Finding your self-confidence in tech is like finding your voice in a black hole.
Maybe it was functioning perfectly well when you entered, but if you try and make a noise, all you will hear is the sound of air being sucked out of you.
Last summer, I reached what I felt was a dead end in my career. I went to AdaCamp as part of figuring out what was going on and why I was miserable despite putting in so much effort. It is often the case that people who look to be highly successful from the outside are actually living in their own vacuum of pain and self-doubt.
The hot, humid summer in Portland dragged through my lungs as I walked to the AdaCamp venue for the first morning of the conference. Voiceless, tired and beaten, I sat in a chair for the imposter syndrome training session. This session was the traditional kickoff for AdaCamp and had a large attendence. I made a few notes:
“The reason you have imposter syndrome is that you’ve been treated like an imposter…”
…If there are people around who are trying to learn and you say to yourself, I’m too far beyond to help them, you are treating them like they are imposters…
…We are trained to say we understand things when we don’t…
…We are trained to pretend to know the answer when we think we can look it up later…
…You need to be able to look at someone and see that they are having a hard time, even if they act ok.
This workshop kicked off a weekend of recognizing the denial happening in my own life and career. It was like looking in a mirror for the first time in ages and seeing that, indeed, the bruises were real and in no way self-inflicted. It’s not like Imposter Syndrome training and AdaCamp magically fixed everything, but it gave me permission to start believing in myself again and to start seeing that I had been dealing with some endemic problems tech likes to hang around the necks of women and people in marginalized groups.
Although there will not be an AdaCamp this summer, The Ada Initiative will be doing Imposter Syndrome Training in Oakland, California and Sydney Australia during August. I highly recommend that women working in tech, especially women in tech who do not have a developer job title attend this training.
Imposter Syndrome is the feeling that you aren’t qualified for the work you are doing and will be discovered as a fraud. It is prevalent among women in open tech/culture, who’ve been socialized to value others’ opinions over their own and to do things “by the book”. Imposter Syndrome is a common reaction to doing publicly visible and publicly criticised work like that done in open technology and culture. In this workshop, The Ada Initiative will discuss solutions for overcoming Imposter Syndrome. This workshop is only open to women, and those who identify as a woman.
I will miss AdaCamp, but if it means more time for The Ada Initiative to do Imposter Syndrome Training, I say it’s a net win.
Just so you know that AdaCamp wasn’t all heavy, intense moments, here is my drawing from the Riot Grrrl session.
As someone who has found success as a software tester, I’ve long counted myself as one of the many people who “fell into testing.” I told myself over and over that I was content to be a “technical tester” and restrict my coding habits to testing scripts, test automation frameworks and tools. Nevermind that I kept having to prove my technical knowledge over and over again, once as a tester and additionally, as a woman.
Today, I consider testing (along with support) as the space I’ve been allowed to occupy in the power structure of tech. If you go to a testing conference you’ll find people talking about how you can stay in testing forever and how it is a great career path. I’ve noticed that, often, the testers who shout the loudest about staying in testing forever have carved out their own place in the power structure of the software testing industry.
Something else you will notice at software testing conferences is the long lines for the women’s bathroom or that people in testing talk about how it’s actually one of the more diverse areas of tech. Why is that? Hmm…I wonder.
Here’s another perspective on this phenomenon of testing being more diverse: tech has pushed women of all races and people of color of all genders into non-developer roles telling us that it’s because of skills, smarts or that our brains work differently. We’re told that our work is just as valued and necessary even though the pay is much smaller and prove it again bias means we will have to prove that we have skills over and over. I’ve now decided that the software testing career path is not so much about falling as it is about being squeezed into a corner and kept there.
Transitioning out of this has been a difficult, rebellious, empowering act also known in this year of 2015 as a tableflip.
A friend of mine who recently made a similar switch had this observation about it:
I hope that every tester no matter how long they have been in testing or how old they are considers whether they want, at some point, to try being a developer. In saying that, I understand that I’ll get 5 people telling me how they never want to code and love testing so much. If you are one of those people, have fun with that. This post isn’t for you.
