Addendums

I’ll be honest - I don’t read a lot of tech blogs. I’m not big on the newest gadget, I still don’t know how i feel about the DailyWTF, and I have very little interest in the day-to-day activities of big-name tech companies. Too many tech blogs exude a lot of the elitism and machismo that make me feel more like an alien in tech culture than a participant. There are some exceptions to this that I’d like to read more, like the excellent Silcon Florist, which follows the Portland tech industry. But as I’m just starting to engage myself with building and strengthening the Portland tech community on a business level, I revisit it less than I should.

There are a couple tech blogs that really draw me in, though, and I love them because reading them makes me feel strongly in alignment with my identity as a technologist. These blogs can be especially helpful to read on days where I need to write some code and can’t get my head in the right space, or the (blessedly infrequent, lately) times where I can’t remember why I ever liked programming in the first place.

I covered the first amazing tech blog, Geek Feminism, in this post, and I think I’ve linked back to it in almost every entry I’ve written since then.

The newest blog to earn my endless praise is Code Anthem.

I actually found Code Anthem through Geek Feminism. GF wrote a small entry on why requiring open source contributions from a job candidate can be sexist, with a post from Code Anthem as the starter material for the discussion: “Don’t Judge a Developer By Open Source”. This topic really interests me - because I’m interested in the open source ethos, increasingly use open source technologies, and have an interest in open source development - but the environment still seems incredibly hostile to me, with a high barrier to entry. As a result, I am still in the “incubation” stage of doing open source work, and it sucks to know that I could be falsely written off as a crappy coder because of my lack of involvement thus far.

The Open Source post led me to Code Anthem’s How to Hire Crappy Programmers, and since reading that post I’ve been hooked.

See, here’s why Code Anthem is awesome: since I started working in industry, I’ve felt like there’s an odd mismatch between the way most companies hire developers and the way developers actually evaluate their own skillsets and otherwise behave. When I was in college, trying to port the skills I was learning while acquiring my Bachelor’s in Computer Science to the job postings that appeared on our department mailing list was basically impossible. What was especially shocking to me about most of these companies submitting the postings was that the way they were trying to market themselves to applicants made me, as a programmer, not want to work with them. Even though I’ve struggled with confidence throughout my lifetime as a programmer, I also know enough about my own smarts to see these job postings and say “if this is the blunt hammer they’re going to apply to resume screening, they’re probably going to filter out a lot of decent applicants (like myself).” Unfortunately, this seems to be what 98% of job postings, at least in Oregon, look like. I’ve ended up coping with this weird reality in two ways: one, I’ve gotten comfortable applying for jobs where I’m not qualified “on paper”, because I’ve come to accept that hardly anybody else applying for these positions can be, either. Two, I’ve written this all off as a symptom of an immature industry that has adopted a stupid standard practice because it hasn’t been around long enough to have an actual tested and established best practice in place.

What a treat to see the How to Hire Crappy Programmers post addressing just this issue. And to see the wide-ranging consensus in the comments! I especially loved the folks who reported on the job postings that require x number of years in a technology that has existed for less than x years. This stuff really happens, and I’ve honestly been surprised to not see anybody ranting about it until the comments section of that entry.

With that personal introduction out of the way, Code Anthem is all about this issue of programming talent and how we evaluate it. How do we hire for it? What is a programmer worth? How can companies effectively market themselves to good programmers, and in turn, how can they (fairly) determine that applicants are indeed qualified? These are really difficult questions precisely because we’re in such an immature industry, but also because this industry is rife with really unique challenges that really complicate the evaluation of an excellent coder (for instance, I’m in the camp that an excellent coder who’s also an asshole isn’t actually an excellent coder, because they can’t work with people - others would disagree).

To my knowledge, Joel on Software has been the go-to for this kind of input in the past, but I ran into a problem a few years ago when reading Joel while doing interview training at Google. His writing seemed thoroughly immersed in programming culture as it currently exists and not programming culture as it could / should be (to start out with, more diverse), and as a result a lot of what I read seemed incredibly male-centric and elitist. I consider myself a conscientious and hopefully constantly-improving programmer - I at least bring some unique strengths to my position - but I didn’t think Joel was talking about people like me when he spoke about good programmers (not just in terms of skillset, but also the social experiences that color one’s identity as a programmer). So I take a lot of his advice with a grain of salt - I think it’s really solid, but a lot of the time I wonder if it’s also perpetuating a lot of what’s wrong with the technological community, not in terms of code quality but in terms of social dynamics and diversity - and those latter two do have an ultimate impact on code and product quality.

I’ll admit some of my preference for Code Anthem is probably based on sharing the same gender identity as Amber, its author. I immediately don’t feel left out of the conversation if the person starting this discussion is a woman - because I know (and she has proven, with the open source post and others) that she’s considering a lot of the nuances which men / privileged groups in the field often overlook or don’t have to think about. This doesn’t seem to be to the detriment of the men reading the blog, either, so in my book everybody wins. Gender dynamics aside, I feel like Code Anthem is different “in a good way” because the blog focuses on the infrastructure / ecosystem of the tech industry as the source of poor-quality work more than the programmers themselves. Most of what I’ve read before this has focused disproportionately on the poor-quality programmers. Sure, bad coders are part of the puzzle here, but focusing solely on them won’t solve the overl

The hyper-focus on bad programmers is problematic in a couple of ways. First, a subset of good coders will read these entries and falsely evaluate themselves as a “bad coder” - simply due to their personalities or social conditioning (read: a lot of women). I know I struggle with Impostor Syndrome and until I became lead on my current team I wondered if I was a “bad coder” myself anytime I read a post lamenting their existence. Then there’s the second problem: the “bad coders” themselves don’t realize that they’re bad. They read along with these posts about bad coders and associate themselves with the “good coders’” group and therefore take none of the content to heart (see the Dunning-Kruger effect.) So in my mind, it’s time to stop focusing on the issue of bad coders and instead focus on the entire ecosystem. Code Anthem keeps doing this, entry after entry, and I can tell I love it because I then want to pass on / retweet each and every entry, to technologists and non-technologists alike.

