Moving to a new blog
After blogging here on a mish-mash of topics for a number of years, I’m shuttering this blog and moving on to a new domain, focused on web development and technical management. I hope you’ll join me at Obi-Wan Kimberly!
Hi, my name is Kimberly Blessing. I'm a computer scientist, Web developer, standards evangelist, feminist, and geek. This is where I write about life, the Web, technology, women's issues, and whatever else comes to mind.
Also by Kimberly
Just Sayin Blog Archive
Craftmanship can change the world
Most mornings, I hit the Starbucks near work for a double tall non-fat no-whip cinnamon dolce latte. Yes, it’s a mouthful to say. And apparently it’s a really tough drink to get right… at least for the morning crew at this particular Starbucks. Despite seeing the same crew regularly, I almost always have to correct them on some aspect of my drink that they’ve screwed up (espresso shots sat too long, wrong milk, wrong size drink, scorched milk, etc.). When I do point something out, rather than get an apology, I’m usually given some excuse as to why it’s not right. I’m starting to suspect that either they’re making my drink wrong on purpose or they just don’t care about their craft — but in either case, they send a clear signal: a job’s a job, and they don’t care about theirs all that much.
Web developers can’t have this attitude. We absolutely must care about our craft and continually ensure that our work is demonstrative of best practices (both industry and our own signature practices). Sloppy execution of our work leads to cross-browser problems, inaccessible features, confusing user interactions, and time lost refactoring code in the future. We don’t get to give excuses to our customers — if it doesn’t work, end users don’t use the site, and clients don’t pay. Messy code shows that we don’t care about leaving something our fellow developers can learn from, and it demonstrates that we don’t care to take the time get our code right.
I shudder to think about the kind of code the baristas at the local Starbucks would write, were they developers. If only they could be more like so many of the awesome developers/craftspeople I know… then I’d be happily caffeinated each morning. And if fewer developers wrote code the way those baristas make drinks? Well, the Web might just explode from all that awesomeness.
The B-Word
Ah, the b-word: bitch.
It’s a word I don’t use much, if at all. I gave up the noun form completely a few years ago, and the verb form only comes out every once in a while, mostly in reference to myself.
I refuse to use the b-word to describe another person, especially another woman and especially in a leadership context. And I object to hearing others — male or female — use the word, since it’s so often dispensed with the very same properties that the speaker is attributing to the person being described: malice and spite. The b-word is a hateful, hurtful word, and I wish it could be cleansed from our vocabularies.
But since it’s clearly going to stick around, it might as well be redefined. I recently read Andi Zeisler’s definition of the b-word, and if everyone understood it to mean thus, I might just use it:
Bitch is a word we use culturally to describe any woman who is strong, angry, uncompromising and, often, uninterested in pleasing men. We use the term for a woman on the street who doesn’t respond to men’s catcalls or smile when they say, “Cheer up, baby, it can’t be that bad.” We use it for the woman who has a better job than a man and doesn’t apologize for it. We use it for the woman who doesn’t back down from a confrontation.
I know a number of women that fit the above far better than they could ever fit the dictionary definition of the b-word. Still, I’ll refrain from using it since I’m bound to be misunderstood. However, if I catch someone else using it, I’ve now got some great material to quote to help them understand what I hear them saying.
Some girls play with dolls. Real women…
I tore this ad out of one of my skateboarding magazines in the mid-80s, and as you can see, it’s beat to hell, having been pinned and taped to various surfaces over the years.
Growing up, messages like this one really spoke to me. Even as a kid, I didn’t want to be seen as a girl. I was a woman, strong and self-confident, capable of doing anything that any guy could do. (Though, to be honest, I wasn’t a very good skateboarder. But the important thing is that I tried!)
So what I want to know is… where are the messages like this one for kids today? Everything seems so dumbed-down, or watered-down, with a “let’s be subtle, the kids will get it” type of approach, so as not to offend or oppress stupid boys. I want aggro, in your face, straight-up shit that burgeoning young feminists can get behind, dammit!
Hmm, that gives me an idea. Check back for more on this later.
Oh, and did you notice that the ad is pink, but that it still kicks ass? I had a pink Rodney Mullen freestyle deck, too… though I really wanted it in white, but the skate shop was out of them. Anyway, pink isn’t just for girls… it’s for real women, too!
How not to recruit talent
Robert Scoble alerted readers to Jeff Barr’s post about Google recruiting. I had to laugh out loud here, because I’ve also been subject to some strange Google recruiting crap myself.
Most recently, I got an e-mail from a Google recruiter (who clearly did look at my Web site, because she commented on the pink-ness of my blog) with regards to a technical solutions engineer position. The first thing that struck me as odd is that, if you actually read my resume, you’ll learn that I’ve been in management positions for a while… so why would I be interested in an engineering position? The next oddity was the requirement that I complete a self-evaluation before discussions could proceed. Uh-huh. No thanks.
Of course, when I got that e-mail I was laughing pretty hard, because in the many years I’ve attended the Grace Hopper Celebration I’ve talked to Google folks many times about job opportunities there — and was basically told again and again that “Google doesn’t recruit Web developers because that’s not important to [their] business”. Whatever.
I have some friends that have gone to Google, but honestly, the more I learn about them, the more suspicious I am of them. I feel like they’re one giant social engineering experiment, and we’re all their guinea pigs.
