It would be nice for the world to acknowledge that gender isn’t relevant to someone’s contributions to a software or hardware project. You’d be one hundred percent right to believe that. From my perspective, as someone who weighed this decision myself, it does matter to someone considering joining a community. It does matter when you see a list of contributors, listen to a panel or see a photo from an event and don’t see a lot of people who look like you. A person could very well feel like she doesn’t belong.
It made me realize that being a part of a community that encourages all types of people to participate is where I wanted to be. And I’m here to state that the RISC-V community is open in every sense of the word. It’s an active, enthusiastic, supportive group that — above all — wants everyone to have access to free and open hardware and software. The RISC-V Foundation is so new that almost everyone is a newbie, and the culture of the community is still being formed.
Also check out her presentation on RISC-V debugging from the last RISC-V Workshop.
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