I enjoy when using tech tools on my extremely femme-gendered hobby projects makes them feel out-of-genre important

What an interesting way to trigger some stereotype incongruence and realize how much "tech weight" we give things just by all these relatively shallow signifiers

Look at that font. She must have a hacker brain
Are there things that make work "look Technical" to you? Are there secret signifiers you have become aware of? I love hearing people notice these things
@grimalkina off the top of my head: monospaced fonts, dark mode, hosting things in source control, customer service with issue trackers rather than ticketing systems, Markdown (sort of, that gets complicated), command-line instructions or aesthetics
@glyph @grimalkina +1 to dark mode. "I've... seen things"
@vic @grimalkina there are practical origins to almost all of this. For example, with respect to dark mode, I am old enough to remember discussing raster burn (both senses) at work, and OLED displays are bringing it back (both senses) now. People do have different reactions but for most folks, over the long term, day-long coding sessions on large screens in light mode is a recipe for headaches and brutal eye strain
@glyph @vic (it depends on your situation though, neurology of eyesight is very individual -- I have v complex eyesight with a lot of opposing needs and dark mode immediately gives me headaches and eyestrain. Something about the high contrast is super triggering for me)
@glyph @vic but yeah, signifiers definitely usually have histories with meaning! Still troublesome when they BECOME the meaning
@grimalkina @vic "low contrast" is also such a signifier, perhaps a stronger one than "dark mode" for exactly your reasons. In the 80s, 90s, and 00s when the programmer population was growing really rapidly and thus most were very young, "programmer themes" featured a lot of fullbright green on pitch black. Now that growth has slowed and the population has aged, almost all color schemes are cream-on-dark-grey or vice versa. (I believe you're using Solarized/Light or some derivative, there?)
@glyph @grimalkina @vic
Another potential reason for the 80s and 90s starting with green on black themes is many of the developers who had been around longer were used to coding in "green screen" terminals or displays. Color monitors were expensive and not always supported by midrange and mainframe computer systems.
@AdamDavis @grimalkina @vic Yeah thanks for raising this, I was out and about by the time I remembered to mention green and amber monochrome displays.