Here are a few posts that I’ve read in the last few days and finally inspired me to post here. I swear, every entry in this blog is rock-solid and addresses one of these tricky ecosystem issues that really merit more attention.

Take a peek at:

Death By Recruiters - why recruiters are generally bad for industry

How to Get a (Programmer) Job In This Economy - I actually went through almost exactly this same thing two years ago, at the start of the recession

Just Technical Enough to Be Dangerous - how to handle the people who over-evaluate their skills and do risky things because of it (been there)

256x Better than a Resume - the reasons why the standard criteria provided by resumes aren’t beneficial for finding good programmers, and some exploration of, “Well, what’s the good criteria, then?” I agree on the “programmer test” route as part of the solution even though the idea of having to draft one up for my own company at some point petrifies me.

Go read! I love Code Anthem because I am passionate seeing these inefficiencies in industry go away. They make the entire practice of hiring and evaluating programmers a lot more painful and unwelcoming than it needs to be. It’s great to see a blog that’s also calling these things out for the crap they are, and discussing good alternatives. The more this discussion is disseminated, the better for any programmer who wants to see a difference.

When I do my HTML and css work, I often have episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report streaming on my laptop. Typically the design has already been done for me, so putting it into code doesn’t require a lot of active thought - perfect chance to catch up on last night’s episodes. I’m a fan of both shows, but since Hulu stopped co-streaming them and they moved exclusively back to Comedy Central’s domain, watching the episodes online has become increasingly painful. Core problem? Comedy Central’s horrible online advertising. The ad content is so male-centric that I feel like Comedy Central is telling me to stop watching their programs, even though The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, while suffering from some of the same problems as most of the entertainment industry, aren’t particularly gendered shows. I understand market demographics, but it’s almost as if, in their choice of advertising, the network is operating like women don’t understand humor and therefore have no interest in Comedy Central’s content.

I remember the first week after switching from Hulu back to the Comedy-Central hosted streaming that I was bombarded with tacky Axe ads. The one that repelled me the most was the Clean Your Balls ad. Axe has taken this line with their advertising from the get-go, and has continued to cross new lines over the years. I suppose that’s been a successful tactic because it’s gotten them brand recognition (I’ve bought Axe products as a joke for male friends and family a couple times just because the ads are so ridiculous: “Let’s see the ladies throw themselves at you.”) That said, their ads have left no ambiguity about their intended audience, which sends the message to me as a woman that even if I were capable of appreciating the humor, I’m not welcome. And I am capable of appreciating the humor - I can be as immature as the best of them about sexual humor, from double entendres to taking statements out of context to inadvertent phallic / vulvic imagery - but if I’m being sent the message that “You, as a woman, aren’t supposed to be in on the joke” from the get-go, it stops being funny right there. That’s pretty much the gist of the Comedy Central’s streaming ads. There are exceptions, but the onslaught of the gendered stuff, when it comes on (if I’m watching a week’s worth of episodes at once, they’ll typically all have the same sponsor and set of ads), is so strong that it’s hard to bear.

I’ve been seeing a lot of Intel ads on both The Daily Show and Comedy Central’s streams lately, and for the most part their ads are gender-inclusive, whimsical, and paint the company as a futuristic innovator, where robots and 3D creatures work amongst the humans (two examples.) Among those ads, though, is the “Generations” ad, which takes an entirely different tone. Here it is:

On its own, an ad with two stereotypical geeks getting rhapsodic over the latest technology seems totally harmless, but it’s the clearly intentional placement of a woman walking by in the background in each case that started to bother me. I remember my reaction the first time watching the ad - the consistent placement of the woman struck so oddly that I thought I hadn’t watched closely enough and she must have been placed there to react to the guys in a “your enthusiasm is abnormal” way - because why else would they put her there every time, moving exactly the same way, except to provide some sort of contrast? It turns out, she’s not participating at all, whether positively or negatively, and to me this is even worse than her portraying the stereotypical “I don’t understand you geeks” that I was obviously expecting the first time through.

Grabbing this video off of YouTube, I noticed just in the first few pages of comments that this gender weirdness was a huge part of the discussion. And the comments affirmed all the problematic societal assumptions and attitudes that this ad only served to reinforce:

Commenter inflorire captures my sentiments pretty well:

Does anybody else find it weird/annoying that the little sister/girl/hot girl is always walking behind the guys who are talking about TECH STUFF. It’s like the dudes are involved in all the advancements in technology while the girls just hang around in the background passively absorbing the change.. I liked the other commercials alright, but this bugged me.

But these are YouTube comments, and Kohltonc responds to inflorire in a way that reaffirms exactly why ads like this are such a problem:

nahh its like your two typical nerdy guys who are more interested in technology than girls lol

And holmap009 inadvertently reveals the only reason these women were probably even included:

the girl grows up with them……..and get’s hotter!

To round out how the comments summed up everything for me, here’s LaurLive:

This video relates well to all of us geeks out here.

