Skip to main content

Listening

Friday night I was very privileged to be able to hang out with my wife at her place of employment; it's a very cool, very forward-thinking place to be working and I'm extremely grateful that my wife gets to work there (not the least of which because it means that my night-terrors about being out of work aren't money-related). I've met a number of really nifty people who work there, but that night was special. That night, I was surrounded.

Specifically, I was surrounded by enormously talented, confident, intelligent women who work in development, engineering, and operations. It was not exactly brand-new to me; I've taken to trailing along to PyLadies with my partner and it's where I met some really fantastic people I'm very happy to know. But this was an environment where everyone knew one another; everyone was relaxed and open and laughing and having a good time and talking about nerdy stuff and the energy was just fantastic.

I tried very hard to be quiet. As a man, especially as a white man in IT, my voice is basically the default one; it's the voice that comes out of most of the CEOs and CTOs and CFOs and the rest of the alphabet-soup-level people not to mention most of the Dev and Ops people. So when I found myself in a situation where my voice wasn't the default, I tried very hard to listen more than I spoke.

I had a great time, but I was reminded again that there are amazing people here in Portland and amazing companies here in Portland and I want to be a part of that amazing stuff. And that listening is a skill that I need to work on.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Organizing And You: Lessons from Labor History

    I made a joke on Twitter a while ago: Do I need to post the Thomas M Comeau Organizing Principles again? https://t.co/QQIrJ9Sd3i — Jerome Comeau says Defund The Police (@Heronymus) July 15, 2021 and it recently came back up because a member of my family got their first union job and was like "every job should be offering these sorts of benefits" and so I went ahead and wrote down what I remember of what my dad told me. My father had many jobs, but his profession was basically a labor union organizer, and he talked a lot about the bedrock foundation items needed to be serious about organizing collective action. Here's what I remember.    The Thomas M. Comeau Principles of Organizing -- a fundamental list for finding and building worker solidarity from 50 years of Union Involvement. This list is not ranked; all of the principles stated herein are coequal in their importance. Numbering is a rhetorical choice, not a valuation. 1) Be good at your job. Even in...

#RPGaDay2018 Day 12: Your Wildest Character Concept?

I've always liked to play characters that are more than a little off-of-plumb, so this isn't actually very easy to figure out. I mean, aside from the geth detective-inspector, or the kobold necromancer, or the Paladin of Kuan-Yin who was forbidden from killing anything? I think the one that stands out the most to me at this point, looking back, is my halfling bard / gunslinger, Otto. He was designed to have the fastest mouth in all of Ptolus; all (and I mean ALL) of his resources were dumped into bluff and intimidate, and his perform skill was "monologuing". He was entirely about establishing a baseline of being a badass, and making sure no one noticed that he had absolutely nothing to back it up. Otto did eventually end up with a decent shooting skill, but other than that, he was mostly about talking himself into (and not nearly as often out of) trouble. Otto was fun.

#RPGaDay 2017 -- Day 18

Which RPG have you played the most in your life? If you count all the editions of D&D as one RPG, then the answer is D&D. I never was serious about 1st or 2nd Ed., but I was part of a 3E playtest group, and I started a 4E campaign basically as soon as I could. If you don't count all of the D&D editions as one, then the answer is HERO system, specifically Champions 4th Ed, the Big Blue Book. I was part of a group that played with the BBB for quite a while, through two multi-year campaigns. I have to admit, there is something rather satisfying about chucking great fistfuls of d6s across the battlemat and being able to figure out the body damage basically instantly. After that, I think it's GURPS, and then after that would be Pathfinder, and then 4E. I've dabbled so much with so many systems that the long-term campaigns basically swamp everything else.