Credit deviantart / oEmmanuele

In January, I was killing it. I’d been promoted, work was going well, I lived in a city I love, hanging out with an awesome group of friends and regular girls nights, and I was basically back to “normal” – athletic, but curvy, after 2 major injuries and, y’know, living in Suburbia and having to drive everywhere. And there was the boy. Figuring things out, busy schedules, he’d been sick, but good. Special.

Fast forward to March, and one morning last week, where after dragging myself out of bed (after spending 10 hours in it) I contemplate the bottle of baileys in my fridge rationalizing “well, people drink coffee for breakfast”. I made it out the door without acting on that impulse, on the way to work briefly contemplated the appeal of a week unconscious (“it would just be nice to have a break”), calmed myself down without drugs when I started to panic and got teary on-route. Made it. Did stuff. Drank 4 cans of cherry coke (willpower is depletable, I guess it was all gone by the time I got to the office). Went out. Went home. Slept.

Did it again the following day. That one was perhaps the lowest. Other days it was a drag, but I didn’t find myself having as many thoughts that were frankly scary. Tenuously held it together. Went through the motions. Finally realized that I understood that lyric from Everclear “Can you believe he actually thinks that I am really alive”. Going through the motions of being human, whilst feeling – at best – dead inside. At worst, just full of this crushing despair about the world.

This morning I got up after a reasonable 8 hours in bed, feeling ready to start the day. I don’t think this has happend since mid-January. I made it into body pump, even if I had to leave after the warmup (starting to feel sick and dizzy – I walked for 2 hours after dinner last night, and only managed to eat half a granola bar before the gym), but managed 90 minutes cardio.

And then I saw the boy, and let’s leave out the details but – we’re done, and I’m crushed. And it’s circumstances rather than anything about how well we get on, how much we care about each other. And that is devastating to me. I can’t hate him, I can’t even be mad at him. It makes sense in a horrible way that you wish weren’t true but you know, is. My last breakups have been those fundamental deal-breaking things where you know it’s for the best because people don’t change. This was the kind of thing where it seems like had a couple of external things been different, I wouldn’t be writing angsty blogposts but instead curled up on the sofa, watching a movie.

I hate that. I hate feeling like this thread was pulled in January, and everything started to unravel. And then another one with that creep on the plane. And that has somehow brought me to this place where I don’t even recognize myself in the scary thoughts that pop into my head.

The thread pulled in January, I can’t write about the details. It was something that I thought I left behind when I left Canada, but it followed me and hit a new low. I finally had the support here where I was allowed to be upset about the new thing, and that support came with process that is supposed to resolve things. That process may resolve things, but it was brutally unpleasant and didn’t leave me feeling any better, really worse. One of those things where if you don’t do it, there’s always the fear that it might make things worse, but the hope that it will make things better. It didn’t make things better. It was isolating, and meant I had to stop pretending that it was manageable - it wasn’t – and then I didn’t do something I wanted to, out of fear.

And then the creep. I told myself that is something that only has the effect on me that I let it. I got on a plane again. I was intimate with the boy – weirdly I felt that having someone I wanted to touch me, touch me, cancelled it out in some way.

But I don’t know anymore. I don’t fixate on <redacted>. I don’t fixate on the creep. I don’t fixate on the boy. I just feel this crushing despair. I think they only have the effect that I let them, and I try not to let them, but I don’t feel quite real.

So I’ve been going through the motions. Getting up every day. Got my hair cut and coloured. Go out with my friends. Go to the gym, even if somehow my epic 3-6 hour workouts have been replaced with 45 minutes on the x-trainer and wanting to lie down. Possibly related to me losing most of my desire to eat. But, y’know, still managing to do that. Limiting myself to two cherry coke’s a day (normally I don’t drink soda at all – only iced tea).

And I’ve realized how easy it is to pretend to be OK. There’s an hour in between waking up and getting up to psych myself up to do that. But the rules are easy – you get out of bed, you fulfill some basic level of grooming, you go to wherever you are supposed to be and do you best at whatever you are supposed to do. You try to ignore that this best isn’t your usual best. You say hi, smile, and take an interest in how people are doing. You go to the gym. You go out with your friends.

To pretend to yourself, you clean up your living space, celebrate the days you don’t cry, count how long it is since you last took a Xanax, and point to how you showed the outside world, and say – I’m functioning.

But the truth is - pretending to be OK, and being OK are two different things. My close friends know. And other people I try to minimise contact with, and think, hey, can you believe they think I’m really alive.

I got back from North America over a month ago. And since then I’ve been doing all the things you are supposed to do to feel better. Live in the world. Exercise. Socialise. I saw a shrink, which didn’t help at all. If you need 5 positive interactions to each negative one, then well, the world and I have not been getting that and I find myself at this catch-22 – I won’t feel better about things until I’m closer to that ratio, but I can’t go out and seek things until I feel less despairing in general.