This post is for testers who see that their reach could extend beyond testing into more areas of tech. In particular this is for women and members of all marginalized groups in testing who have likely ended up in the field due, in some part, to cultural bias. If you find yourself writing little scripts to help you do your job, learning how to write automated tests, or learning so much about the application you test that you are constructing api calls and looking at application code, please give yourself the gift of questioning how you could go further with your technical skills and that you might want to switch to a developer career path.
Before I share what helped me, it’s worth recognizing some of my own privilege. I’m a cis, white woman. I don’t have kids and I’ve purposely sought out jobs that offer work/life balance. That means nights and weekends are mine. I make a good salary and live in the tech hub of San Francisco so I have a good amount of access and a great network of friends. I did not, however, have the time or money to attend a bootcamp so you won’t be reading about that experience here. That doesn’t mean I think they are bad. It means that they are not an opportunity for everyone, even with a scholarship. Thinking the only way into programming is through a CS degree or a bootcamp is its own bias. There are plenty of us WHO ALREADY WORK HERE. We deserve our own bridge into developer land. That bridge is something I have found to be all too rare in the tech world. I hope that changes.
Here is some of what worked for me.
Attend community workshops
Here in San Francisco, there is always a meetup. I’ve been to Railsbridge, Girl Develop It! and some Women Who Code meetups. I suggest these as a first step because they will get you oriented and help you feel supported. Also, each has their strong points so attending different types of these meetups will help you figure out which workshop will be most advantageous at each stage of your journey.
Pick a stack and stick with it
Because I enjoyed Girl Develop It! so much and because I was surrounded at work by developers working in javascript all day, I focused on learning web development through javascript and React.js. Having been to some javascript conferences, I generally find the javascript community around the Cascadia.js conference and the Javascript/Node groups in SF to be very supportive and encouraging. Eventually I branched out to learn rails, but it helped my confidence to have a solid foundation in javascript, node and React.js.
Pick an editor and learn all of the shortcuts you can
Any developer you seek help from will want to sell you on using their editor. Don’t let them do it. Pick one and make them help you with that one. If you have a mentor relationship with someone in particular, it can be worth learning their editor, but the truth is that you need to pick an editor that feels comfortable for you and learn its ins and outs. This will keep you coding.
Keep learning the shortcuts in that editor, because being able to quickly navigate your code without thinking about it is only going to help if you are building something. Also, if you are asking questions or showing someone your code, it looks better if you are using shortcuts vs. mousing around and clicking. Trust me, developers will give you more respect if you use shortcuts. My favorite editor is pretty much anything in the Jetbrains family, particularly rubymine and webstorm. Sublime is also beginner friendly and used by many of my friends who are developers.
Find a workplace that will support you
I went through multiple jobs in my quest to switch careers and found that support varied from place to place. One thing I did find helpful was to be open about what I was trying to do, once I knew what that was. It could be that you decide to do this while you are working at a job that won’t support you. That happened to me. The only solution was to find a job that would support me. Although it sounds drastic, I found that once I was in a more supportive workplace, everything was easier.
Talk to a Career Counselor
This option is pricey and, sadly, not available to everyone, but I found it to be worth every penny. Tech is so broad and there are so many different types of developer jobs. This also helped to settle the question of whether this is really what I want and not just something I’m chasing because the developer job title is power.
[Mini-rant: Personally, I’ve found that so many people tell me I would make a great product manager and maybe that’s true, but the job that I do every day needs to be in line with my heart’s desire and not other people’s perceptions of my talent. Having worked with some brilliant product managers, I’ve seen what that work involves and I know it’s not what I want. Also, I suspect that women are often steered towards the role of product manager for reasons rooted in cultural bias.]
Talking to a career counselor helped me prioritize what I was looking for in a job and a company. As an example, I found out that I care less about being emotionally invested in the problem I am solving. I care more about how I am building software. This helped me shift focus away from companies building products to consultancies focused on pairing and TDD.
