Blog review: "Maya's Programming Blog: An attempt at a proper programming blog"

"Maya’s Programming Blog: An attempt at a proper programming blog” is all business. Yet, the author Maya Posch herself presents an incredible degree of human intersectionality through the context of the blog.

Posts are almost exclusively about the technical details of the projects Posch has worked on, a marked difference from other programming blogs I have seen so far.

Working out of The Netherlands, her native country, Posch focuses mostly on graphics and gaming, her most recent post being on using Qt to create an accessible app for a blind client.

She is not very prolific on this blog, but obviously quite knowledgeable.

Amazingly, with only two (well, three) posts for 2012, Posch reported 30k views?! Cross traffic? This blog merits reading in and of itself, and it is linked to her other blogs which I think draw more interest than this wordpress blog of hers.

Posch's main site immediately identifies her as being born intersexed. Here, she introduces associated political and personal struggles. Though she clearly identifies as a woman, she says she was born a hermaphrodite.

She is engaged in a campaign to get Dutch surgeons to perform reconstructive surgery which she says would make her existing sex organs more functional. She has not been able to get the surgeons to perform the surgery, she says, due to an oppressive culture in The Netherlands.

Along with the programming blog and her sort of main PR page, Posch maintains an extremely personal blog and vlog, and a blog called “Jinzou Ningen – Artificial Human Project.”

Through an amateur exploration of reverse engineering of the human body, the artificial human blog shows the intersection of her interests in science and engineering with her personal and political struggles as an intersexed individual. How fascinatingly cyborgian post-structural!

I wonder how much of the serious tone and focus of the programming blog has to do with Posch’s target statuses as a woman and as an intersexed individual. I wonder if she feels like she needs to present herself as more competent to be perceived as equally competent in a masculine-privileged, binary-privileged world and industry.

This experience might be revealed through the ambivalence of the blog title's tag line where "proper" both asserts competence within and compliance with programming discourse, while the doubting "attempt" undermines that assertion either as self-doubt or as a critique of the system.

Looking at her other blogs, she maintains a similarly intense tone and focus, so maybe that’s just how she is. But, that begs the question, doesn’t it?