All of us geeks? Because I’m a geek, and I was getting a strong “THIS IS NOT YOU” vibe from the ad (see also: any incidents in the tech community where a guy tries to make a joke by calling on a shared experience that he does not realize reflects only a subset of the community - something that usually says “we’re all dudes here” when we, in fact, are not). I suspect a lot of female geeks - and probably some male geeks, too - would feel the same when watching this. I’m sure not all - some probably saw no issue with it or did relate based on the stereotyped portrayal - but if you have the ad on in the background often enough, like I have lately, it just gets to be too much. Thus this blog post.

Intel has another recent ad with two stereotypically geeky males that I can actually relate to a lot and really love. There are no women in the ad, but that’s not a problem here because the message of the ad isn’t gendered. It’s one of those cases where lack of portrayal leaves room for possibility, versus “Generations” where the women are merely background scenery for the shared experience of geeky friends.

Problematic media, like “Generations”, isn’t unique to Intel and certainly isn’t unique to advertising, which as a rule seems to get great pleasure out of grabbing hold of unpleasant stereotypes in character portrayals and running wild with them. I actually get a huge kick out of analyzing the enormous societal problems that seep into pretty much all of the entertainment we ingest (s.e. smith and my good friend Mindy are two favorites to read for this kind of critical analysis). But an ad like “Generations”, which portrays a major part of my own identity in a way that actively excludes me, stops being entertaining food for thought and really starts to piss me off, especially after the nth run.

A small postscript - these ads heavily rely on the fictional experiences of Intel employees as a storytelling device. When I think “Intel employees” I think about my fellow Code-N-Sploder Sarah Sharp, who does Linux kernel work for the company. She’s a classic example of how interesting and well-rounded geeks can be, and as a real-life example she would fit the “our employees are doing great, geeky stuff” theme of these ads. So, lucky for me, I have a real-life example of what an Intel technologist (and by proxy, any modern technologist) looks like, but for anybody who doesn’t spend their days reading Geek Feminism, and trying to surround themselves with these sort of awesome people, they’re absorbing a far more problematic portrayal.

Well, the first day of Open Source Bridge has come to a close.  I expected to be writing this entry at the Hacker Lounge while I was volunteering as coordinator there, but Christie (amazing volunteer lead) informed me that the lounge was pretty dead.  As a result, I’m still writing during the wee hours of the night, but I’m doing so while attending to some cooking and cleaning that I didn’t think I’d have time for this week.  It’s bittersweet - I desperately needed the free time but I am sad that it didn’t look like any late-night hijinx were shaping up.

However, the hacker lounge (at a great central location in the Mark Building of the Portland Art Museum earlier today - you hit it basically right after you come inside the building), was a hubbub of activity during the core of the event, as this photo I took literally minutes before a session started shows:

My biggest disappointment with the event so far has been personal; I felt tired and a lot less social than I would have liked for an event where, imho, it’s tremendously easier to be social and get to know folks than at larger conferences. I definitely had a lot more of that last year, but today I mostly kept to myself, even with local friends, who I mostly exchanged smiles with. That has a lot to do with a bunch of stress in my non-professional life more than anything about the conference itself. Even yesterday when I showed up to help with event setup (which was blessedly overstaffed - I stuffed some nametags and then headed home), both Christie and Sherri commented on how tired I looked. Nothing like going into a conference feeling tired, and knowing that your sleeping schedule is likely to be compromised in the week ahead with a conference that pretty much packs in a 24-hour-day of geeky goodness.

Outward social disappointment aside, I actually “came to know of” quite a few awesome people throughout the day’s events. I followed eleven new people on Twitter today, and I suspect to add an additional number tomorrow. This event in general has been a great chance to re-acquaint myself with Twitter, which I fell out of using when my personal computer was in the shop for a solid month last August. I’ve been using Facebook more heavily since then, but today’s conference was a reminder of why Twitter provides a great connection to the “life force” of tech communities. I repeated what I did last year with regards to note-taking during sessions, mostly because I get a kick out of reading the tweets of those attending the sessions I had to miss (if only there weren’t five at once to choose from!). Once again, I was really pleased to see that, by and large, during any one session time, every talk available was considered a winner. Gave me warm fuzzies for pretty much everybody involved in this conference, from planners to speakers to attendees.

To get on with the show, here’s an overview of My Day in Talks:

One overarching theme with regards to the set of talks I attended today was that they didn’t necessarily teach me a lot in the immediate sense but gave me a Whole Lot to Chew On and Research Later. To that degree, the talks had a bit more of a cultural than technical slant, but not exclusively. My main worry with these type of talks is that it is so easy to get caught back up in the craziness of life before really letting the fullness of the content sink in. To that end, I hope doing some mad del.icio.us tagging this afternoon helped, but we’ll see.

The conference-opening keynote was Danny O’Brien presenting Free Speech, Free Software Across the World. Despite Danny’s insistence that his speech would not be funny, he was a really charming speaker and I definitely cracked a smile (or a chuckle) quite a few times, even amidst the 9 am mental haze. O’Brien discussed the victory that is open source software being used worldwide, and he also discussed some of the (negative) consequences that come as a result of this usage. It was an excellent exercise in checking my privilege, as a citizen of a society where the data I create is unlikely to be used against me (at least by the government). O’Brien’s best example of a way that open source can be “used for evil” came with regards to the “default settings” that we take for granted - even if a program is intended to be customized after launch, the default becomes “the way things are”, and this can become a problem when your default is non-encryption and verbose logging (two examples). Logging in general was placed in a new light - while helpful debugging tools for developers, oppressive regimes can use logging data to identify and then punish activists who disagree with them. Although data retention policy has become a hot topic in the U.S. lately due to Facebook’s careless attitude about privacy, it becomes clear that the stakes are even higher in countries where a company with the wrong data management policy can become an accessory to an oppressive regime.

