flashionista interactive developer, speaker, author and teacher

something worse than dell’s speaker choice

this week, christiane vejlø’s write-up of inappropriate content at a dell event (for which dell has since apologized) made me sad. not just because dell made a poor choice and alienated women (and undoubtedly, many men). but what disheartened me more was the backlash that christiane faced for telling her story. she was widely accused of writing a sensational post for the sole purpose of increasing her blog readership, and accused of being un-feminist and counterproductive to the conversation around women in tech.

shooting the messenger

i actually think it was a great, evenly-keeled post. christiane tethered her account to concrete details, and maintained a conversational (not angry) tone. but while dismayed, i was not surprised to see backlash against it. because when i’ve written about challenging moments at conferences, i have received similar backlash too.

i don’t understand why people shoot the messenger. we’re just telling you what happened. you don’t have to like it, and you don’t have to agree that you would feel the same way in a similar situation. but other people have a right to their feelings, just as you have a right to yours. this isn’t a he-said, she-said thing, with one objective truth about who’s right. we can all have different experiences around something, and they can all be valid.

and yet, i think the large majority of us really do share a common ideal for gender equality in tech professions. we’re all in this together. couldn’t we put away the vitriol and find a little more solidarity?

event culture is orchestrated by organizers. but overall tech culture is produced by us.

honestly, i couldn’t care less about dell as a company, i don’t use their products. but i do care that women feel welcome in the tech world. this includes the culture at events, but more importantly, it includes their everyday experiences with their peers – both in their immediate workplaces, and in their wider professional network. the people who jumped on christiane are part of the problem, making the tech culture one that mutes and intimidates women. whether this intolerance is a cause or a symptom of the problem, i’m not sure.

do we want a tech culture that mutes and intimidates women?

good politicians listen to their constituents, in order to enact appropriate kinds of change. the tech world needs to listen to, and stop backlash against, its women. clearly, as a community, we have a long way to go in becoming better listeners.

articulate

i’m happy to announce that i’ve joined articulate as a software engineer. my first day was the day of articulate’s storyline product launch, and the energy and momentum at the company is really exciting.

i’ve worked on a few different types of software in my career. at an interactive agency, we worked on web projects for big brands that had a large audience, but whose campaigns could be short-lived. then i worked at a startup, where i wrote beautiful and intuitive mobile apps which sadly reached only by a small audience of early adopters of the device. so it’s thrilling for me to now be working on more mature software with an enormous and devoted user community.

i’m also really excited to be a member of a top-notch team. looking forward to releasing some cool features in the coming months!

difficulty settings in the game of life

the first computer game i remember loving as a kid was oregon trail. i remember crying dramatic tears one sunday morning as my mom pulled me away from the game to go to church. years later, in a nostalgic conversation with my sister, she poked fun at me:

“you always played as a banker from boston,” she said. “that was the easiest setting. of course you won.”

it was shocking, because i had never realized it, but she was right. the banker starts with the most money, and can outfit his wagen with the necessary supplies and easily replenish along the way. the carpenter was better at repairs, and the farmer could carry more food back from hunts. but having the most money meant i didn’t have to be good at that stuff, i could use money in place of skills.

i was reminded of this when reading john scalzi’s post straight white male: the lowest difficulty setting there is, which borrows the idea of difficulty levels in video games as an analogy for privilege in real life. what difficulty level are you playing?

filed under “knowing is half the battle.”

brogrammers lose

these tidbits from gina trapani‘s opinion piece In war for talent, ‘brogrammers’ will be losers for CNN resonated with me:

The tech industry’s testosterone level can make the thickest-skinned women consider a different career.

when i was going through postpartum depression, one of my therapist’s recommendations was to leave the startup i was at (i chose instead to switch to part-time). the sheer number of hours that tech work often demands can be really hard, and it’s definitely rare to find tech gigs that promote healthy work-life balance.

When a recruiter’s pitch is: “Wanna bro down and crush some code?” — like San Francisco-based Klout’s was — you get a sense of what that company is looking for. If you’re a woman, it’s not you.

yeah, and “well-stocked beer fridge” is not a perk i look for at the office either. higher on my priority list is friendly people who smile and are interested in talking about life outside of work, video games and sports.

Tech start-ups founded by women are few and far between, but they’re highly attractive to female and male candidates who don’t want to join a boys’ club.

the emphasis above is mine. i think it’s really important to realize there are guys who are equally uncomfortable. there’s diversity among men too, the culture issue is definitely broader than gender.

beyond tellerand: play 2012

at marc thiele‘s invitation, i attended the btplay conference in april in köln. i was really excited to be around other local creative coder types, learn from and chat with the impressive speakers, and just reconnect with my developer self.

overall, i found the talks very accessible. it made me wonder whether they really were simpler talks, or whether i’ve reached a place in my career where it’s easier to take things in. each talk was only 45 minutes long, which might just not be enough time to dive deep.

the venue was modern, comfortable, and well-equipped. the wifi worked, and speakers could be heard without competing background noise. you might think such amenities are de rigueur, but i’ve experienced otherwise and no longer take them for granted. there was a fun twitter screen in the lobby following the #btplay hashtag, and the feed was also projected in the session rooms between speakers.

