[RandallBrown]

This has little to do with the contents of the article, but I found it interesting.

"For development, each engineer runs her own instance of Fake S3 where she can put gigabytes of images and video to develop and test against, and her setup will work offline because it is all local."

Is spool a team of all women engineers? (I'm just curious as to whether or not that's true because it's so rare. I don't want to turn this into a weird opposite day version of the sexism in computer science debate.)

[anadiazhernandz]

Female pronouns are used in many contexts to counteract the too-common use of male pronouns. I assume jubos was doing this because he knows the tech-world is flooded with male pronouns.

[dlgeek]

I have no problem with this in general... but for the love of god, please don't do what a coworker of mine did recently. In a threat model document, he had A sending HIS messages to B, using HER public key. I automatically translated the names to Alice and Bob (like anyone else would in a threat model), hit the pronouns, and my brain segfaulted.

[eli]

The English language lacks an appropriate word for this situation (singular personal pronoun that could apply to either gender). Many people feel using "he" to refer to both genders is sexist and will instead rephrase the sentence or use "they" as a singular (which is controversial). Using "she" is just another option. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Gender-neutral_la...

[piggity]

I much prefer gender neutral language to using "she" or "he".

Unless of course we are talking about a specific example like "John foolishly unscrewed the cap on his radiator while the engine was running".

In which case I would generally try and mix the gender across examples.

"Jane stabbed herself in the eye with a pencil when she was rear-ended by John on the way to the hospital"

[eli]

Those aren't pronouns. Making up fake names would get very confusing for the reader.

[arms]

Maybe, maybe not, either way I don't think that's why it was phrased that way. I have no idea of the internals of the team, but I've seen the female terms used instead of the male terms more frequently when referencing software engineers than in other fields. It's just how some people write it.

[Drbble]

It's an unintended consequence of the stereotype the all women engineers are imaginary.