I opted for Matt Youell and Markus Roberts’ When Everything Looks Like a Nail over Hal Pomeranz’s The Return of Command Line Kung Fu for the long morning session. I saw all three speakers last year, and although I loved Command Line Kung Fu, I also felt like I hadn’t spent enough quality time with Hal’s corresponding Command Line Kung Fu Blog in the past year to justify a return visit where I’d get full benefit. I plan on spending some time with the blog following the conference, and in the meantime I heard that the Command Line Kung Fu redux was great. I went the more masochistic route with Matt and Markus, who have a knack for coming up with the most painful programming scenarios I can imagine, all while packaging them in a humorous container that allows one to forgive such sins. Last year, they started out the journey of pain by showing code excerpts that clearly looked like one language (say, python), but when the full script was revealed, were actually another language entirely (let’s say C).

The kind of exercises that Markus and Matt embark on in these talks (last year’s Spindle, Mutilate, and Metaprogram and now this year’s) would normally make my blood boil. They bring to mind an exam I had in my senior-year college programming class, that I had with a professor who was fond of similar experiments in coding torture. I had an exam question that presented a section of code, with directions that said “This code compiles. What is x?” In the code, x is named no less than 10 different times, as an identifier for variables, classes, and other code components. My default response is “Screw x, no code like this should EVER be written,”, but despite my immediate negative reaction to this stuff, my old professor, and Markus and Matt, are really pretty likeable. So I keep paying attention to the exercise. What I liked about today’s presentation was that they did try to close out with a point to all of this self-flagellation by way of code, which was very much a “larger thing to chew on” but still a pretty good conclusion.

That said, “Looks Like a Nail” led us through various situations where we were presented programming problems and given one tool (the proverbial hammer) to solve these problems with. We started out with SQL (one code excerpt included bits that were “supposed to work in 2016″ for some painfully slow graphics rendering). We moved to the ed text editor. We then looked at a program that used sound as code and also introduced a hypothetical alterna-universe where jello was used as a conductor of that sound. It got pretty out there, but Markus and Matt had the props and humor to guide us through, and at the end the lesson was: even if you start out with a hammer, we’re ingenuous enough people that we’ll use that hammer to construct other tools to make our jobs easier. So although none of us are in real-world situations where we’re limited to one obscure technology to carry out our whims, it’s a nice insight on human innovation and the continuous improvements we make in order to make the art of creating that much easier.

After lunch (which was uneventful - I am using the time all week to check in with my office instead of playing at the food carts, which is a judicious but unfortunate choice), I had my most difficult decision of the day - three talks that I desperately wanted to attend. I ended up opting out of Chris Messina’s Activity Streams, Socialism, and the Future of Open Source talk (luckily - he posted his slides! - ready to be devoured later). I also opted out of Moonlighting in Sunlight, which was all about the legal issues that may arise when one has a full-time job and is contributing to open-source projects. I first became aware of this issue a mere month or two ago during our negotiation talks at Code N Splode, and I’ve been eager to learn more since then. If I revisted things, this is probably the talk I would have attended, as there aren’t session notes yet and it seems like very practical information for a person who keeps intending to get involved in an open source project… eventually. I work for an employer who has been burned in the past by non-compete agreements that have been too lax, and since has introduced a more strict NDA, so I will definitely be at least going from the presence of this talk and re-reading the documents I signed when I started my job, and doing some web searches on the topic. In the meantime, Sumana’s session later in the day (to be detailed momentarily) was a nice complement to this talk and filled in some of the gaps.

The talk I ended up attending was HyperCard 2010: Why Johnny Can’t Code. I admit I went to this purely out of nostalgia, as I fell in love with HyperCard in late junior high / early high school when it was used in the occasional computer and science class project (I am lucky enough to have a father who realized what I was doing at the time was a form of programming and that I might be interested in pursuing it further, because I didn’t make that connection at all!) Presenter Devin Chalmers was similarly nostalgic for this technology, and we got some great context about the overarching goals of Hypercard’s creators (Alan Kay and Bill Atkinson), as well as some choice quotes. This was the talk of the day that was heaviest in “bigger questions” and more abstract culture issues. Nostalgia is a deceptive beast, and although older computers did necessarily require users to be more of a power user than they are today, we programmers forget that such a requirement excluded a LOT of people from computer use - the user base was drastically smaller than it is today. I’ll be interested to see what the programmers of the future, who are just being exposed to their first trinkets now, have nostalgia about in 10-15 years, like Devin and I have about Hypercard. Hypercard was a great swiss army knife of an application - but as Devin pointed out, a world of task-specific applications have come out of the woodwork to fill these use cases, from presentation software (I had to use Hypercard as a PowerPoint of sorts in a high school Biology class) to Facebook or the assorted smartphone apps that allow you to keep track of x, y, and z. An audience member also mentioned Scratch, which I’m interested in playing with later. Initiation experiences to programming were especially interesting to me in college, but since then I’ve let go of the passion - the Hypercard talk brought back a lot of that overall discussion, but the more practical side of me was nonetheless second-guessing my session choice. Isn’t that how it goes with conferences that are packed with great options?

I spent the mid-afternoon session at the Open Government Directive talk, which was a well-scheduled panel discussion about the challenges presented by using technology and the open source ethos to inspire civic engagement online. I was introduced to two projects, White House 2 and Democracy Lab. One of my note-taking tweets was also misread as my taking a stance as a small-government conservative (I’m definitely not) - and re-reading it I see that; woe be the problems when you’re limited to only 140 characters and someone peeks in without prior context. The comment was mentioned in the context of the challenges that partisanship presents in these endeavors, in particular: if a project is about improving government overall, what to do about the ideological conflict presented by conservatives or libertarians, who have totally different goals in mind - because they don’t necessarily want better government (they want smaller government)? And that is as political as I’ll get here (I’m generally not a fan of such discussions in the public sphere).

