Who among us hasn’t logged into Twitter only to find friends one-upping each other with meta-meta-meta-ironic jokes about something that happened five minutes ago, and no longer is anyone actually mentioning the thing they’re joking about? Who among us has not followed someone because of a really excellent viral photo or tweet, and then hundreds of posts later it’s like Oh my God, stop talking about your cat, or your car, or your loneliness?

Why do so many startups fail? Why are all the hosts on CouchSurfing male? Are we going to be tweeting for the rest of our lives? Why do Silicon Valley billionaires choose average-looking wives?

Leaders of the tech industry need to make it clear that they support a medium that loves speech and supports dissent, but does not tolerate hate.

This is tautological, unless you have a definition of “success” other than “be worth a lot of money”. Which raises the question of whether that should be the measure of success. A great many creators are scraping by on merch sales and now Patreon, devoting themselves to making the things they love full-time. If they do it consistently and garner an audience who loves their work, is that not success? You might even call them small businesses… and yet, they don’t have stock worth a lot of money. But the investment model doesn’t leave any room for that kind of success, because the primary thing investors want is to get richer. You provide an incredibly useful service that everyone uses and loves? Great. How much money does it make? How much money do I make? Did you try putting ads on it?

Consider writing THAT essay. What is wrong, Mr. Graham, with REDUCING income inequality by taxing EXCESS wealth, and spending it on public services to maintain or even (gasp) improve social mobility? Because that’s what those “hunters” are really talking about.

A radical experiment at Zappos to end the office workplace as we know it. … Meetings might be scheduled at 10 p.m. on a Sunday, in the middle of what appeared to be a party but was really just an extension of the all-encompassing Zappos corporate culture. … But entry-level jobs aren’t that easy to come by in Las Vegas (or anywhere), Coy responded, and for people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, a job that’s always in flux can be pretty terrifying. “People who live in trailers,” he said darkly, “generally do so because they’re broke, not because it’s a fun social experiment.” … One thing Zapponians now have to do is their own research about salaries, to find out the market rate for jobs at other companies that correspond to their roles. In a normal corporation, such things are taken care of by the human resources department. Not at Zappos, not anymore. Instead, if Murch wants a raise, she has to do all the research into what she’s worth, create a badge, come up with qualifications for receiving the badge, and then design the actual look of the badge. Then it all has to be approved by the People Pool & Comp circle.

As government agencies and tech companies develop more and more intrusive means of watching and influencing people, how can we live free lives? … It awed me, the Utah Data Center at night. It awed me in an unfamiliar way—not with its size, which was hard to get a fix on, but with its overwhelming separateness. To think that virtually every human act, every utterance, transaction, and conversation that occurred out here—here in the world that seemed so vast and bustling, so magnificently complex—could one day be coded, compressed, and stuck in there, in a cluster of buildings no larger than a couple of shopping malls. Loss of privacy seemed like a tiny issue, suddenly, compared with the greater loss the place presaged: loss of existential stature. … The gun show was not about weaponry, primarily, but about autonomy—construed in this case as the right to stand one’s ground against an arrogant, intrusive new order whose instruments of suppression and control I’d seen for myself the night before. There seemed to be no rational response to the feelings of powerlessness stirred by the cybernetic panopticon; the choice was either to ignore it or go crazy, at least to some degree. … The assault rifles and grenade launchers (I handled one, I hope for the last time) for sale were props in a drama of imagined resistance in which individuals would rise up to defend themselves. The irony was that preparing for such a fight in the only way these people knew how—by plotting their countermoves and hoarding ammo—played into the very security concerns that the overlords use to justify their snooping. The would-be combatants in this epic conflict were more closely linked, perhaps, than they appreciated. … There are so many ghosts in our machines—their locations so hidden, their methods so ingenious, their motives so inscrutable—that not to feel haunted is not to be awake. That’s why paranoia, even in its extreme forms, no longer seems to me so much a disorder as a mode of cognition with an impressive track record of prescience.

