Thanks for speaking up, contributing your viewpoint on HN and not attacking me.
I'm sorry to hear your employer deciding to not to work with you on this and I hope they reconsider, bring you back on and dealing with it constructively.
For context, I'm a developer evangelist.
That means I'm an advocate for developers, male and female. While I hear abou demanding bosses with impossible deadlines for product launches, I also hear about the experiences of women working at startups.
In both cases I offer suggestions, ideas and mentoring to help the developers become problems solvers. Sometimes the answer is our API or not answering email after 7pm while other times it about being assertive and shedding impostor syndrome.
The forking joke set the stage for the dongle joke.
Yes, this time I decided I didn't want to argue my perspective. I decided instead to accept it bothered me and took action based on the PyCon Code of Conduct. It sounds like if I'd said something about the forking you would have denied it having a sexual association. Not sure if I smiled but I'm also unsure what facial expression you would have expected.
The guy behind me to the far left was saying he didn't find much value from the logging session that day. I agreed with him, turned around and said so. He then went onto say that an earlier session he'd been to where the speaker was talking about images and visualization with Python was really good, even if it seemed to him the speaker wasn't really an expert on images. He said he would be interested in forking the repo and continuing development https://us.pycon.org/2013/schedule/talks/.
That would have been find until the guy next to him...
began making sexual forking jokes
I was going to let it go. It had been a long week. A long month. I had been on the road since February and PyCon was my 5th and final conference before heading home.
I know it's important to pick my battles.
I know I don't have to be a hero in every situation.
Sometimes I just want to go to a tech conference and be a nerd.
But...
like Popeye, I couldn't stands it no more because of what happened next:
Jesse Noller was up on stage thanking the sponsors. The guys behind me (one off to the right) said, "You can thank me, you can thank me". That told me they were a sponsoring company of Pycon and from the photos I took, his badge had an add-on that said, "Sponsor".
They started talking about "big" dongles. I could feel my face getting flustered.
I totally agree on the retrospective. Without taking the time to review what you've done, it's harder to stay motivated and measure your progress. Set aside time on the calendar to do this because it's also a very good time to review your goals. Remember, tasks should move you closer to your goals!
We all should realize it's Twitter, home of public flame wars.
Agreed. That comment was from a bystander and Freshdesk pulled it into the story to sensationalize.
Yes, I remember back in 2005 when there was Kayako, Cerberus, Activecampaign, Request Tracker and PHP Ticket. All required self-hosting of files and maintenance. A cloud based helpdesk just wasn't an option.
In the end, customers will select technology that fits their needs. Those needs may be completely technical in nature but more and more, customers are making decisions about technology vendors based on the ethics and relationship with that company.