Jonny 290 posted:

i really hope that when i move to a bigcity market that it isn't a whole bunch of check-your-privilege sjw tumblrtalk at work, i'm super glad you're a TWoC but i just want to deliver the project. can we chat about your struggles when we're not under deadline

ymgve posted:

also apparently sexual jokes are verboten on pycon for being unprofessional but playing cards against humanity where you can make jokes about hitlers gas chambers is allowed

prefect posted:

i took an intro to java training class at sun (many moons ago), and it was loving awesome. there was all kinds of remedial stuff i didn't know, like actually understanding binary math, and stack/heap stuff

i took a second training class and tried to get the same teacher, but apparently they have a policy against letting you do that; they're afraid of stalkers

ymgve posted:

the worst thing is that this is over a few lines she eavesdropped, not even something someone said directly to her or relating to her in any way

MononcQc posted:

If you don't know <thing I know> you're a terrible person.

MononcQc posted:

Some additional context from Adriana's blog: http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont-belong-at-tech-conferences/

quote:

The stuff about the dongles wasn’t even logical and as a self professed nerd, that bothered me. Dongles are intended to be small and unobtrusive. They’re intended for network connectivity and to service as physical licence keys for software. I’d consulted in the past with an automotive shop that needed data recovery and technical support. I know what PCMCIA dongles look like.

ratbert90 posted:

It's stuff you need to know to program. Holy poo poo if you can't count by power of twos you have no business programming a computer that RUNS OFF OF POWER OF TWOS.

NOTinuyasha posted:

The stuff about the dongles wasn’t even logical and as a self professed nerd, that bothered me. Dongles are intended to be small and unobtrusive. They’re intended for network connectivity and to service as physical licence keys for software. I’d consulted in the past with an automotive shop that needed data recovery and technical support. I know what PCMCIA dongles look like.

Cocoa Crispies posted:

why

why does a literal idiot making a porn site with php need to know that

why does somebody making python scripts that call wget need to know that

why does anybody who has a loving compiler on their computer need to know that

ymgve posted:

maybe that was the joke, the presenter showed a picture of an abnormally large dongle and they joked about it

ratbert90 posted:

If you don't know binary math and stack/heap stuff you don't need to be programming.

ratbert90 posted:

Because it's incredibly simple and you can learn it in less than one minute?
Because computers run off of it.
Because having a basic understanding of what a computer actually does isn't a bad thing?
Because if you want to be a programmer instead of a script monkey you need to have at least a basic understanding of how computers operate and work?

I'm not saying you need to know bitwise operations, but good god man, counting by 2's isn't hard at all!

MeruFM posted:

the needtoknowtobeprogrammer crowd is probably akin to the solo mid crowd

anyone who gets this should kill urself now

NOTinuyasha posted:

Shaggar posted:

shes never seen a real dongle

MononcQc posted:

Some additional context from Adriana's blog: http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont-belong-at-tech-conferences/

Shaggar posted:

I clicked on this and it brought up some browser detection page that I closed immediately. web "developers" are the litterall worst

Mr Dog posted:

if you want to do more than "database skins" at some point you gonna have to understand how poo poo works son

Werthog 95 posted:

The it happened….The trigger.

Tiny Bug Child posted:

in two weeks i'm going to an adult industry conference. there's going to be porn stars playing a game of naked dodgeball

Werthog 95 posted:

The guy behind me to the far left was saying he didn’t find much value from the logging session that day. I agreed with him so I turned around and said so. He then went onto say that an earlier session he’d been to where the speaker was talking about images and visualization with Python was really good, even if it seemed to him the speaker wasn’t really an expert on images. He said he would be interested in forking the repo and continuing development.

That would have been fine until the guy next to him…

began making sexual forking jokes

I was going to let it go. It had been a long week. A long month. I’d been on the road since mid February attending and speaking at conferences. PyCon was my 5th and final conference before heading home.

I know it’s important to pick my battles.

I know I don’t have to be a hero in every situation.

Sometimes I just want to go to a conference and be a geek.