Build something
Once you’ve done some workshops and are comfortable with your editor, it’s time to build something! The thing doesn’t have to be particularly original or even interesting. In fact, you might simply repeat building something you’ve built in a workshop but give it a name-change or tweak. Lately, I’ve built several versions of the same rails app, but with a different name every time. Every time I’ve rebuilt it, I’ve learned something new or deepened my understanding in some way. At some point you will start thinking about building a thing you can release. This will help you when you start interviewing because it gives you something to point at and say, I built that.
Let other things go
I’ve just had about 6 months of not doing a lot of things I wanted to do. Once you are in the serious prepping for interviews stage, it’s time to Stop Doing Other Things. This is a painful but necessary step. Women are already pressured at every turn to take on more activities than we really have time for and to always be helpful and willing to sacrifice our time for someone else or their cause.
I found getting ready for tech interviews the ultimate excuse for taking a look at my responsibilities and removing myself from a lot of it. There were a couple of weeks when all I did was send out emails and talk to people to remove myself from responsibilities. It wasn’t fun, but it created the space I needed to proceed with deep prep.
Mock Interviews and Interview practice
I had former co-workers and friends mock interview me several times. In between, I would work on the feedback I received after the mock interview. This helped me strengthen and tweak what I was doing. In fact, since I focused on pairing interviews, it made me a better pair. Also, be sure to ask about what you did right. It is such a confidence boost to know that you have some things covered and don’t need to worry about them in an interview situation.
Don’t find a mentor — ask questions!
There is a general refrain I have heard over and over at different tech events: “find a mentor!” I wish people would say, instead, “keep asking questions!!” The truth is that you will need many people, some of whom will be more involved than others. Rather than explicitly looking for and asking people to mentor you, focus on reaching out with questions. You will need to practice and you will need to reach out and ask questions even if you are tired, even if you are shy and even if you don’t want to. At the other end of that reaching out, you will find people who will only half answer your question or people who prefer answering with their own hubris rather than the information you need, but you might, if you’re lucky, find someone who not only answers your questions, but will tell you to ask a few more. That is a mentor.
A good mentor will answer your questions and guide you in the right direction. A great mentor will be there for you many times in ways you didn’t even know you would need them. They will give you confidence when you don’t have any left and they will help you shape your career path in a way that best suits you. This is not a relationship you’ll be able to trivially go out and find just anywhere, but if you end up with one of these, thank your lucky stars and your mentor for it is rare and a true gift.
Don’t give up
There were so many days when I looked at my broken code and thought, “why am I doing this?” Especially if you are not at the beginning of your tech career, you will have some days when you seriously question this strategy of switching to developer. Currently, in San Francisco, there is an on-going parade of people marching through coding bootcamps and straight into jobs. This is discouraging to watch if you are someone who can’t afford to leave your current job for 3–6 months. Also, if you are older, especially in the Bay Area, it’s easy to look around and draw the wrong conclusion that development is for the under-30 crowd. Development should be for people who find it interesting and who are curious.
Curiosity is one of the most valuable skills a tester can have. In fact, I’ve told people for a long time that curiosity is necessary for great testing. The thing about curiosity is that it doesn’t have edges. This is the root of being someone who is engaged and who cares about what they do at work. If you are a tester and you are curious about where else you might fit into tech or where else you might find a challenge, you should follow that instinct and tech (and also other software testers) should be supporting you.
I’ve described myself as a feminist for years and, for many of those years I didn’t take too much time to stop and think about what that meant to me. My definition was fairly straightforward and one that I’ve seen in many other places. Feminism meant equal rights for men and women. My definition didn’t go much further than that.
In my earlier days of blogging, I didn’t particularly want to write about feminism. To an extent that’s still true. There is a tax for people who are part of any marginalized group. The tax requires that you will spend your time and energy not on the actual topics you care about and want to write about such as software, but that you will spend time and energy defending your participation in the space and your right to be there. The tax is so far-reaching and insidious that you will end up paying before you even realize what’s happening.
