Coraline Ada Ehmke Quotes

is sometimes necessary on a distributed team, but never in my career have I seen it taken to the level that GitHub has. Asynchronous communication is definitely not my strongest area. When I see a text box on screen, I tend to be very terse and direct instead of typing out a wall of text.

GitHub has made some very public commitments to turning its culture around, but I feel now that these statements are just PR. I am increasingly of the opinion that in hiring me and other prominent activists, they were attempting to use our names and reputations to convince the world that they took diversity, , and social justice issues seriously. And I feel naive for having fallen for it.

As a seasoned developer I have certain quirks, opinions, and common patterns that I fall back on. Having to explain to another person why I am approaching a problem in a particular way is really good for helping me break bad habits and challenge my assumptions, or for providing validation for good problem solving skills.

I was well aware of 's very problematic past, from its promotion of meritocracy in place of a management system to the horrible treatment and abuse of its female employees and other people from diverse backgrounds. I myself had experienced harassment on GitHub. As an example, a couple of years ago someone created a dozen repositories with racist names and added me to the repos, so my GitHub profile had racial slurs on it until their support team got around to shutting them down a few days after I reported the incident. I didn't get the sense that the company really cared about harassment.

Values that are expressed but that don't change behavior are not really values, they are lies that you tell yourself.