Personal – Page 19 – Walking Contradiction

PyCon 2015

PyCon 2015 ended over a week ago, so you might be wondering why I’m writing this so late. Well, once again (see my PyCon 2014 post) I blame the location: the city of Montreal. We like it so much that Linda and I planned on staying a few extra days on holiday afterwards. After returning, though, I again payed the price by digging out from the accumulated backlog. It was well worth it, though!

If you weren’t able to go to PyCon, or even if you were there and don’t possess the ability to be in multiple places at once, you missed a lot of excellent talks. But no need to worry: the A/V team did an amazing job this year, and not only recorded every session, but got them posted to YouTube in record time – many just a few hours after the talk was completed! Major kudos to them for an excellent job.

swagline — The swag table (top) and pile of stuffed bags (bottom)

PyCon is an amazing effort by many people, all of whom are volunteers. One of my favorite volunteer activity is the stuffing of the swag bags. Think about it: over 3,000 attendees each receive a bag filled with the promotional materials from the various sponsors. Those items – flyers, toys, pens, etc. – are shipped from the sponsors to PyCon, and somehow one of each must get put into each one of those bags. Over the years we’ve iterated on the approach, trying all sorts of concurrency models, and have finally found one that seems to work best: each box of swag has one person to dish it out, and then everyone else picks up an empty bag and walks down the table, and one item of each is deposited in their bag. Actually it took two very long tables, after which the filled bag is handed to another volunteer, who folds and stacks it. It’s both exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. We managed to finish in just under 3 hours, so that’s over 1,000 bags completed per hour!

In between talks, I spent much of my time staffing the OpenStack booth, and talked with many people who had various degrees of familiarity with OpenStack. Some had heard the name, but not much else. Others knew it was “cloud something”, but weren’t sure what that something was. Others had installed and played around with it, and had very specific configuration questions. Many people, even those familiar with what OpenStack was, were surprised to learn that it is written entirely in Python, and that it is by far the largest Python project today. It was great to be able to talk to so many different people and share what the OpenStack community is all about.

Last year PyCon introduced a new conference feature: onsite child care for people who wanted to attend, but who didn’t have anyone to watch their kids during the conference. Now, since my kids are no longer “kids”, I would not have a personal need for this service, but I still thought that it was an incredible idea. Anything that encourages more people to be able to be a part of the conference is a good thing, and one that helps a particularly under-represented group is even better. So in that tradition, there was another enabling feature added this year: live captioning of every single talk! Each room had one of the big screens in the front dedicated to a live captioned stream, so that those attendees who cannot hear can still participate. I took a short, wobbly video when they announced the feature during the opening keynote so you can how prominent the screens were. I have a bit of hearing loss, so I did need to refer to the screen several times to catch what I missed. Just another example of how welcoming the Python community is.

True to last year’s form, one of the keynotes was focused on the online community of the entire world, not just the limited world of Python development. Last year was a talk by John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sharing his thoughts on government spying and security. This year’s talk was from Gabriella Coleman, a professor of anthropology at McGill University. Her talk was on her work studying Anonymous, the ever-morphing group of online activists, and how they have evolved and splintered in response to events in the world. It was a fascinating look into a little-understood movement, and I would urge you to watch her keynote if you are at all interested in either online security and activism, or just the group itself.

The highlight of the conference for me and many others, though, was the extremely thoughtful and passionate keynote by Jacob Kaplan-Moss that attempts to kill the notion of “rockstar” or “ninja” programmers (ugh!) once and for all. “Hi, I’m Jacob, and I’m a mediocre programmer”. You really do need to find 30 minutes of time to watch it all the way through.

This last point is a long-time peeve of mine: the notion that programming is engineering, and that there are objective measurements that can be applied to it. Perhaps that will be fodder for a future blog post…

One aspect of all PyCons that I’ve been to is the friendships that I have made and renewed over the years. It’s always great to catch up with people you only see once a year, and see how their lives are progressing. It was also fun to take advantage of the excellent restaurants that the host city has to offer, and we certainly did that! On Sunday night, just after the closing of PyCon, we went out to dinner at Barroco, a wonderful restaurant in Old Montreal, with my long-time friends Paul and Steve. Good food, wonderful wine, and excellent company made for a very memorable evening.

dinner picture — (L to R) Paul McNett, Steve Holden, Linda and me.

This was my 12th PyCon in a row, and I certainly don’t plan on breaking that streak next year, when PyCon US moves back to the US – to Portland, Oregon, to be specific. I hope to see many of you there!

Losing an Internet Friend

I found out yesterday that Mike Beane died. Mike was one of those people in my life who are becoming more and more common: someone with whom I interact a lot online, both professionally and personally, but spend very little, if any, time with in person. I think that the way the news of his death hit me shows how it is possible for relationships in the online world to be just as real as those in the physical world.

I first encountered Mike in the pre-internet days of CompuServe in the early 90s, where we were both active in the FoxPro forums. There was a very active, vibrant community there, and Mike was a very visible part of it. I first met him in person at the FoxPro DevCon in 1995 in San Diego. During that conference I was talking to another online regular, Sue Cunningham, and mentioned that it was great to finally meet her and several others whom I had only known online until then. I mentioned Mike, and she exclaimed “Mike’s here? I have to meet him!”. I told her that I would make sure that I would find him for her. Later that evening I saw Mike, and told him to stay where he was. I found Sue and brought her over. She looked up at him (he was pretty tall!) and said “Funny, you don’t seem tall online!” He didn’t quite know how to respond – how does one project height in a text-only world?