Payment comes in many forms: your influence, showing actual emotions on twitter, a boss’s anger, exhaustion from explaining yourself (again) and then there are all of the requests people make of you to teach them because they don’t feel like finding answers for themselves. Eventually you become #thatwoman who has opinions on feminism. This turns you into a “go-to” whether you want to be or not.
There was a time when I was willingly paying all of these various forms of tax. I’ve done organizing, participated in “visibility” efforts and written about feminism. At the end of it, I found myself exhausted and needing to focus on my own career rather than continuing to feed the testing community with all of its various requests.
I largely disengaged from the testing community a few years ago because I’m pushing my own career in a different direction and it is taking all of the energy I have. In the meantime, I’ve paid attention to what has been happening in tech around gender and diversity outside of testing. For the most part, I focus on listening and signal boosting other people because, as a straight, white, cis woman who already has a tech job, I have my own share of privilege.
Through all of this listening and signal boosting, my feminism has grown and changed. It has outpaced my old definition and is now anchored in bell hooks
Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.
I’m done arguing, debating and/or discussing the meaning of quality, but I don’t think we talk enough about feminism, what it means to us, how it touches our lives and what it looks like in our communities.
The testing community, in particular, seems to operate under this two-headed shadow of a certain leader with mysoginist tendencies coupled with other leaders who don’t seem to have an awareness of what is happening in tech diversity outside the walls of testing. (Yes, that is a challenge. I don’t mind if people communicate with me to tell me how wrong I am about that, just don’t expect me to give you a cookie.)
One thing I’ve learned in this new world is that if I am part of a marginalized group, it is ok for me to push back on taking responsibility for fixing things. It is ok for me to voice a frustration or call someone out and leave it at that. I don’t have to write tons of articles for different testing publications explaining myself. I don’t have to be the one giving talks about this. In fact, by not doing these things, it leaves space for other voices. I’ve noticed that there are some great new voices in software testing who are paving the wave for even more change.
My hope is that people in software testing reach outside of the testing bubble for influence on multiculturalism and inclusion. Prove me wrong. Show me that you are learning and listening. I am not the person who will say to you that my opinion is the only one and you should blindly follow it. We’ve had enough of that in software testing.
2009 was the year I rode zeitgeist like a motherfucker.
Portrait of a woman with her shit together
My blog became more widely read in software testing circles. I presented what still stands as one of my favorite talks on software quality and data visualization at the PNSQC Conference in Portland. One week later, I presented that same talk, my first ever conference talk at Adobe Software in Seattle and again at Microsoft in Redmond. After graduating with an MS in Software Engineering I moved to Australia to work for a company making killer software development tools.
From the outside, my career was taking off and there were no limits. My twitter exploded, I was in contact with a lot of conference organizers and I met so many people. But, at work, I found my opinions being questioned and put down in ways I hadn’t expected. In going from one job to the next, I found that, each time, what I had to say felt diminished. I didn’t feel listened to or heard. I was told I should be less abrasive, less aggressive, less defensive and take things less personally. When I did that, I was told that I shouldn’t bottle up my emotions.
I was #thatwoman.
Zeitgeist has a way of turning around and moving on without you. I could feel its energy and power withdrawing as a particular stack of books grew taller on my bedside table: The No Asshole Rule, Crucial Conversations, The Sociopath Next Door, What Every Body is Saying, The Five Dysfunctions of a team, The Emotionally Abusive Relationship, Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management and Good Boss, Bad Boss.
If it made you tired reading all of those titles, think of reading each one cover to cover and making sure you apply what you learn from them every day at your job because you’re trying to survive and be the employee management seems to want. That’s what I did over a period of 6 years.
What I found is that no matter how much I read and worked at not being an asshole or finding the “right way” to say things or get my opinions across, I could never be silent enough. Quiet crept into my head and started to expand there like a cancer.
What? Quietness? Me?
