoralineAda". Twitter. Retrieved July 9, 2017.
  39. ↑ "A Little Fire Scarecrow". Archived from the original on May 6, 2019. Retrieved July 9, 2017.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.