Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Intra- and Interpersonal Expectations In Open Source And the Tech Industry
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2011 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
That theme emerges in the three articles I've written for Geek Feminism this year.
- January: "On competence, confidence, pernicious socialization, recursion, and tricking yourself" (previously mentioned in Cogito, Ergo Sumana). I have to remind myself to take my own advice and take more risks -- if I succeed all the time, I'm not thinking big enough. Echoed in Sheryl Sandberg's Barnard commencement speech.
- July: "'Put up or shut up'." I wrote this to explain the double-edged sword of the do-ocratic norm, to describe how we sometimes use it to shut down uncomfortable conversations, and to remind us that the very people who need certain new policies, procedures and abstractions are least able and worst placed to implement them. There's a difference between "that's definitely an issue; could you file a bug?" and "stop talking about this unless you're prepared to implement it all by yourself."
- Also July: "Google, gossip, and gamification: comparing and contrasting technical learning styles" tells my tale of failure and return, then asks: how do you learn technical material and skills? I'm especially interested in hearing from women who now spend a lot of time in a technical domain, but whose first attempt at learning it went awry.
By the way, if there's something you wish I would write about, do let me know.