The writing I do is smart, ambitious and full of backbone because that is who I am. These qualities, however, can lead to suffering at work…particularly for women. This is called tone policing.
Tone policing shows up in one-on-one meetings, performance reviews, chats with well-meaning co-workers, beers with friends, meet ups with strangers. It even comes from the mouths of well meaning women and men who consider themselves feminist and/or interested in equal rights for women…that’s right. It is everywhere and it will chip away at you and chip away and chip away until it becomes something else entirely and you are being erased and even erasing yourself.
This is the equivalent of clear-cutting and terraforming your emotional acre and it can happen to anyone, even those who appear, on the outside, to be highly successful.
Here I am, on my birthday last year at the lowest point in the country, Death Valley. The low was also metaphorical. Yep, I was down. Way down. Further than ever and talking to no one.
I had erased myself. My writing no longer made sense because I couldn’t allow myself to say anything. My tweets were more polite than ever and slowed to a trickle.
What I didn’t anticipate at the bottom, was that zeitgeist, would once again, turn and present itself at a different angle, an angle I wasn’t expecting.
Punk Singer
This is Kathleen Hanna. She’s one of the firestarters of the Riot Grrrl movement. I hadn’t heard of her before going to see the film about her titled “Punk Singer” on a get-to-know-you outing with San Francisco’s feminist hacker space, Double Union. DU was, at the time, just getting started and looking for new members.
Riot Grrrl was a punk-rock, DIY focused movement born of Pacific Northwest, 90’s grunge zeitgeist. Kathleen Hanna was the lead singer of punk band Bikini Kill and the person who spray painted the phrase “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on Kurt Cobain’s wall. When taking the stage, she would call for all women to go to the front so that they could dance because, at the time, men had turned the front of the stage into unruly and unsafe mosh pits.
As I watched “Punk Singer,” I couldn’t stop looking at Hanna’s hair. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I had worn that same shade of hair back in my heyday. I fingered strands of my own long, brown hair and had a cry as the movie neared its conclusion. After the film, I went home, cued up Bikini Kill’s Rebel Girl on YouTube and made an appointment with my hair stylist.
Sometimes finding your voice starts with a hair color.
For me, it was changing my hair color back to black and finding my place among those bringing the RiotGrrrl zeitgeist back around and into San Francisco’s tech scene where it is so sorely needed.
I got accepted as a member at Double Union and I began learning. I’ve learned that the more smart and ambitious you are as a woman, the larger a target you become for other people’s projected insecurities and assumptions i.e. the more I follow Sheryl Sandberg’s advice to be bold, the harder and more damaging the knockbacks are likely to be. I learned that it doesn’t matter how much I work at erasing myself, it will never be enough. I learned that not all women are feminists and even women who think they are feminists are capable of tone policing other women. I learned that anger is a beautiful, inspiring emotion that I’ve earned the right to feel in every cell of my body, and above all, I learned that it’s ok for me to have a voice and to use it.
I’ve been using that voice lately and sometimes it’s harsh. Sometimes my voice shows the anger, grief and frustration of a woman who has been cut down time after time but who is still, somehow, a fighter. Sometimes this takes people by surprise and they don’t know where the anger comes from, they only see me letting it go. There was a time when I would have said, “don’t mind me,” or “so sorry, I don’t mean to offend,” but, I’m done with that. To some extent, this means that I might lose some followers and that some people will shake their head and say, “she used to be so accommodating.” So be it. I’d rather be myself.
Over the holidays, I went to see the art exhibit Alien She: Examining the lasting impact of Riot Grrrl exhibit at Yerba Buena Arts Center. Looking at the huge wall of Zines (pronounced zeens) assembled for the exhibit, it reminded me of the amazing zine community we have at Double Union. In looking at the hot pink, barbed wire fence made of yarn, I thought of the large number of members at Double Union who have brightly colored hair. The sound of the punk music strewn throughout the exhibit on iPods tracks not only with our collective frustration that tech is so fucked up and we’re just trying to survive it, but also with the happy chaotic noise of gatherings at DU. The exhibit is open for another week until January 25, by the way.
