As part of my work with Mozilla and Stumptown Syndicate, I attend a lot of meetings and many of those I am responsible for facilitating. I think most people consider meetings to be necessary evils. Meetings are often time-consuming, inefficient and take us away from real work we need to be doing, and yet they …
Advice to Women Seeking Careers in Technology
Note: This post is inspired by this question submitted to Quora. There are many benefits to a career in technology: wages and compensation are high compared to other industries (even accounting for the wage gap between men and women) many tech jobs offer flexible schedules and working environments the work can be intellectually challenging and …
Death Threats in Open Source Are not Occurring in a Vacuum
Individuals who make death threats start with less egregious behavior and systematically test the boundaries of the communities in which they exist. When they get away with small violations, they often move on to larger ones. They watch what others are able to get away with, too. The pattern of behavior is common among abusers. …
My First Internet Death Threat (Trigger Warning)
Trigger warning: Violence against women, homophobia and fat-shaming. Friday morning I woke up to find I’d received my first internet death threat. It was in response to my blog post about accountability. I’m posting the contents of the entire message below so that others have an idea of the kind garbage others and I have …
On Accountability
Back in July, someone claiming to be a “Mozilla member” made threatening comments here on my blog, directed towards myself and my colleague Tim Chevalier. I reported the comments immediately to Mozilla HR. It look nearly three months, but I can now report a resolution. The person who left the comments is a Mozilla employee. …
Securing Your On-line Life with a Password Manager and Two-Factor Auth
The Internet was ablaze last week with discussion of the hacking of Mat Honan. For those not up to speed about what happened, hackers were able to use social engineering and weaknesses in the security policies of Apple and Amazon to obtain access to Mat’s on-line accounts and to reset all of his Apple devices. …
Response to Nice Girl’s “The Dark Side of Feminism”
The recent post The Dark Side of Geek Feminism, authored by the pseudo-anonymous Nice Girl, and the mostly uncritical responses to it concern me for a couple of reasons. First, it attacks all of geek feminism based on the actions of a few unnamed individuals. I find this problematic because there is no certification for …
O’Reilly Open Source Award
Last Friday I was presented with an O’Reilly Open Source Award. The award recognizes “individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software.” Wikipedia has a list of previous winners. Not only did I get the very awesome sharpie-enscribed lightbulb award you see above, but I also …