[campus-JHU-staff] Introductions

[Denise Paolucci]

On Aug 16, 2012, at 5:02 PM, Asheesh Laroia wrote:

> Hello, dear people on the JHU open source comes to campus mailing list,
> 
> I'd love if we'd all introduce ourselves. I'll go first.

i'm denise paolucci, co-founder of dreamwidth studios (www.dreamwidth.org), a code fork of the livejournal.com blogging/community software that also holds the distinction of being (to the best of anyone's knowledge) one of only two open source projects that are majority-female. (at last count, we were about 75% female-identified people and around 65-70% newcomers to open source, or to programming as a whole.)

i've been in and around open source for about a decade or so, although mostly in the "adjunct" skills -- testing, documentation, end-user support, etc -- until mark smith and i started dreamwidth and i realized that if we wanted to have any hope of meeting our target launch-to-open-beta date i was probably going to have to tackle some code myself. in my spare time (ha!) i am also a fanfiction writer and a disability activist, the latter owing mostly to my own health/disability issues.

i live about three miles from the jhu homewood campus, so if anybody's coming in from out of town i can tell you where to get a good meal. :)

i'm also two weeks past hand surgery, hence the lack of capital letters. although i'm *finally* starting to get better!

looking forward to meeting all you lovely people, and to helping with a great event.

best,
 d

-- 
Denise Paolucci
denise at dwscoalition.org
Dreamwidth Studios: Open Source, open expression, open operations. Join us: www.dreamwidth.org