Post-coffee-break, my next session was Encouraging Open-Source Work at For-Profits with Sumana Harihareswara (I also mentioned this talk in my “Looking Forward to Open Source Bridge” post last week). This talk was a pleasant surprise in that it went far beyond “how to encourage your boss to consider the LAMP stack versus a proprietary web platform”. In fact, we hardly dwelled on that - instead, we talked about cultivating the open source ethos within the workplace, with some great, anonymized real-life anecdotes of where the open source philosophy in a for-profit workplace can go horribly awry (or be implemented in portions that suffer without the whole). Sumana posted her entire session in the session notes post-talk, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but I thought her thread on avoiding isolationism was the most important. This industry has an isolating tendency in general (both as organizations and among individual workers), but understanding that innovation is always a byproduct of being tapped in to a larger ecosystem is important (a story about a company where the employees were only allowed to use email and were not allowed to do any research via the internet - it gets worse than I am explaining here - was an utter nightmare). We’re also likely to make better choices when we avoid isolationism - a lot of companies choose a proprietary solution because it’s “what they know”, and in that case, it’s a good option to be the “innocent pain in the ass”, as Sumana put it, and suggest looking into other options.

In general, it was great to see a Geek Feminism author be such a confident and entertaining presenter. Sumana spoke without slides (because she said she’d rather have no slides than bad slides, and had been busy at another conference before this one), but did so in a way that kept the audience engaged. If I haven’t made my status as a Geek Feminism fangirl clear enough yet, here it is again. And I get a real kick out of things when it turns out that fellow female technologists are such kick-ass presenters.

The final presentation of the day, A Naive Developer’s Guide to Venture Capital, was also the most disappointing, although it was to little fault of the presenter (she, like most of us, wasn’t able to effectively shut down a Presentation Derailer, and I can’t blame her. I was passive-aggressively tweeting about it instead of trying to step in myself.) I felt like I was back in my introductory CS class in college, where Joe Programmer is required to take the 201 level class, but thinks he is so above it already, and as a result (for reasons that are still incomprehensible to me) asks obscure questions that have no bearing on the fundamentals of the subject matter throughout the class. When I took said 201-level class, my professor had trouble dealing with these guys because it was clear he enjoyed discussion about the unrelated details, like a lot of tech types do - and as a result I ended up writing a pretty scathing review of the class in general when I was done. My view towards the “presenter” has softened significantly since then, and I generally feel that the blame lies solely with the derailer / heckler for putting the presenter in such a situation where they have sole responsibility to get the discussion back on track. It’s just common courtesy, nevermind acting like a mature adult, to go to either a class or a conference presentation and defer to the presenter as the expert. It’s common courtesy to think ahead of time before you interject with a question or observation - “is this to the benefit of the whole audience, or just me? Will there be an appropriate time to ask this later?”. And it’s just outright rude to dominate the flow of the presentation if you’re an audience member. The presenter is the one who went to the work of submitting the talk proposal, not the attendees. So keep quiet until the scheduled moment to follow up with questions and feedback.

What really struck me about the heckler in this particular presentation was that the session was clearly framed as an introduction. I can totally understand going to a presentation as a hobbyist who is looking for some morsels to chew on on - in fact, I think many of Friday’s unconference sessions will probably be a lot like that. But this session was clearly NOT that sort of gathering, and as a result, having an audience member interrupt with his own insights every minute or so was immensely aggravating. My blood started to boil when the derailer challenged the presenter on some of her assertions midway through the talk, because in his experience the international world of VC was different - nevermind that she had started the talk from the get-go by explaining that her expertise was specific to the Silicon Valley area. Amy was a brave soul and finally spoke up and said that perhaps said heckler should save his questions for after the presentation, so we could make sure to finish - of course, the heckler wasn’t really asking questions, he was trying to give his own presentation in parallel. It was infuriating and distracting and it really kept me from absorbing the original presentation.

The talk ran long (and when it’s the last talk of the day - my body had been stuck in a seat all day, and was screaming for movement), which was expected due to the heckler, but was also a disappointment because that’s when things really got interesting. I suspect I am like a lot of programmers who see the VC world as a “necessary evil”; I find that a bit of bile rises in my throat when I think about it. The VC model is, so far, the proven way to fund technology and innovation, but it’s rife with problems. The VC industry is demonstrably sexist and therefore perpetuates the already miserable gender disparity in the tech industry (here is one article from TechCrunch supporting this statement; it is not the exact article I read at the time it came out but reports on the same research). There are also a multitude of problems with the industry being almost exclusively located in Silicon Valley, and requiring most companies to be based there as a result. There are countless innovative people who want to start businesses all over the country, but they, like myself, DO NOT WANT TO LIVE IN SILICON VALLEY. Like a lot of systems in business, VC is rife with inefficiencies, but learning more about it seems the straightest route to figuring out how to work with the system for the better. I know that Portland really suffers for this - we have a lot of innovation but the disconnection from the Silicon Valley VC and corresponding executive talent hurts our growth (Silicon Florist discusses this in far better detail).

Anyhow, I mention all of these complexities because that’s what drove me to the talk, what drove me to fight the bile in my throat and learn more. Joyce Park, the presenter, was doing a great job of being pretty real about the whole process and some of the ridiculousness that is inherent to it. It’s just too bad that a heckler derailed the bulk of it, and I was left to fume from behind my computer. In the moments that I was tempted to speak up, I suspect that I would not have handled it like an adult, because I was so miffed. Amy was far more diplomatic!

