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Meeting someone who made history as part of desegregation

Do you remember those 4 brave, little, black kindergarten girls who were the first to attend a desegregated school? This is one of those girls, Leona Tate.

She went to kindergarten accompanied by US Marshalls. She said the first year and a half wasn’t bad. Her family never let her feel like they were afraid, the US Marshalls were nice and they were the only 3 kids in the school. Everyone else pulled their kids out because of fear they’d get hurt. She said the next school was tough. Kids broke a school bus seat on purpose and blamed her; they spit in her hair (she said that was the worst) and the white mothers harassed her. One day her mom told her to come out of school and walk past her like she didn’t know her. She did and when one of the white mothers harassed her, Leona’s mother chased the harassing mother down the street! She never had a problem with the mothers after that. I’m so honored to have met her and had a chance to chat with her. I’m also so impressed with her parents’ bravery and appreciate their willingness to put their family forward in making our country a better place for everyone.

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Let others choose their own hats

How many hats do you wear?

When I’m in a city and say I’m there for a software conference, I wear my “all technical people” hat. When I’m the only woman in a room of men, I wear my “the entire female gender” hat. When I’m the only American at a long table full of Europeans, I wear my “American” hat. At those times, I feel like my behavior reflects on an entire gender, nationality or industry.

That often makes me think and act very carefully. Sometimes that makes me feel guilty. It often feels stressful.

So just go easy on Marissa Mayer.

She didn’t choose to wear the female hat. But she did choose to wear the CEO hat. And the mom hat. And the female mom CEO hat. Wow! What a burden that must feel like at times. So give her some slack. Let her do the best she can the way she thinks is right. She obviously chose not to wear the “children should spend the first couple of months with their mom” hat. That’s ok with me. She’s wearing a lot of hats. And she’s pushing the stereotypes. For a lot of hats that I care about. Give her some room to breath. Remove the stress of imposing yet another hat on her. Support her in all the hats she has to wear.

I say this from my a day of camping without work and without kids. So pretty hat free, relatively speaking. Yeah to the female, mom, CEO!

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Don’t let them label you a demon kitty

Over the past couple of days I’ve had a number of conversations with women that have left me frustrated. And I realize I’ve heard a lot of stories like this. For the record each of these comments comes from a different woman who works for a different company, none of which I have worked at. So this is not about the companies but about empowering individuals.

Each of these women is super smart and talented, with a good career and has done and created awesome things.

  • “Is there a life outside this company? Tell me there are good places to work.”
  • “I’ve gotten so much negative feedback, I’ve stopped listening to any feedback. I think I’m unemployable now.”
  • “I’m not doing anything meaningful at work but I can’t quit. If they offered me a severance package, I think I’d take it.”
  • “I’ve given up on advancing my career. I just want to find nice people to work with where I can do good work.”

And all that reminds me of the lesson I learned from my demon kitty.

I used to foster kittens for the humane society. And one kitten they gave me was a demon kitty. She would attack me with tooth and claw every time I ate; she peed in every corner of my house; she shredded curtains. She was truly a demon kitty.

I took her back and said “I’m sorry, she’s a demon kitty, I can’t work with her.”

A few days later I called and asked how she was doing. They said “oh, she’s great, we placed her with another volunteer.” I didn’t believe them, so I called the other volunteer. She said, “She’s the sweetest little thing ever.” I asked her to describe the demon kitty just to make sure we were talking about the same cat.

Something in my organization (i.e. my house) was toxic for the kitten. Maybe it was the wrong kind of food, maybe it was the big slobbery dog, maybe it was the color of the carpets. Maybe I was just a terrible manager (i.e. foster mom). And she tried to tell me. And I gave her lots of negative feedback (sprayed her with water) and I labeled her a demon kitty and recommended her for lots of remedial behavior training. I failed her.

So if your organization is labeling you as a “demon kitty”, it’s not your fault, not any more than it was the fault of a six week old kitten. So, hold that knowledge, that it’s not your fault, and decide if you want to work it out with them or if you want to find a better home. Don’t let them tell you who you are or what you are capable of. Don’t argue with them about what label they’ve given you. Don’t let them make you feel like you have no other options. They might think you are a demon kitty, but if you’ve shown you can create great things and you work hard, there’s a place that will show you that you can be a shining star.

