This project is called (wo)man and is a semi-satirical, semi-useful command line tool designed for people interested in popular feminist issues as well as being a commentary on technology being a male-dominated field.  (wo)man is a set of 6 custom terminal commands that each touch on a different feminist issue. 

The inspiration for this project came from the irony that the manual command in terminal, the command that explains all other terminal commands is: ‘man.’  Typing ‘man’ and then any terminal command (ex. ‘man cd’) will pull up a manual page explaining the command.  I was going off of the idea that the world of technology is still pretty inaccessible to women just due to the way society typically steers feminine interests.  Instead of simplifying the ‘man’ command to make it more accessible, I decided something that more females (and males) with terminal knowledge would find more interestingo is a set of commands dealing with feminist issues. 

A brief overview of what each command does:

dump — Dumps your significant other for you via email.

sorry — Looks through your sent messages and counts how many times you say “sorry”, “just”, “actually”, or “I think.”

card — Based on gender and ethnicity returns how many cents someone of the specified demographic makes on the dollar compared to a typical white male.

fire — Fires an employee via email.

mmas — This ‘make me a sandwich’ command will refuse to make you a sandwich, but will give you the jimmy john’s menu so you can make one yourself.

trump — lastly, this one returns one of many hilarious/not hilarious misogynistic quotes said by Trump.

woman — ‘woman’ followed by any of the above commands will bring up a manual page explaining the flags associated with each command and how to use them.

I was pleasantly surprised by how many people enjoyed using these commands and learning things about how they speak in their emails, or in general being reminded about popular feminist issues.  The biggest problem I ran into with my users was the learning curve.  Especially people who do not know terminal extremely well had some problems understanding the limitations of not using the correct flags, or not using the flags correctly.  Since that is how terminal functions anyways, though, I do not think I would change the usability aspect. 

This project pushed me more than others in needing to be ‘clever’ over technical challenges.  Next step: add a function so that people can suggest new commands and the (wo)man library can grow past just my ‘cleverness.’ Github