It’s no secret that many technology circles are boys’ clubs. There’s something about the industry that seems undesirable to women. For the longest time, it eluded me as to why anyone would not love technology.

Then Matt Aimonetti and Hoss Gifford proved why it’s a culture that is generally unwelcoming to women. I won’t bother linking to them or any of the stories; you’ll have to Google it yourself to find out.

These two cartoons presented at a developers’ convention and utterly degraded the entire profession in the span of an hour or less. First, Matt mad unclever and borderline offensive slides that urged developers to “perform like porn stars.” Not to be outdone, Hoss decided to put a most definitely not safe for work image directly in his slides in a recent conference, and even acted like a prepubescent boy during the presentation. Again, you’ll have to Google it for the video.

If software engineers ever hope to be taken serious by the traditional professions, such as doctors and lawyers, this kind of crap has to stop.

Much to my dismay, Kirrily Robert decided to include an image link directly in her feed that is aggregated on Planet Perl. The result is I am reading my daily dose of software related blogs and suddenly I see a resized image of something not even remotely professional in my feed reader. Google Reader dutifully downloads a dozen feed items in advance so I am not waiting to download them. No matter what I do at that point, it won’t look good.

Now I am in the uncomfortable position of explaining to my boss tomorrow why that was in my feed reader and what I intend to do about it. I am basically going to have to cut myself off of Planet Perl and try in the most professional manner to explain that I was not looking for that sort of content. Planet Perl will now join the likes of Gizmondo and XKCD as being inappropriate to read at work.