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Why child care at conferences is great

Child care at conferences is awesome but not for the reason you think it is. We think it helps women who have no other options for kids to attend. Really it helps all parents be closer to their kids, helping people in technology build strong families, relationships and communities.

Child care helps attendance for local meetups

Child care is often toted as a way to enable women to attend conferences. I think that’s really true when the conference is local. It’s not that women (or men) couldn’t find someone to watch their kids but it’s one less impediment. The meetup is posted, you see there’s child care, you can just rsvp. Later you might find child care or you might use the meetup child care.

Most people that travel for work have child care

But as anyone that travels a lot for work knows, it’s much more work to bring your child than it is to leave them at home. If you have to travel for work, you probably have child care options for your kids at home because there aren’t enough other options while traveling for work these days. (Luckily, I have an awesome extended support network at home.)

But child care at conferences is vital for our extended community

The reason I think child care at conferences is awesome is that it allows me to share my work, my travel and my colleagues with my kids.  It allows me to bond with my child in an environment that I don’t get to share with them very often.

My kids love attending conferences with me. They get to share my love of traveling, stay in hotels (which they still think is awesome), get swag, meet all the people I talk about and play with colleagues’ kids.

My kids have met my colleagues – really smart, funny people. They have played nerf guns and games with the kids of my colleagues like at the kid day at SCALE or the daycare at Grace Hopper.  They see what I do when I travel – my youngest turned the slides for me at my talk at SCALE and helped out at both the Kids on Computers and Mozilla booths. They’ve enjoyed exploring cities with me the weekend before a conference.

Hopefully they’ve learned more about the world, how technology makes it works, why open source is important and how people debate and collaborate on things that make the world a better place.

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7 ways to know if you are suffering from impostor syndrome

Have you ever suffered from impostor syndrome? Most of us can relate to it. And it’s more prone during certain times of your life, like new jobs.

Impostor syndrome[1] is a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. Despite external evidence of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be. Notably, impostor syndrome is particularly common among high-achieving women. – From Wikipedia

Having recently started a new job, I thought I’d make a list of the signs that you are suffering from impostor syndrome:

    1. Not accepting praise. Usually when someone says you did a great job, you should say “thank you” not “but I goofed here and I could have done better here.” My performance in my OSCON talk was not as good as my CiviCRM keynote, but I should still accept the nice comments people say. And my OSCON talk was better in many ways – like working with someone else.
    2. Announcing your mistakes or shortcomings. Telling everyone what you don’t know. There’s a lot of technologies in Cloud Foundry! I’m learning them. Just please don’t ask me any detailed questions about exactly how scheduling works.
    3. Being afraid of making mistakes. Everyone is afraid of making mistakes but you find yourself going out of your way to avoid situations that might put you on the spot. You hesitate just a moment before stepping up – a moment you don’t normally hesitate in.
    4. Feeling stupid. Not asking questions you have for fear of looking stupid. I’ve got lots of questions. I’ve asked about 90% of them. I’ve also asked some of them twice – the key is just to ask the same question of different people in hopes that somebody will answer it in a way you understand. That’s a trick I learned in karate. We would take turns pairing up with everyone in class. Eventually someone would explain the move to me in a way that just clicked with me.
    5. Writing lots, publishing nothing. Because nothing is good enough to you. I’ve got a book’s worth of blog posts at this point. Should make life easier later.
    6. Feeling uncertain in other parts of your life where you know you are competent but suddenly you are doubting yourself. Seriously, we’ve had a boat for over 10 years and I suddenly couldn’t get it started last weekend. Luckily for me and my 8yo, I did know how to use the trolling motor (or rather together we figured it out) so we weren’t stuck in the middle of the lake.
    7. Researching and writing about the impostor syndrome. 🙂

How do you know when you are suffering from impostor syndrome?

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What labels are applied to you every day?

When you hear that a 13 year old, black girl is giving a keynote at OSCON, what do you think?

  1. Wow, she must be a child prodigy, what did she do?
  2. Who are her parents?
  3. She got that keynote because she’s a 13 year old, black, girl.

