It’s been a crazy month for me. I’ve been spending a lot of time annoying my Twitter followers with announcements about the Kickstarter.

If you’re interested in what I’m trying to do, you’re running out of time to back my project. It’s only two weeks left before the Kickstarter ends.

Kickstarter Ends December 8th

If you want to back the film, you can pick between a t-shirt, laptop sticker, access to stream the film, a signed CD, preview of the film, quarterly video updates, or even a private screening of the film with a Q&A (North America only). Every dollar helps! Back it here:

Hello World: The Film Kickstarter

Why I’m Making a Documentary

You might be wondering, why make a documentary? Well, the reality is that I’ve been a nut for documentaries since I was young. I’ve always harbored a dream of being a filmmaker. I’ve made a couple of short films to get prepared to make this film. And I think it’s worked. I’m loving telling a story with film.

A short documentary I made about my neighborhood And the story I've wanted to tell for a long time now has been our story. I'm a software developer (and have been one for over thirty years). There is something interesting about our job. It's not like many other jobs. Most people don't understand what we do or why we do it so passionately. I want to demystify what we do in order to let people know that it's an accessible industry and more people could and should become developers.

Related to this story is the story of diversity and inclusion. Women make up a minority of software developers, but most of us don’t know how it got that way. Going back to the the history of women in software tells us that they used to be the majority (even Cosmopolitan magazine said “Programming is women’s work” back in the '60s). But how we got here is a story worth telling.

While the fact that women make up a disproportionately small number of developers, I’m also concerned with the tiny number of American minorities (e.g. black and latino/a) in software development. If we want to build software for everyone, we need people on teams that represent a wide range of users; race, gender, ethnic background, faith and economic background. That’s not where we’re at now.

These facts have been bouncing around my brain for a number of years. And at some point it has to come out. That’s why I need your help.

While you know that I make videos for Pluralsight, this isn’t going to be a film like that. This is a feature-length documentary. I’m interviewing people around the world and that’s why I need backers for the Kickstarter. If you want to contribute, just visit the Kickstarter page here:

Hello World: The Film Kickstarter

What do you think about me making a film?