A year ago, I left Canada because I felt that my life had disintegrated around me. <Redacted> had contributed to that. And now I find myself in an eerily similar situation. I thought about leaving again, but how would that help? People have tried to protect me from the affects of it, but what remains is how I feel, which affects everything. And then I just feel worse, because it’s still after me, it’s not over until I feel better. And I’ve done all the things I’m supposed to do, but I’m feeling worse every day.

I’m giving up on pretending. It’s time for drugs.

Credit Deviant Art / LashelleValentine

After my recent experiences, I’ve been thinking a lot about men. Not in the way where I think they are all misogynistic, sexually assaulting jerks (although yes, my idea of the prevalence of these things is off – I hope). But also just clinging to those in my life who I know have a healthy respect for other humans, for women, for me.

Weirdly, it was easier to talk to my male friends about the creep-on-the-plane. They were just purely horrified and angry on my behalf. Women were more likely to comment on how I should have reacted, and have a more complicated reaction because of things that had happened to them, or other women they know.

I’ve realized, lately, and I think I’m horribly slow to this, that men have a huge part to play in addressing the lack of women in tech, and so few of them seem to realize it.

There is this range, from don’t care, to panic. It’s rare to see people at either side of it, although you do find them.

Most fall in the middle, somewhere around well-meaning-but-not-actually-helping. The ones who don’t actually want to think it’s a problem, who will go to great lengths to ignore things, say things like “that guy is a jerk to everyone!”, or “some men have that problem too! So what are we doing about that?”

Sometimes they are afraid it will take something from them, that if we have more women that will mean there will be less men. They worry they won’t make the cut, and have to deny it, hide behind some ideas of meritocracy, that aren’t really all that meritocratic.

And then there are those that get it. Maybe they want their daughters, sisters, wives to have the same opportunities they do, maybe they are viscerally terrified that they cannot succeed without a diverse team, because they want to create things that work for everyone, not just nerdy boys.

I’ve become convinced that right now, one of the best ways we wil see progress is to find these guys, and pull them towards the edge, until they are as angry as we sometimes are. Until they see it. Panic.

I really think, that we have got towards the end of the benefits we will see from a bunch of dudes in a room. The next places that technology will revolutionize will require a broader view of the world. People expect more, demand more, you can’t not cater to 51% of the population because their husbands and fathers are actually making the decisions. That isn’t the case anymore, if it ever was. Women are the biggest users of social networks, the drivers of consumer spending. So you need to know what they worry about when you consider privacy, have some idea of how they shop (clue! Efficiency is often not the major goal).

When we talk about the dream of getting women into tech, we talk about numbers. One third is the magic number. That was the case when I was at IBM, on my old team, on my current one. It’s actually awesome. But rare.

I have a slightly different one.

I want to have technical women that I don’t like. I want to work with technical women who I don’t think are amazing, and I want to not freak out about that. I want to have enough women around me that I build relationships with those I have stuff in common with, more than just a job title.

There is this stereotype of what a woman in tech is like, near tech, not making, and wrangling engineers that she seems to despise. It bothers me when I encounter women like that. It bothers me that it bothers me. That we have this idea of what it means to be a woman in tech, and it doesn’t even seem to be technical. The idea that you have to be a certain way – usually some version of a nerdy scifi lover who never had a girlfriend in high school is just so limiting. To women, but also to some men.

The boy is telling me about his day, and he says something about “loading things into your head” like he’s some kind of computer himself. And I say, “that’s not what I do. I mostly work by having feelings and I follow them around the codebase”.

He thought I was joking, but I’m not. Thankfully we never made it to the topic of what must be wrong with me to work like that.

Maybe it’s just, I’m not a nerdy boy.

It would be nice if that was less weird, and less hard.

Credit: flickr / robinsoncaruso

My friend and I went to Bangkok for the long weekend. We relaxed in the spa, swam in the outdoor pool, explored the shops, got lost and wondered around the city. Rode in a tuk tuk.

I wondered, why it was that we spent more time at the hotel than I would usually. Than I did, say, when I was in Copenhagen last year. I realized it was the stress of being out and about, and worrying about things that we don’t usually have to worry about. That guy being helpful? Hoping he is just practising his English, until he tries to send us to a “special” mall with a “special” sale on, where if we were to go along with it, we would be pressured to buy overpriced jewels. Worrying about where our guide was, after he took us to watch precious stones being polished and oh, we do find ourselves in an overpriced jewelry store. Because that is a trick, apparently, they disappear, and you’re stranded, and voila, you can’t get away until you buy something. We found him, we didn’t buy anything, it was OK. But I don’t usually have to worry about that. I don’t usually have to bargain everywhere. I know I’m paying over the odds – I live in Australia… but so is everyone else.