Photo by Leigh Honeywell/@hypatiadotca
In the meantime, another legendary Riot Grrrl band, Sleater Kinney has reunited and is releasing a new album today.
Between Double Union, Punk Singer, Alien She, Sleater-Kinney, Model View Culture, AdaCamp in Portland last Summer and the upcoming Alter Conf, it’s as if there is a badass, feminist zeitgeist that has ridden into San Francisco on the back of Karl the Fog. It has, for now, decided to settle on the 4th floor of the The Fog Building in the Mission. I show up there and breathe it in. It, along with some great friends and a wonderful partner have helped take me back to the powerful, unafraid woman I was in 2009. It’s help me slough off the dead weight of jobs past and prepare me to advocate for myself more, to give myself more credit and to sing and sometimes shout like a motherfucker.
The Riot Grrrls are back and so am I.
Thanks to all of my friends at Double Union and to my non-DU friends who have shoved the microphone back in hands. I am shouty-singing.
Some tweets are like a Rorshach test and it’s much easier for people to project onto them what they want to see. This tweet is such a case. The quote can be interpreted in a few ways, all of them insulting. It really hits the tester nerve, especially for testers who take pride in their testing skills and have worked to make them better. I can see how it especially hits the nerve of testers who have worked to set themselves and the activity of testing apart from development as its own industry and job role with its own set of skills.
It makes sense that the natural reaction to this is to reach for pride and say, “I’m a tester, FUCK YEAH!!!”
What’s been missed, though, is that this tweet was part of a mini-rant. I was actually going for something more complicated that speaks to where testing is going within the broader context of the software industry and my place in that paradigm shift.
The Fun
Let’s take a moment to acknowledge the fun side of testing that we all know and love so well. We poke, we break, we question, we investigate, we discover. It’s fun!
The Baggage
Now, let’s examine the rest of what comes with a career in testing:
You will be seen as an also ran.
Developers (or management that doesn’t work with you day to day) will see you as not that smart or technical unless you get a chance to prove them wrong.
There is significantly less opportunity for promotion, especially as “testing departments” get smaller or go away completely.
Even if you learn how to write code, it’s assumed you will only ever work on test code and that your code will be shittier.
You will have far less decision power.
You will be paid less.
I’m sure there are people who would argue that the subset of baggage listed above doesn’t mean much in comparison to how much they loooooove testing and the pleasure they take in breaking things. If they want to stay in “testing” forever, that’s fine with me.
I disagree, however, that I should be content with less pay, a smaller set of career options and a position where I’m consistently marginalized on a team or even in tech.
It also occurs to me that the women’s restrooms at testing conferences are always crowded compared to the ghost town that is the women’s bathroom at any tech office or developer conference. There is no mystery here.
I started my rant because I had occasion to send someone I respect two of my favorite testing posts by Trish Khoo and Alan Page. When Trish and Alan suggest that testing teams are going away, that testing is an activity done by many on a software team and that testers should level up their coding skills, I see a role coming into focus where I am more empowered and more of an equal on a software team. I see a role where I’m even more in the thick of the software engineering process than I already am. I see a role that uses my testing skills and develops my problem solving skills as well. I see myself as a developer who is great at testing. One feeds the other and I am making great software as part of a team. All of this fits particularly well in the Agile XP process which includes TDD.
I’ve been working at building my web developer skills and I’ve found a team where this type of contribution will be welcome. It hasn’t been easy and this is all still a work in progress, but I can see the tipping point fast approaching.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
—Eleanore Roosevelt
By the way, the short-sighted person quoted in my original tweet wasn’t a developer. It was another tester. I am surrounded by developers who see what I’m doing and who couldn’t be more supportive.
Now that you have the full story, let’s look at my tweet again.
