jwlrs

• http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/is_there_a_payoff_from_top-team_diversity
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2012/10/10/diversity-drives-innovation/
• http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~spage/thedifference.html
• https://www.ncwit.org/resources/what-impact-gender-diversity-technology-business-performance-research-summary
• http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/
• http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/opinion/sunday/why-some-teams-are-smarter-than-others.html?_r=0
• http://www.illuminate.com/whitepaper/
• http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/09/25/3572355/women-on-boards-performance/
• http://www.catalyst.org/media/companies-more-women-board-directors-experience-higher-financial-performance-according-latest
• http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0079147

jwlrs

One thing that often comes up in discussions about hiring more diverse candidates is the idea that selecting for diversity is seen as lowering the bar.  We need to spread the idea that selecting for diversity is raising the bar.  Why?

- More diverse candidates are more likely to have faced discrimination and other hurtles.  This means that even if they are of equal competency as someone else, they had to work harder to get there, and therefore have greater velocity and tenacity.
- Underrepresented candidates might be more competent than they appear because of unconscious bias.
- Diverse perspectives are in and of themselves an asset.

This is not an original idea of course; I will collect all the references I can and present them.  There is plenty of academic research about this, for example: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7281.html

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jwlrs

A GitHub coding pattern analysis site

What if we could use GitHub to determine how common certain coding practices are among savvy developers? Imagine a site where you could search for particular coding patterns, or possibly just view total counts of particular patterns already deemed important. This could be very useful for language and library designers, students new to a language, and more.

As background, over at https://github.com/JSFixed/JSFixed we are discussing what features we want to see in the next generation of ECMAScript (though discussion has focused on JavaScript specifically for the most part). In https://github.com/JSFixed/JSFixed/issues/49, https://github.com/polotek asked "Is there any quantitative data to replace the subjective argument that 'lots of people need this all the time'?" One answer is that there could be plenty of quantitative data available if we mined GitHub itself.

This is a bit like Google Code Search was, but more geared arou