…and, approximately 3500 words later, that’s all for Day One of the conference. It’s about the time that my Hacker Lounge volunteerism would have wrapped up anyhow, so I need to be heading to bed - given that tiredness has been the biggest impediment to my fully enjoying the conference. I am looking forward to more fun tomorrow - a mind buzzing with more “tech concepts to investigate” than I can possibly manage at once, a smattering of cool and inspiring people, and most excitingly, all sorts of tech women that I am seeing at this conference for the very first time and can’t wait to learn more about. There is a lot to love about Open Source Bridge, but I will reiterate how much I love its ability to attract so many amazing technical women. Can’t wait to see more of them tomorrow!

Today marks the second annual Ada Lovelace Day, which celebrates women in technology through a mass pledge to write blog posts about tech heroines. I participated last year as well. I don’t have a lot of time on my hands, but I wanted to give some lip service to the tech women who have helped lift me up over the past year, because it’s been quite a year.

Once again, I won’t be writing about a specific woman who has had an impact on me. For better or for worse, I’ve never developed a close rapport with another technically-oriented woman, although I have a handful of close friendships with male programmers. What I lack in one-on-one connections has been made up for by the incredible communities that I’ve been able to be part of recently. Today I’d like to celebrate three of those communities for the positive impact they’ve had on me in the past year.

The first is Code N Splode, Portland’s user group for technical women. I talked about Code N Splode last year as well, but the group has continued to great things and deserves another nod. Though the group is small, its members are some of the most passionate and active of the local tech community, from the organizers of Open Source Bridge and Portland’s BarCamp to board members in the Legion of Tech. They also represent many different specialties and levels of experience, making for a perfect environment in which one can learn and grow from the knowledge of others.

This has been especially evident to me in the last few months, as our group has directed its focus to the tricky issue of women and negotiation and the correlation between women’s socialization to not negotiate and the still-persistent gendered wage gap (Newsweek had a piece addressing this just last week; when they mentioned deeply entrenched cultural factors preventing the leveling of the playing field, the negotiation issue immediately came to mind.) Some of us have been moving jobs; others have been eager to have their contributions recognized within their present workplaces. Either way, I’ve been struck by how relevant this issue has been so much of the group, and how beneficial the sharing of our respective stories has been for developing a better picture of women’s experience in Portland’s technical workplace. I’ve learned so much from what we’ve shared in our discussions over the past few months; it’s bolstered my confidence and given me a better picture of what I’m dealing with and where I’m heading professionally.

Despite seeing the women at Code N Splode as vastly more technically accomplished than me (they are absolute role models), I’ve taken the leap and spoken twice at meetings over last year. The most recent experience was last night - talking about my own experiences with negotiation. It was such a beneficial experience, even if the nature of the presentation was a bit nerve-wracking for me.

The second community of note is DevChix, a women’s technical group with an emphasis on open source and agile methodologies (although there is no strict focus). DevChix benefits so far from having a smaller reach than similar groups like Systers, where the sheer size of the mailing list means stricter rules about the content and nature of posts. Beyond the rule that only technically-oriented women can be part of the list (much like Systers), there hasn’t really been a limit on what can be discussed in the DevChix mailing lists - and as a result the conversation has been lively and varied. Over the past year, I’ve read threads that run the gamut from professional advice, to reactions to the latest sexist act in the tech community, to fine-grained technical discussion, to the outright germination and planning of new open source / group projects. Occasionally things veer from our shared profession altogether, and that’s OK too in this list - which has made it seem a lot more human to me than often-detached communities I’ve tried to engage with in the past.

I’ve entrusted DevChix with a few professional dilemmas of my own, and have been surprised and delighted by most of the feedback. Inevitably, someone may reply with the typical detached professional boilerplate, but more often than not people will respond with compassion and the wisdom of experience. The last time I started a thread, I was inspired to actually go ahead and start pushing to get recognition for the increased responsibility I’ve taken on in the workplace over the last year - despite the fact that the original impetus of the thread had little to do with taking on said increased responsibility. So I am immensely grateful to the group for providing me with consistent opportunities to learn and grow.

The final community is Geek Feminism, which I heaped with all sorts of praise in a prior entry. That praise still stands, as Geek Feminism continues to address incidents of sexism with articulate confidence, and celebrates all that is geeky with women (even beyond tech, which has allowed me to pass on several posts to my friend Mindy, a non-technical fellow comic book lover). Although I haven’t commented on a single post, I’ve found that more often than not, the writers of Geek Feminism speak for me, and it’s likely that they also speak for the countless other “lurkers” who have found the community to be solace in the often cruel hybrid world of technology and internet culture. I am also buoyed by the knowledge that, in light of any future sexism in the industry (and you know there will be plenty), this group exists to present a unified front, an increasingly relevant force which can say, “this is not acceptable, and here are the reasons why.” How cool is that?

I’ve been so blessed enjoy a year of immense personal and professional growth, but I really couldn’t have done it without the presence of these communities. Through Code N Splode and DevChix, I had a forum in which to vent, to seek advice, and to throw ideas at the wall and see if they stuck. Through Geek Feminism, I have an advocate. As humans, we may cherish our individuality and uniqueness, but we also seek belonging and acceptance, a feeling that is often not a part of women’s experience in technical fields. It has certainly been lacking from large chunks of my own personal experience. What a joy, then, to have these communities around to lessen the feeling of being an alien in a strange land. Through the collective efforts of the amazing individuals in these groups, I have the power to say “I belong here. We belong here,” and in my journey towards a more confident technical presence that has made such the difference.

