Improving distribution of opportunity on technology, by Espartaco Palma
Abstract
There's a lot of problems to surpass the barriers of entry to create innovation using software development, one of them is happening in this precise moment while you read this: English-centrism world.
It's something so common that people that happen to have English as native language thinks is the norm and there's no need to do nothing further. It does.
In this talk I'll propose some ideas on how to improve the distribution of opportunities for developers around the world through multi-language documentation of the aspects of the software development covering programming language(s), frameworks
Details
Ruby is one of examples of how a (initially) non English-based community can create a programming language that cover a lot to democratize the opportunities on software development, an impressive ecosystem has been created around them, but as part of the success the need of English centrist is there as a solution, but also as an entry barrier. A weird dichotomy.
Fortunately the ruby community is open enough to be ready to embrace to be more open on what can we do to create a more broader community, not just for people privileged enough to access, understand and apply the already free resources on a language that is not their native.
Translation is kind of an never-ending work, always needed for more human resources to keep the impressive velocity applied to technology, a problem that should not be a problem but an opportunity for all those communities ready for a great achievement.
Pitch
I've been working on provide to the Spanish-base community of software development more resources on our own language for about 18 years now (starting on a now defunct PortalFox), doing more broad work in this matter using Creative Commons as an leverage. I've translate books (97cosas.com is my lastest work) and courses about open data, python, ruby, etc. Doing this translation work I've learn a lot about how my solo effort is not, and never will be enough to solve not only the Spanish-based work, and extrapolating this to the non-English word is just overwhelming.
Speaker Information
Senior Software Engineer working with datasets all day long, using whatever techniques we can apply aiming the real-time processing.
TDD advocated, been working with dynamic languages long time ago.