This is more of a quick, explanatory “heads-up” post than anything else.

On March 31st 2018, I started an experiment: I created a new Stack Overflow user called “Daisy Shipton” with no picture and a profile that just read “Love coding in C#” (or similar). I wanted to see how a new user presenting with a traditionally-female name would be treated, while posting the same content that I normally would. This experiment was only a small part of my thinking around the culture of Stack Overflow, and I expect to write more on that subject, touching on the experience of “Daisy”, at another time.

I let a few people in on the secret as I went along – people who I fully expected to recognize my writing style fairly quickly. A single person emailed me to ask whether Daisy and I were the same person – well done to them for spotting it. (Once someone had the idea, the evidence was pretty compelling – the “Jon Skeet” account went into a decline in posting answers at the same time that the “Daisy Shipton” account was created, and Daisy just happened to post about C#, Noda Time, Protocol Buffers, time zones and Google Cloud Platform client libraries for .NET. I really wasn’t trying to cover my tracks.)

As Daisy reached a rep of about 12,000 points, there became little point in continuing the experiment, so I asked for “her” account to be merged into my regular one. So if you see comments on my posts referring to @DaisyShipton, that’s why.

There’s one aspect of experimentation that never happened: Daisy never asked a question. Next time I want to ask a question on Stack Overflow, I’ll probably create another account to see how a question I think is good is received when posted from a 1-rep account.

It’s been fun, but it’ll also be nice to only have one account to manage now…