Thanks to Code N Splode, I’ve known about the Geek Feminism wiki for awhile. It’s a really amazing resource - it concisely addresses the issues facing women in tech (specifically Free and Open Source Software, or FOSS) in a way that is knowledgeable and matter-of-fact. Nothing puts the air back into my lungs quite like seeing excuses for sexist behavior de-legitimized through a good bingo card. As a person who wants to give thought to every voice in discussion (counter-productive in the case of a lot of comment threads on gender in FOSS), it’s nice to have some shortcuts via the wiki: “This is an excuse, and this is why it doesn’t work”.

I was really delighted to see the wiki’s inevitable growth into a blog after this year’s OSCON (where Kirrily Robert, nee Skud, imho a woman in FOSS we are incredibly lucky to have for how gloriously well she handles the topic). I don’t read it regularly yet, but everytime I refer to the site I see intelligent, confident women addressing the issues of being a woman in tech or a woman in FOSS. Several times, women from my own community (Portland, OR) have appeared. It’s encouraging to see this community emerge online, to both establish presence and provide support to geek feminists on the margins (i.e. less involved, like myself).

In this year’s political atmosphere, we’ve seen our country’s latent unresolved issues with race and gender come out a bit more publicly, oftentimes in uglier ways than we still thought possible (I think specifically of Obama’s presidency and the Senate confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court). This racial / gender hiccup on society’s part has been simultaneously revolting and encouraging - encouraging because I’d like to think that those who thought there wasn’t a problem might be woken up and pushed to activism. I’d like to think that this year’s ugliness will have repercussions in coming years, to bring our discourse, beliefs, and behavior to a higher plane.

The Open Source community has been following a similar plotline in regards to re-opening one of its ugliest wounds - the gender inequity issue. I really thank the Geek Feminism community for documenting the List of Incidents from this year and years past. Taken together, these incidents reveal that tech and especially FOSS have a much longer way to go than we could have anticipated even a year ago.

The incidents themselves are only one part of the problem - the bigger issue is typically the fallout, where the backlash against those who call out sexist behavior is astounding. Anytime I read up on these incidents, I’m typically derailed for a good day or so by fist-clenching anger and disbelief. I’m incredibly discouraged to find out that, when a subset of men within the community are called upon to explore their feelings on these issues, they come up on the wrong side of the fence. I’m disheartened that much of the software I use on a daily basis - be it in the workplace or at home - is made by some people I probably wouldn’t want to associate with in “real life”.

This isn’t just a gender issue, either. My parents raised both of their children to be adults and professionals, which meant a certain level of conduct not just in the workplace, but in adult society. Most of adult society has safeguards in place to punish or discipline those who aren’t able to follow that level of conduct - but the FOSS community (and tech in general, as I’ve found through my three years in industry) has revealed itself to be shockingly free of a lot of those safeguards. People who have never learned to behave like adults seem to run wilder in the land of tech, and even those who’ve been chastised for it seem to be slower to learn their lessons, if ever. It makes for a gut-churning contrast to the more civilized parts of our society.

These incidents - and the fallout afterwards - bring forth a LOT of complicated feelings for me, things I will be unlikely to blog about coherently much of the time. And this is one of the biggest reasons I am grateful for Geek Feminism, because I finally have a pool of references to people who are saying what I think and feel, and creating a growing community of likeminded individuals.

I expect that I will be sharing many a blog post from Geek Feminism and entries from other sites that it links to. Not just to voice my support, but to continue to add to the dissemination of this discussion to the community at large. The people who voiced their opposition to sexist comments and behavior in the FOSS community this year did the right thing, despite the backlash. Consider me another person saying “hear, hear!” and compelling my peers to do likewise.

So, there’s a great initiative afoot this year to make a bit of a public splash in the interwebs via the Ada Lovelace Day Pledge, which is:

I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.

Cool thing: the pledge is 600+ people over the limit as of the time of this post.  I haven’t even formally made the pledge yet (I suppose I’ll do it simultaneously while writing this, since I’m going ahead with the deal) because I didn’t know how much of my tech blog would be up and running by the day - and although this blog is barely crawling, this is good fodder for getting started.

I really can’t speak personally about one woman in technology specifically.  Much of my experience as a female programmer is probably symptomatic of the experience at large, which is to say that all of my best programmer pals are men and although I have deeply craved a mentor / friend who is female to help me through the constant struggles, the pickings are slim.  Just because you are the only women in X group doesn’t mean that you are instantly best friends for being women.

Although I do want to acknowledge that impulse on my part.  Suw’s blog post about this initiative mentions:

But what to do? Well, let’s pull back from the anger a little, and start to look instead at why it might be that women feel less secure in their abilities than most men, and what might help change that. Undoubtedly it’s a complex issue, but recent research may shed some light: Psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones.

Throughout my history as a female programmer I have ached for female role models, and it’s required quite a bit of restraint to mask my desparation for such things.  I have the feeling many of those I have wanted to serve as my role models had no idea that I looked up to them.  Of course, that’s the whole point of this movement.  Acknowledging the importance of role models and our own potential to be those role models, even if we don’t see ourselves as “good enough” or in the proper position to fulfill that role.

Identity has been a major struggle for me as a programmer.  It strikes me that the bulk of most varied, interesting, fascinating people I have met are programmers, and yet in the same stroke I feel like the space for my own person within the technology personality-space is extremely restricted.  How does this culture draw in such a varied array of absorbing, brilliant people, but still as a whole firmly reinforce its most negative stereotypes as a socially-bumbling, misogynist, difficult population?  This is a discussion for another time, but I think it ties in importantly: my greatest grief and greatest joy as a programmer have related to group identification.

