I don’t care about dongles or forking repos

Wow. Web speed. It takes about 24 hours for indignation to be viral and for an incident to come full circle. Donglegate happened with a speed a ferocity that is the real story, not the silliness of what anyone actually said or did. Tweets were tweeted, people were removed from a conference, people blogged, and people were fired all in a very short cycle.

Adria Richards, the developer evangelist for SendGrid, was fired in what had to be the least surprising outcome if you take a close look at her role in her company and the choices she made. She was supposed to bring together developers across the Internet, which are by and large male (just a fact) and instead she reinforced the stereotype that women are difficult and even vicious when given power. She became every man’s nightmare (and frankly, my own nightmare, too). She turned the clock back.

I don’t care about dongles

As a woman in technology, I have bigger fish to fry than dongles or forking repos. I have no agenda to push more women into technology, but I’d like to see more talent come to the front, which means more of everyone…more women, more races, more colleges, and more backgrounds. Let’s face it, ladies, we share the challenge with anyone isn’t the stereotypical developer type. it becomes clear when I overhear female coworkers saying, “He’s too cute to be a developer.” Stereotypes and bias suck wherever they exist.

Just as Facebook’s Sandberg spoke out against bias against woman, I’m speaking out against bias against anyone who isn’t a traditi0nal part of the tech world.

I don’t care about dongles or forking repos.