I’ve heard all three options and a few in between.

The truth is that Keila Banks is pretty awesome. She’s an accomplished blogger/technologist and her 10 minute keynote (to a 4,000 person audience!), “The Undefinable Me”, is well worth watching.

And Keila’s parents are pretty awesome too. They have given Keila lots of support and encouragement as she explores the opportunities around her. They are as inspirational to me as a parent as Keila is.

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Join the Open Source Track at Grace Hopper this year!

There’s a Free and Open Source Software Track at Grace Hopper this year! Submit your proposal now and come join us.

Grace Hopper is the largest gathering of women technologists and it’s a super energizing conference. They are expecting 11,000 people this year – which I find kind of scary. But my experience at Grace Hopper has always been very welcoming – a place to see old friends and a great place to meet new people. I always see quite a few women from the industry that I know and I always meet a couple of more – usually a couple each time that I still remain in contact over the years. It’s how I met the HFOSS folks and where I met Corey Latislaw who is now a Kids on Computers volunteer. I also always see at least one speaker who makes a huge impact on me. One year a keynote speaker made me cry and laugh several times all in one talk. Another year, the President of Harvey Mudd College was on the imposter panel. She talked about how she felt like an imposter asking for a $25 million donation when the people all around her were much more successful and wealthy. GNOME owes part of its financial success that year to her. Because of her stories, I had no problem going and asking all of the advisory board member companies if they could double their contributions.

Heidi Ellis and I are co-chairing the Open Source track and we’re both excited to bring the new things happening in the open source world to a larger audience. We want to get more of the women at Grace Hopper involved in free and open source software. Or at least aware of the opportunity. Please consider submitting a proposal to the track. Formats include presentations, lightning talks, panels, workshops, and birds of a feather.

Men and women are welcome at Grace Hopper although I warn you (both men and women!), if you’ve never been, it feels very strange at first to be at a technical conference that is almost all women! There are also a lot of students at Grace Hopper and that too adds to the energy and the unique feel of Grace Hopper.

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Who’s helping who?

At Philly Emerging Tech some girls from TechGirlz came into meet with me and Molly Holzschlag. I think we were supposed to be role models for them but two minutes into the meeting, I realized the girls were the role models!

One of the girls was already writing a game in Python and had already considered the benefits of open sourcing it or not.  Another was concerned with the lack of emotion you can convey in a text message and how we might be able to improve that. A third girl had already set up her own dog treat business complete with an online presence. And the youngest in the group? She was in a Lego club and could build and program computer robots. Her teacher? An older girl in the group. These girls ranged in ages from 8 to 15 and they were already accomplishing amazing things.

We talked about careers in tech, how you can take technology into other fields, the things that frustrated them, the things that motivated them, … I sure learned a lot and came away motivated!

For more on what we talked about read Todd Weiss’ excellent recap.

Thanks to Tracey Welson-Rossman for TechGirlz and for inviting me to participate.

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The secret to my success in a field of men? All my friends. My guy friends.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks talking about why we have so few women in open source and web development and how to encourage more women to join. (I even got to spend an awesome afternoon with a bunch of girls. I was supposed to be mentoring them but they were already Python game developers and small business owners – at the ages of 10 and 15!)

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that I am in this field because I really like the people. And 95% of those people are men and I appreciate them. I appreciate all the help they’ve given me whether they knew they were helping or not!

So I decided it’s time to thank all the men that I appreciate, who have helped me in my interests and my career.

First, there’s my dad. He not only told me I could do whatever I wanted to do, but promised to make sure I had the opportunities. I think he’s always been secretly disappointed I didn’t want to play football.

To my grandpa. He told me it was his sandbox, so I could play in it. He taught me how to defend my right to participate with out a leg to stand on — it wasn’t his sandbox. (And to Chris who taught me how to play toy soldiers in that sandbox. I still consider that to be one of the most boring games I know but it taught me how to steer the game or the conversation in the direction I wanted it to go.)

To my uncle John who saved all his computer magazines. He asked me once if I wanted to organize conferences. I stand by my firm answer of no, you’d have to be crazy. (But I do help out occasionally!)

