[UbuntuWomen] Intro

[Amanda Babcock Furrow]

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 08:12:01PM -0500, Jess wrote:

> Anyway, I'm currently staying at home with my almost one year old, and
> while I love taking care of the kiddo, the gentle art of domesticity, etc.,
> I must sadly report that I feel the technical part of my brain slowly
> turning to mush.  

I so know what you mean!  I'm typing this around a 1.5-year-old who just
crawled into my lap for a nurse.

> I've never been "involved" in the open source community
> beyond using some of the software that it produces, but I might like to
> change that, so that's why I signed up to this list! :)  I'd love to hear
> what other SAHM's are doing to stay sharp while not working, too.

I was a network engineer, dealing with customer routing requirements
and programming Ciscos.  I've been stay-at-home for 7 years now, and I 
just started volunteering as a sysadmin for the Organization for Transformative
Works.  Just having that bit of an identity other than "mom" is wonderful.

It's unlike most free software projects, but more like Dreamwidth Studios,
in that the environment is majority-female and, at least for the OTW but
likely Dreamwidth as well, strongly fannish.  Both organizations use 
volunteer Ruby coders to build their backends.  I'd meant to volunteer
as a coder but they needed sysadmins more!

Amanda