The one other time that I met Mike was when I got stuck in O’Hare airport overnight. Bad weather had canceled the final leg of my flight home, and as I had spent the night in O’Hare on two previous occasions, I really didn’t feel like doing that again. The only person I knew who lived in Chicago was Mike, so I went to the pay phones and looked through the phone book (geez, does that sound ancient!), and found a listing for a Michael Beane. I called it, and sure enough, it was Mike. I asked him, if it wasn’t too much trouble of course, if I could crash on his couch. I was willing to get a cab to take me there, but Mike insisted on picking me up. He took me into his home, introduced me to his wonderful family, and put me up in his daughter Allie’s bedroom. The next day he fed me breakfast, hung out with me until it was time to return to the airport, and then drove me to the terminal. He really went out of his way to make me feel welcome.

I really haven’t had a lot of contact with Mike since the days when I worked with FoxPro, but he did write me recently to congratulate me on my new job with IBM. I was really saddened to hear of his death last week, and truly feel that I’ve lost a friend.

Default to Respect

If you know me, you know that I have a sense of humor that can be risqué at times (ok, perhaps crude would be a better description!). I’m also known to engage in the predominantly male form of communication that involves bonding by insulting each other: put downs, the dozens, whatever you want to call it. I also hold very opinionated positions on politics and religion, and enjoy engaging in lively discussions about them.

Yet when I am in a group of people I do not know very well, I do none of these things. Why? Because I am aware of their potential for offending people, or at the very least, making them feel uncomfortable. So I default to respect.

In programming, a default value is one that is used unless specifically overridden. Setting your default to respect means that unless you are certain that everyone within earshot (or who can otherwise observe you) knows you well enough to properly interpret your words or actions, limit yourself to those words or actions that do not require special interpretation; those that show respect for the people around you. Failing to do this is one of the biggest sources of the problems in the tech community when it comes to how women and other under-represented groups are treated. At conferences, or online, guys (yes, it’s a guy problem) act as they would normally do when they are within their tight-knit group of friends, and say/write/do something that is interpreted as offensive or even hostile. When their poor choices are pointed out, they get defensive, using the excuse that their intention was not to offend, so no one should take it badly. Or they attack, claiming that the person who pointed out their behavior is too “politically correct” (at best), or an over-sensitive bitch (if the reporter is a woman). These attacks all too frequently cross the line from name-calling to outright threats.

But refraining from sexual references or racial stereotypes is not being “politically correct”; it’s a sensible default value. Maybe later you might get to know these people better, and more importantly, they’ll get to know you better. Only then when you make a crude joke will they know that you mean no harm. But until then, the only sensible approach is to default to respect. The practice of a conference having (and enforcing!) a Code of Conduct is really a way of defining these sensible defaults for people who apparently never learned them growing up. It is encouraging to see them become more common than not, for that will help our communities “grow up” and become more inclusive. The days of the tech world being an old boys club are quickly drawing to a close, although it can’t happen fast enough for me.

So does that mean that you need to muzzle yourself? No, of course not. There are plenty of places where you can express yourself; hell, if you follow me on Google+, you’ll see that I’m not at all shy about stating my opinions. It’s totally appropriate there, because if you don’t like what I’m writing or the way I write it, you don’t have to follow me; there are plenty of other people you might like better. But a conference or an online forum is a community vehicle, and filling them with potentially hostile or offensive words or actions means that we will turn away many who would have otherwise helped the community grow better. We all suffer when otherwise talented and interesting people choose not to engage in our communities because they do not feel welcome. So do us all a favor and when you are in a community situation, set your default to respect.

A New (But Familiar) Adventure

OK, I admit it: I haven’t been posting here as regularly as I should be. It’s not like my life is so boring, or that I haven’t had any interesting thoughts to share. Rather, it’s because I have been so busy and my life changing so fast that I haven’t had the time to sit down, catch my breath, and write things down. I hope to be able to change that moving forward.

Today is the beginning of one of those changes: I start my new job as an OpenStack developer for IBM. In a way I feel like I’m coming back to a familiar world, even though I’ve never worked for IBM before. I was involved in the creation and initial design of OpenStack, and have always felt that it was partially “my baby” (ok, a very small part, but mine nonetheless). I left active involvement with OpenStack a few years ago to start the Developer Experience effort at Rackspace, and have only been tangentially working on OpenStack during that time. With the move to IBM, my focus will once again be on OpenStack, and I couldn’t be happier.

Beauty and Time

Are you afraid of getting older?

I was struck today looking at two pictures of my woman Linda and her mom Keiko: one taken in July 1982, and the other in May 2013, just a few months before Keiko died.

In both you can see the connection between mother and daughter, and though age had changed both of them in the later picture, the shared beauty between them remained very similar.

I think we have a distorted view of aging in the US; it seems as though most people feel it is something to be avoided, or that we should somehow pretend that it doesn’t apply to us. To some degree I am part of that too: I color the grey out of my hair, mostly because I’m in a career where most of the people I work with are my kids’ age, and I’m afraid I might scare them! 😉 But I certainly don’t deny my age; instead, I am proud that after 56 years I am still strong and active (more so than many of the people I know who are 20 or even 30 years younger than I), and find that my 56-year-old woman is more vibrant, witty, and attractive than any woman I have ever met.

How about you? I assume you’re planning on getting older than you currently are, so how are you going to deal with it? Is aging something you fear?