Les Speakers photo credit Lillie Chilen (@lilliealbert)
In my credo, I state that I will always be a writer first. I’m working on the 2nd draft of a novel, I write everyday and I attend a writing class every other week. This class is precious to me, but recently, I made the extremely painful decision to skip a writing class in order to attend the event “An Evening of Talks with Double Union and Ashe Dryden.”
And so I gathered with others, our reflections co-mingling with the Bay lights in abstract patterns and crossing signals releasing an energy collected through resistance into the San Francisco night. The purpose of the evening was to raise funds for San Francisco’s first feminist hacker/maker space, Double Union. You can read more about that effort, here.
The featured speakers were Ashe Dryden (@ashedryden), Valerie Aurora (@adainitiative), Missy Titus (@missytitus), Dr. Kortney Ryan Zeigler (@fakerapper), Alaina Percival (Women Who Code) @alaina, Shanley Kane @shanley, Amelia Greenhall @ameliagreenhall.
It was refreshing that:
I didn’t have the usual space bubble around me that I normally do at tech events. Unless I go with someone, I find most meet ups and conferences are actually pretty lonely and there is usually this space bubble of a chair in every direction between me and other people even if I use double deodorant. Ok, it’s usually guys who are at the outer edge of the bubble. Although I didn’t know too many people, the crowd was quite friendly which cut down slightly on the terror. (Yes, I actually am very shy like everyone else in tech).
Shanley’s slides emphasized the general state of fucked up-edness in tech and software and it was like basking in the harsh daylight of reality. We need more of this.
There were none of those stupid, heckling, troll-types in the audience discounting the points the speakers were making or trying to play the speakers off of one another. I get so sick of stupid people saying, “well HER blah blah blah was SO MUCH BETTER.” Like it’s only ok to allow 1 female to be good at anything. There were 7 people on that stage and they were all awesome.
What I learned:
That I need to take stock of my own privilege. I hadn’t heard about this before last night, but it makes sense. Before you can understand who is different from you, it’s important to know your own self and the benefits that you’ve had in life.
Ashe Dryden suggested wearing a color to a conference and introducing yourself to others wearing the same color so you get a different type of cross-section. I really want to try this and see what happens.
There is a need for a harassment policy at every conference, even ones that are all women because women can be homophobic and/or culturally insensitive. I’ve reached out to Cascadia.js about their policy and pointed them towards the template on geek feminism.org
I’m really really really really done with tone policing myself online, on my blog, etc. Although I’m already fairly WYSIWYG in my writing and in life, I can do better. This includes engaging with men I know already in the tech community. The post I wrote on Medium still stands because I’m committed to supporting people around me when they try to do better. It’s just that I’m done with people patronizing me or playing me off of other women online. This will likely require me to educate myself more about feminism, and I look forward to that.
I want to write more about diversity in tech AND THAT’S OK. I can write as many blog posts as I want about being a woman working in tech AND THAT’S OK TOO. I’m tired of feeling guilty every time I have an idea for a blog post on gender or diversity as if I’ve written too much about it or that the world doesn’t need to hear more. At this point, I’ve written a few (Links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and every time I think to myself, “How badly do I need to say this at the expense of looking less technical.” This is who I am and what I want to write about it. If you want technical, go check my Github. FUCK IT.
The Bay Lights on Bay Bridge (romanboed)
I feel an awakening in the tech world and in San Francisco.
It’s needed in many ways. Aside from the misery of the many who are marginalized, tech has been invading San Francisco’s friendly, collaborative culture and razing it to make way for Nerds Acting Like Jocks. It’s about time some of San Francisco began bleeding into some part of the tech community because we’ve bled enough of our own city.
Ashe specifically mentioned the need for everyone in the room to bust out of our own tech bubble and put more energy into experiencing the non-tech world. In San Francisco, we live in the heart of the counter-culture and it’s time to be more open to the lessons our neighbors and our city have to teach us.
Even without much of a membership or much of a space, the collective of people that makes up Double Union has already managed to bring us together in a way that reverberates through time and our own static-y channels. It was a privilege to attend this signal gathering.