To my uncle Larry who used to save me boxes of science fiction books. Boxes! Boxes of science fiction books! When you live in Spain and can’t get them that was a treasure.

To my great uncle Ted who was more delighted than I was when I finally managed to beat him in a game of cards.

To my boyfriend Frank who projects complete confidence that I can do anything. Except mow the lawn. But he is willing to get in a small boat in a big ocean with me. And he listens to my excited stories and my gripes and promises to beat up anyone who bothers me. I know he’s got my back.

To all my friends that I hang out with online and at conferences. I couldn’t possibly hope to list you all in one blog post but you’ve made all the difference. Especially those that welcomed me in the beginning. Meeting all the HelixCode guys. An afternoon hanging out with Havoc Pennington and the Eazel guys in Copenhagen trying to stay awake. Dave Neary encouraging me not just to be GNOME Foundation member but to run for the board! I didn’t run for the board then but he did later convince me to apply for the executive director job.  Dinner with Bastien Nocera, Jeff Waugh and Glynn Foster.  A cab ride with Daniel Veillard during which he explained why he didn’t trust OpenOffice. An afternoon hunting for saffron with J5. Conversations with Bradley Kuhn about free software and community and who was always helpful even when I was causing him great grief. All the questions that Vincent Untz answered for me when I started as Executive Director of GNOME – he was probably starting to get worried there! For Luis Villa, Brian Cameron, Lukas Rocha, Germán Póo-Caamaño, Behdad Esfahbod, Diego Escalante Urrelo, who took all my suggestions seriously and never acted like any question was stupid even when they were. For Jeff Schroeder who regularly pings me and encourages me on the ideas I’ve mentioned. For Paul Cutler for always making time to meet in person even when I delayed his trip home! For Ragavan Srinivasan who taught me we can be the ones to start something. And for all my new friends in the world of JavaScript and web development. Dave Herman, Christian Heilmann, Trevor Lalish_Menagh, Robert Nyman, Peter Svensson … Even after I’ve shown I have no clue how to write good JavaScript, you’ve still made me welcome.

And a whole bunch more people that I’ve talked to on IRC, IM, in hallways, over lunch or a beer, … I’m not leaving you out. But I do have to get back to work at some point.

Thanks to all of you. For all the conversations, for all the ideas you’ve shared, ideas you’ve given me feedback on, questions you’ve answered, trust you’ve shown, … I thank you. Hopefully I am successful in returning the favor or passing it on because I think it’s what makes our communities great. It’s what will continue to bring more men and more women to our communities.

That’s why I’m part of these free and open source software communities and why I’ve chosen this career path. For the people in the communities and the way we are making the world a better place together.

And I love the 5% that are women too! But I feel like I owe the guys a special thank you as we don’t often mention how encouraging and helpful they are.

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Help girls discover how cool a career in technology could be!

If you have some time this Saturday, take half an hour or so to help show girls how cool a career in technology can be. Dare 2B Digital is a conference for girls to learn more about careers involving computers.

What can you do?

As part of the conference, the girls will be making videos. (Mozilla is sponsoring the event and Lukas Blakk will be teaching the HTML5/Open Video workshop.) We need volunteers to help transcribe the videos and translate them real time to show them the power of the community and technology. The software being used is Universal Subtitles (which is a really cool tool).

Spend half an hour this Saturday and help show girls how cool our world is. You can sign up here.

Why help girls learn about computer science?

As many of you know, less than 2% of open source software developers are women. This frustrates me for two reasons.

  1. A bunch of women are missing out on some really awesome opportunities.
  2. The open source community could be twice as big! Imagine all we’d get done!

But it’s hard to recruit more women when the pool of women in computer science in general is small. I helped out at a technology event for girls once. They were sixth graders (about 12 years old). When we asked what they wanted to be, none of them picked any kind of technology field. Studies show that by sixth grade, girls have already decided not to pursue math and science careers.

This is our chance to show them how cool those fields can be. And that they aren’t alone, that there’s a whole community of interesting and motivated people they’d get to work with.

So sign up now. You can help in person if you are in Mountain View or you can help transcribe and translate if you are not. Bilingual people are much needed!