Hello, world!
Hello, everyone!
Helen Faulkner's message reminded me that although I had been lurking
on debian-women through gmane for a while now, I hadn't actually
gotten around to posting. <laugh> I guess it's a good time to
introduce myself.
I'm Sandra Jean V. Chua from the Philippines, but I suspect that only
people who read my changelogs or know me in some official capacity
will recognize my full name as I almost always use 'Sacha Chua'. I'm
currently in Japan for IT training.
I started using Linux in 1996, when my first year high school teacher
put me in front of a computer, gave me root, told me where to find the
docs, and told me to set up a Linux-based BBS. (I think he did this
because I kept bugging him for extra things to do, and he knew I
BBSed.) It took us three days to figure out how to get privileges on
mbbs. <laugh>
I've been into computers since childhood. My parents have been and
still are extremely supportive. All my siblings are female and I
attended an exclusive girls' school (which taught LOGO before it
taught Wordstar!), so it never occurred to me that computers aren't "a
girl thing". Sure, most of the people on the BBSes I joined at 9 were
probably male, but my sister was also prominent in that world, so that
wasn't an issue either.
Neither was gender an issue throughout high school or college, as by
then I'd already found my niche and developed enough skill to
distinguish myself in it. Being a girl had its advantages, though. I
always got my own room when we went abroad for programming contests! I
suspect I attracted a bit more attention locally because of age and
gender, but everything turned out well. <laugh>
Before going to Japan for my IT internship, I taught introductory
computer science (and a few other subjects; you know how it goes) at
the university level. I'm also the former vice president of the
Philippine Linux Users Group and an active Linux advocate, having
given a number of talks on Linux, wearable computing, and computer
science education. I'm planning to work on my master's after finishing
my training, although am a bit nervous about the chances I'll be
accepted into places like UToronto or MIT. I'm interested in personal
information management. In particular, I'd like to look at how people
customize their systems and how their ways of planning evolve as they
build software support for it.
I'm upstream and Debian packager for planner-el, a personal
information manager for Emacs. I also package emacs-wiki and
remember-el, although remember-el isn't official yet.
I finally got around to having my key signed at the recent Kansai Open
Source 2004 conference in Japan, and have just started on the new
maintainer process. =) (That conference was a bit of an experience. I
was sometimes the only girl in the room during the talks and BOFs I
attended, and sometimes the only foreigner. <laugh> That said,
everyone was Really Nice, and I had a lot of fun chatting with the
other Debian people over dinner that evening.)
I'm really looking forward to becoming part of the Debian Project.
It's less work for my sponsor, for one! Besides, someone needs to help
bootstrap Debian involvement in the Philippines. <grin>
You can check out my wikiblog at http://sacha.free.net.ph for more
information, or Google me. See you around!
--
Sacha Chua <sacha@free.net.ph> - open source geekette
interests: emacs, gnu/linux, making computer science education fun
wearable computing, personal information management
http://sacha.free.net.ph/ - PGP Key ID: 0xE7FDF77C
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