Ask HN: Female hacker-founder AMA

These are the selling points for CS that worked really well in my conversations with 10-18 year-old girls so far (Aggregated so you can use them for your niece if you find the opportunity) :

- You can do this really cool thing you wanted to do (ex: build a cringe Justin Bieber /cringe fan app ) and it's easy, let me show you how.

- This girl who was just like you is now heading Yahoo/building the top fan site for XYZ band.

- You can make something that millions of people are sharing and using tomorrow and you don't have to ask your parents for money to do it.

- You can make more money as a teenager building stuff in a day than did the average worker in my country in a month.

- You can work from a tropical island if you want, or anywhere on the planet, really.

- The quality of your work can be proven immediately and the duration of your experience shows in the size of your portfolio, so every hour you make things they can help you in perpetuity (no way to get that as a teacher, nurse, or model).

- You can graduate college in the US in one of the worst years for immigrants ('07), with no visas available, and still get multiple job offers at companies of your choice because of the point above.

- The jobs are growing, not shrinking in this industry. It is a new form of literacy you will need to know eventually.

- (When all else fails) Hacker girls get hit on quite frequently.

Bulgaria is a very patriarchal country, but education up-to-and-including high-school was/is fitting for CS (math is required every year and it is a frequently chosen concentration). The same applies to many eastern european countries, I assume. There is a lot of "sand in the opportunities engine" after that stage, so many smart young people prefer to get their undergraduate and graduate degrees elsewhere (Germany, US, etc). One of the teen girls I mentored just started working in Germany as a Software Engineer. Most of my classmates are abroad. For CS, a good math middle-school and high-school education and a fun component (competitions) seemed enough for the peers I know.

First thought - great setup, but I'm curious about the source, so to speak.

I've been thinking about open sourcing this: http://www.doerhub.com/for/whichvc but as the primary hacker on DoerHub I haven't found the time to clean up the code.

Technically, most of the code I wrote before my startup is source-visible, since my former employer doesn't obfuscate JS. If you dig into the CNN js files you will see the SearchProcessor, CSI Manager, ads js, custom local storage libraries, and other stuff I wrote or contributed to that also repeats on NBA.com, CNN Money, etc (I was a part of the front-end core-developer team and wrote library-agnostic custom js libraries). However, I founded my company and started writing code on it the day after I quit my employer, because it had very tight IP ownership of everything generated while employed (we asked for an opportunity to open-source some of our stuff, but it wasn't approved by the time I left).

If DoerHub is successful I believe it will help worthwhile open-source projects get a lot more support and exposure. I think I can add more value by amplifying the amplifiers in the short run.

I want to make it a go to place for people to establish and grow their identity as doers - to nurture their pursuits and benefit when they help others (If you are great at something you can mentor and invest/contribute open source in that field. The social capital you generate from doing that should come back to you as help in areas you are trying to grow in). Not everyone is comfortable putting that out there (especially non-hackers) and if they do, having real relationships with the other users on the site first helps. I would rather sacrifice short-term growth to build a product that really rocks and is spread by users in the mid-to-long term.