there were generally two talks going on at a time. some were in german, and i skipped those. german speakers, no doubt you were wunderbar, and i’m going to aim to make it to some of your talks next year.

here’s what i saw this year:

keith peters: playing with chaos

it’s always a pleasure to run into keith, a fellow bostonian, at conferences. his session reminded me of the flash math creativity book from a decade or so ago, that was my first stepping stone from the timeline over to generative actionscript. but with the twist that all of keith’s slides/examples were in html/javascript. he explained what fractals are (shapes made up of smaller, identical shapes), and showed different well-known variations like mandelbrot and barnsley’s fern. while he didn’t go much into the math, he showed enough to convey that it really isn’t that hard.

stray: talking and walking: robotlegs 2 and fluent code strategies

stray is such a humble, brilliant developer. she talked about the decision-making process that’s gone into adding features to robotlegs without increasing the cognitive load that it puts on the developer. she showed some playful inventions that she’s come up with in the process, like a key command in her IDE for thesaurus lookup, so that she can easily check whether another word would be clearer than the one that first comes to mind. she also talked about the problems with parameter lists, and solutions that more explicitly associate the parameter’s name/usage so that the line of code can always be easily understood without having to look up the signature.

marcin wichary: you gotta do what you gotta do

hands down, the best-designed presentation. marcin does a 20% on the google doodles team (he wrote pacman, for example), and talked about the process of designing and implementing doodles – from constructing the UX, to choosing technologies, to making things work. his slides were nested inside a scene from one of the doodles, and he used an effect on his text that animated letters in place using a couple of different versions of the font with some gentle transforms. the slides also logged debugging information as they advanced. really smart, relaxed, interesting speaker.

joshua davis: beyond play!

beers were provided before this talk, and joshua davis is a big, tattooed guy with a persona to match. while this session was meant to be inspiring, i found it to be the least enjoyable talk. the message was really good, if a bit obvious: that work and play are not opposites. i think the most valuable idea i gleaned was that you should only put the sort of work in your portfolio that you want to do more of, so that eventually you get paid to do things which for you are closest to play. but the actual presentation really turned me off. there was a lot of machismo about things like a rivalry over who has the most skateboards, mixed with profanity and scatological humor. it just felt, well, boyish.

michael plank: workflows for developing next-gen 3D browser games

this was a really clear talk, where the speaker really went through all of the different phases involved in game development, and which tools his company uses. he covered some basics of 3d thinking, like meshes and viewports, which i am already familiar with from papervision and from being married to a computer vision researcher. but i’d love to see another talk by this speaker, going into more detail about specific problems and solutions from his experience developing games. maybe next year?

bastian allgeier: design your code, code your design

i kind of wish i had sat this session out – it was meant to be inspirational, but i just didn’t feel it. i think he was trying to motivate people to work on their own ideas, and not be consumed with working for other people. a noble message, but it just wasn’t relevant enough for me.

grant skinner: html5: life in the trenches

grant started by explaining his identity as an interactive developer, who currently focuses on r&d for his company which for the past couple of years has meant working with html and javascript. then he walked through each component from the CreateJS libraries that he has released: EaselJS, TweenJS, SoundJS, PreloadJS, and Zoë (SWF to sprite sheets converter). a lot of the code looked very easy to grep for actionscript programmers. and the work itself was just plain inspiring.

seb lee-delisle: pixelphones: pixels for the people

this was GREAT. by great, i don’t mean that everything worked the way it was supposed to, or that we were all wowed by the stuff seb showed. in the session, the audience connects their phones to seb’s hotspots, and then he sends out a unique series of b&w blinking patterns to each one, and uses a camera to identify which phone is where. finally, he sends out images or games to the phones… connecting the audience in a common experience.

what was awesome about this session, for me, was how raw it was. technology didn’t work perfectly (not everyone’s phone was able to connect, seb had to restart things from his end a couple times), and the results weren’t totally compelling (you couldn’t look out at the audience and see a complete picture, or anything… just a lot of flashing rainbow colors). but as seb mentioned, this sort of thing is hard for him to test at home by himself… it requires a lot of people and a lot of phones. so what was happening, is that seb was trying something enormous and risky. through both success and failure, he was collecting data, learning, and laughing. and we got to watch it happen, and be a part of it. for me, this was the epitome of “play”. rock on, seb.

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the first evening, there was a party at a club, and i am just going to come out and say that i am always nervous that these things will make me feel old and awkward. i kind of want to be able to easily hear the people i’m talking with, and not smell like smoke at the end of the night. but it turned out alright. i had nice conversations with keith, marcin, grant, and a couple of other guys. it was pretty great how accessible and friendly the speakers were.

i wish i’d thought up a good answer to the “what do you do?” question that professionals ask other professionals upon meeting. i don’t always know how to sound interesting in a context where people are identifying themselves by their work… especially after taking a year off to adjust to life in germany. people just want to find a way to connect, figure out what you have in common. it’s an innocent question, but not always an easy one, unless i’m talking to other parents or expatriates.

again, thank you marc for the comp, extended as a very generous gesture as consolation for the long wait to hear about my speaker proposal. i really appreciated the chance to attend as a participant! i also look forward to attending next year, and maybe even speaking next time. in which case… i have some important playing to do! in the meantime, it looks like marc is busy organizing the smashing conference in freiburg in september, which will be another one to watch.