But…

like Popeye, I couldn’t “stands it no more” because of what happened –

Jesse Noller was up on stage thanking the sponsors. The guys behind me (one off to the right) said, “You can thank me, you can thank me”. That told me they were a sponsoring company of Pycon and from the photos I took, his badge had an add-on that said, “Sponsor”.

My company was a Gold sponsor as well.

They started talking about “big” dongles. I could feel my face getting flustered.

Was this really happening?

How many times do I have to deal with this?

Can they not hear what Jesse is saying?

The stuff about the dongles wasn’t even logical and as a self professed nerd, that bothered me. Dongles are intended to be small and unobtrusive. They’re intended for network connectivity and to service as physical licence keys for software. I’d consulted in the past with an automotive shop that needed data recovery and technical support. I know what PCMCIA dongles look like.

I was telling myself if they made one more sexual joke, I’d say something.

The it happened….The trigger.

Jesse was on the main stage with thousands of people sitting in the audience. He was talking about helping the next generation learn to program and how happy PyCon was with the Young Coders workshop (which I volunteered at). He was mentioning that the PyLadies auction had raised $10,000 in a single night and the funds would be used the funds for their initiatives.

I saw a photo on main stage of a little girl who had been in the Young Coders workshop.

I realized I had to do something or she would never have the chance to learn and love programming because the rear end clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so.

I calculated my next steps. I knew there wasn’t a lot of time and the closing session would be wrapping up. I considered:

The type of event
The size of the audience
How the conference had emphasized their Code of Conduct
What I knew about the community and their diversity initiatives
How to address this issue effectively and not disrupt the main stage

The ballroom was huge. Here’s a photo from that morning of the keynote speaker, Guido van Rossum, creator of Python. Each section was 12 seats wide and 20 rows deep with six sections (front and back) in the ballroom. I would estimate it held over 1,000 people that afternoon. I was located approximately 10 rows deep from the front right screen in the top-right section and about 5 seats in from the aisle on the left of the section.

(Math inclined folks: feel free to provide your estimates on how many people the ballroom held in the comments.)

Accountability was important. These guys sitting right behind me felt safe in the crowd. I got that and realized that being anonymous was fueling their behaviour. This is known as Deindividualization:

Deindividuation is a concept in social psychology that is generally thought of as the losing of self-awareness in groups. Theories of deindividuation propose that it is a psychological state of decreased self-evaluation and decreased evaluation apprehension causing antinormative and disinhibited behavior.
Deindividuation theory seeks to provide an explanation for a variety of antinormative collective behavior, such as violent crowds, lynch mobs, etc. Deindividuation theory has also been applied to genocide and been posited as an explanation for antinormative behavior online and in computer-mediated communications.

It very much reminded me of Lord Of the Flies. I decided to put out the fire at the base.

PyCon has gone to great efforts to position themselves as a conference that everyone is welcome to attend according to their homepage:

PyCon is the largest annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language. PyCon is organized by the Python community for the community. We try to keep registration far cheaper than most comparable technology conferences, to keep PyCon accessible to the widest group possible.

and they go on to say:

PyCon is a diverse conference dedicated to providing an enjoyable experience to everyone. Our code of conduct is intended to help everyone maintain the PyCon spirit. We thank all attendees and staff for observing it.

I did a gut check and waited until Jesse finished introducing Diana who would be the new PyCon US chair for 2014. I stood up slowly, turned around and took three, clear photos. I said back down, did another gut check and started composing a tweet.

Three things came to me: act, speak and confront in the moment.

I decided to do things differently this time and didn’t say anything to them directly. I was a guest in the Python community and as such, I wanted to give PyCon the opportunity to address this.

A few minutes later, one of the PyCon staff member approached to the left. I stood up, went outside to talk with him and explain the situation with a few of the other PyCon staff. They had seen my tweet. After explaining, they wanted to pull the people in question from the main ballroom. I walked back in with the PyCon staff and point them out one by one and they were escorted to the hallway.

As I walked back to my seat, I cannot tell you how proud I was of the PyCon and Python community at the very moment for keeping their word to make the conference a safe place to be. A bit shaken, I took my seat to continue watching the lightning talks. I sent an updated tweet that the situation was being dealt with and later on, PyCon tweeted they had addressed the issue.