Why did I say that? If I’m responding to someone’s question, am I trying to answer it (or better understand what they’re asking), or just boost my ego? Am I trying to be helpful or just look clever? Am I trying to contribute to a conversation or just make sure people know I Have Opinions? Why did I make that bad joke that disturbed the flow of the meeting?

The computers we have today are not bicycles. Instead we’ve got something more like a car for the mind. Which, you know, does get you around and is easier and more comfortable than a bike. But at what cost? When we decided that America would be a place for cars, we signed ourselves up for urban sprawl, air pollution, car crashes, and oil wars. And even on a human scale, cars are as much liabilities as they are assets — I’m sure we’ve all known people working terrible jobs to keep their junker running so they can get to their terrible job.

We all have to work towards making inclusion an ordinary occurrence. Rather than wonder about how to adequately represent exactly 17% colored people in an image that only has three people in it, chill out and drop some extra color in there. You are neither atoning for hundreds of years of continued injustice, nor creating institutionalized racism against white people. You’re just making the world a little friendlier for the many, many people alienated by their media. Don’t overthink it, just go for it.

This text is a transcript of a presentation I have given on October 9, 2015, at the CityCode conference in Chicago. … Why do we code?

On the hand holding the ‘Add to Slack’ button in a piece of marketing design being a brown hand. Why was the choice an important one, and why did it matter to the people of color who saw it? The simple answer is that they rarely see something like that. These people saw the image and immediately noticed how unusual it was. They were appreciative of being represented in a world where American media has the bad habit of portraying white people as the default, and everyone else as deviations from the norm.

Too often, work cultures neglect the fact that workers have bodies, forgetting that food, exercise, and rest are design requirements.

What if, instead of teaching women that they have to raise their hands to speak at meetings, we taught men to be more reflective and circumspect; instead of telling women to tamp down their emotions at the office, a man was told that he didn’t appear committed enough to the job because he’s never shed tears over it; instead of pushing women to take public credit for their work, we publicly admonish men who don’t properly acknowledge others’ contributions? I was just invited to a seminar on public speaking skills for women — where’s the class on listening skills for men?

With the requisite context in place, it's easier to understand why any of us who are praised or recognized as "Good Guys" have to not believe the hype, no matter how seductive the idea of such praise may be. If fixing tech becomes the domain of just those who are perfect avatars of the ideal activist, none of us will ever be ready to participate. Worse, if we require (seeming) perfection or ideal traits in all of those whom we recognize, we make the overall movement vulnerable to being attacked when any of us is revealed to have our inevitable human flaws and foibles.

Some people do very well with traditional interviews and they should stick with what works for them. However, I’d urge any company to really look hard at what their interview process is screening for. Does it accurately produce employees that do great work and fit well with the team? Does it select people who have heard your particular brain teasers before? Are you just going through the motions on interviews and then going with someone’s gut? Maybe that manager is really good at guessing, but what happens when they leave? Think about whether or not the short term contract approach might give you a better idea about a candidate’s value.

It’s time for Asian American men to stop being the “Model Minority” in tech. We all know tech is excluding most people from participating. But one group is actually over represented. And we’ve been conspicuously silent.

Thoughts on what it means to be a maker.

I know this: I am not my job. I am not my industry or its stereotypes. I am a black woman who happens to work in the tech industry. I don’t need to change to fit within my industry. My industry needs to change to make everyone feel included and accepted.

Programming languages shape the way their users think—which helps explain how tech startups work and why they are able to reinvent themselves.

I get angry in SF, too. I saw a quote at the African American museum from Rep. Barbara Jordan that read, “All blacks are militant in their guts, but militancy is expressed in different ways.” For me, militancy is best expressed by attacking the problem and not just complaining about it. I’m furious about the homeless problem in SF, so I’m working to do something about it. And I’d like to see more Blacks in tech, so I started with myself.

Having a non-trivial number of women submitting presentations seems to have made it so that a non-trivial number of women are speaking at No Show Conference. Imagine that.