The positive in group identification: In late college, when I met some of my best friends in the world (yes, programmers) through interning at the Southern California Earthquake Center, I delighted in the ways my geekitude matched up with that of my friends.  I wore my identification as a programmer like a badge of honor, and delighted in talking shop with tech friends and seeing the look of pure bafflement on the faces of non-tech friends in the room.  There is an immense amount of my personality that is satisfied by being a programmer.

Unfortunately that group identification has existed during the minority of my time as a programmer.  Sometimes it was a stubborn, nearly prideful “I’m not like these people,” like when I took programming classes in high school (and inevitably I had to eat my words a bit when some initially offputting programmer turned out to be a delight).  Mostly it was mournful, unnerving “I don’t belong here,” due to not seeing any aspect of myself in classmates, co-workers, and peers.  This feeling of being a square peg in a round hole lasted for the majority of my college career and only intensified when I entered the industry, completely overwhelming me several times in the last two years.  It’s only recently that I’ve begun to start feeling my way around and acknowledged my legitimacy as a member of the tech community, whether or not I can identify with those I see around me at all times.  As I mentioned in my introductory posts, I’ve finally come to terms with my legitimacy even though I don’t have the raw numbers of “people exactly like me” to help me be more comfortable with it.  “It all starts with you”, and other such pithy sayings.

To wrap this up, I do want to acknowledge the women who have had a positive role in my time as a programmer.  Women are so rare in tech that nearly every one I’ve encountered has served as a role model.  I think a lot of my lack of confidence in embracing them in that role - or asking them to actively serve in that role - is because I’ve seen a tremendous number of women who are hesitant to emphasize their gender in a professional context.  I’ve seen enough of these successful women expressing their hesitance to reach out in a gender-specific way that it’s made me scared to ask them for help.  But even when I have not been able to ask people for help they often still have influence on me as an observer.

@ School:

The Computer & Information Science program at the University of Oregon had four female faculty when I attended, which is an incredibly high number (especially since the gender ratio among undergrads was something like one female student to every twenty males.  Yes, I was often the sole woman in my classes).  This meant that I took higher-level courses from three different women, which was an incredible blessing.  My computer architecture professor, Dr. Jan Cuny, left for a position at the NSF, helping with diversity efforts, not long after I took her class.  I’ve seen her give a few rockin’ speeches at conferences like Tapia and Grace Hopper.  Meanwhile, my thesis advisor, Dr. Sarah Douglas led her classes and my thesis process with a disciplined, incredibly knowledgeable hand.  I received some of the greatest bang for the buck from the three classes I took from her,  and she helped me immensely with my senior thesis, instructing me in both the areas where I didn’t need to stress out so much, and the areas where I needed to shape up and do better-quality work.

@ Work:

Female co-workers doing the same job as me can be counted on two hands for all three companies I’ve worked for in the two and a half years I’ve been in industry, but they’ve all had a positive impact (and I’m especially happy that I’ve stayed in touch with those I worked with in my first Portland job). Nori, from my time at the big G, was the only woman on my 30-person team when I joined, so just by circumstance I looked up to her.  Beyond just that mere circumstance, though, she established herself as and remains one of my biggest girl geek crushes, and I continue to admire the incredible presence she creates, even if from afar.  Since returning to Portland, I met the best mentor-coworker I’ve had to date, Amy, who continues to impress pretty much everyone with her ability to go above and beyond in the work she does, and always took the time to give a thorough and considerate response to every question I had.

In the Community:

And finally, the group that I found out about Ada Lovelace Day through, Code N Splode. They conveniently have a meeting tonight!  Not only have Code N Splode meetings been a great way to keep in touch with former coworkers (aforementioned), but they’ve exposed me to some of the local developer community’s strongest voices, including some incredibly active and passionate women.  It has been so encouraging to see local female tech types who are passionate about technology and helping women’s representation in the community / increasing the confidence of the women who are already there.  And I can say that just watching them in action giving news updates at meetings, presenting a technical speech, or just chewing the fat at the “cd /usr/local/gin” which follows has had a tremendous amount to do with my own sense of daring-do increasing in recent months.  Most blatantly this blog.  I’m looking forward to continuing to cultivate my new girl geek crushes with this group - they’re a living example of the positive things you can do as a female programmer when you care about the problem and then make a point of doing something about it - even if it’s as simple as acknowledging that you may be a positive influence or unintentional role model for another female programmer.

I could go on and on (orgs like Anita Borg, DevChix, Systers, etc. - my SCEC internship - diversity-themed conferences) - but it’s late.  The only reason I’m up at 3 am on a Monday night is because I took an extended nap with my freshly-returned-from-the-hospital cat earlier (she got into some lily pollen, which can cause renal failure).  And, time aside, I find myself feeling increasingly nervous as my blog posts start to (inevitably) grow.  Because, although I have a lot to say on these topics, I’m not yet fully confident expressing it to an undefined crowd.  But in the spirit of this day and the other people following suit in fulfilling their pledges, I’m hoping that this entry is of some value to another female tech type at some other point in her journey.

Inevitably, lots more on women in technology later.  When you’re the only female in the crowd (or one of just a few) for as long as I have been, and your brain goes off all sorts of analytical directions while observing such trends, you end up developing a bit of an obsession.  Some women want to de-emphasize their gender in professional terms, but I can’t help but focus on it.  It is not the only symbol of my feeling different from the rest of the tech community, but it is the most blatant symbol - the others are obviously a lot more subjective and fuzzy.  And the time has come to work towards celebrating being different in this community - my unique voice - because isn’t that the point of all these diversity efforts in the first place?