It occurred to me how I took my safety like that for granted. From there, I went on to India where I actually ran away from someone who insisted on “helping” me and then followed me wanting money. I crossed the road – one of the most terrifying things I have ever done. Leaving India, on the way to the airport, I’m running later than I want to be (checking out was incredibly inefficient) and the driver asks me if 45 minutes to an hour is OK. I say, get there as fast as you can (not the best thing to say to your driver in India)… he gets there in 30 minutes, in a zooming, honking adventure. This part is important. It’s the last thing I remember doing, when I was not afraid.

When I teased the boy about the tuk tuk, asking if he worried about me, he said he just worried about me being in Thailand and India full stop, and why didn’t I vacation in a rich country instead. So at the airport, the developing countries part of my trip over, I messaged the boy, and told him he didn’t need to worry about me anymore.

The next time he hears from me, I’m crying hysterically and filing a police report.

It’s soon after takeoff, I’m so tired because the flight was at 4am and it had been a long day and I was so jet-lagged, having left Sydney about a week previously. And the guy sitting next to me, I guess the selection of movies was insufficient for his entertainment, because he starts touching me. He puts his hand on my leg, and I’m so tired and I have an eyemask on, so I can’t see, and, I think he must have just mistaken it for the armrest, and urgh but I’m so tired I don’t even really get what is going on. He puts his hand on my breast, and I tell myself I must be imagining things, is missing the boy making me crazy?

But by the second time his hand is on my breast, I know I’m not imagining things. And I know I’m not imagining his finger drawing circles on my back, and when he moves backwards and forwards and something hard touches my leg… I know I’m not imagining that.

And I’m weirdly calm. I just keep moving away, and I’m fixated on, well I can’t possibly sleep with this going on, and the next time he touches me I’m going to have to go and tell a flight attendent and get them to move me.

I wait.

He puts his hand on my breast again. I move, more sharply this time. He pretends to wake up like I’ve disturbed him, and I put on my sneakers. I get up, and he’s talking about how he’s so uncomfortable. I walk away, pretending I’m going to the bathroom. He follows me, telling me about how uncomfortable he is, some back problem, and how he is going to ask them to move him.

At the back of the plane I find a hostess but he’s behind me and starts talking. She sends him back to his seat, saying the plane is full. He goes back to sit down, and I say I’m going to look for a bathroom, and get away, walking around the back and up the other aisle.

It’s horrible when someone creeps on you, but on a plane, it’s extra terrifying. You’re trapped, there is no way to walk out. You’re powerless, hopefully the flight attendants will help, but what if they don’t believe you? What can you do? I wonder if this is why I waited so long, had to be so sure.

I find a bunch of flight attendants eating. And then I start crying. I’m hysterical. I speak at first to a female one – she’s nearest, and I think she will understand, but it is a male one who is more helpful. They sit me down, tell me I won’t have to go back. The creep arrives, and looks concerned – asks me if I’m OK. I lie and say I’m just having a panic attack. The male flight attendent gets physically between us – I was so grateful for that – and scares him away. I say, “that was him”. Someone gets the most senior flight attendent. More crying. Someone gets my stuff. More crying. They put me in business class. The male flight attendent tells me, “these men think they can get away with this, but they shouldn’t”. I can’t seem to stop crying. Luckily I have some stuff to take the edge off long haul flights – I take it. And cry, until I eventually pass out.

In the morning I wake up, surrounded by 15 dudes. It is business class, after all. And I’m still very upset, but calmer, and I tell myself – some men behave in an appalling way, and they will probably get away with it, but I am done making it easy for them.

So I tell a flight attendent I want to file a police report.

The plane lands. I am kept on board, so is the creep. I see him walk by. I feel dirty. The police come on. I write everything, ask for an extra page, and then another. I call the boy, and one of our friends, and cry. I don’t remember what they say. The male flight attendent is so kind, but eventually he has to go, and I’m distraught, and alone, in Germany, with 3 more flights and countless hours to California. I give the paper to the policeman, and he tells me the female (he makes a point of letting me know this) judge has already decided, there’s not enough evidence – my word against the creep – and she is letting him go.

And I knew this would happen. Eyes open, I filed that report knowing nothing would happen. But it’s still shocking to me that he’s not even put in a holding cell at all, he’s just had a minor 30 minute inconvenience, really. And I understand it’s his word against mine, but I could no more make it up than I could fly. It was so horrifying to me that I wasn’t even sure it was happening at first – I mean, who does that? Who does that?

Really the message is that he can try and sexually assault a minimum of one woman on his way to every country?

They let me off the plane, and I make my way through the airport. I’m not sure how I’m going to cope with my next flight, and it’s hours away. The boy calls me, and I cry some more. When I get to further into the building, I can see the desk where I can try and change my next flight, I pull to one side, against the wall, to finish our conversation.

And the creep walks past, sees me, and comes towards me. I panic, and run away, accidentally hanging up in the boy in the process. And I’m really stupid, I run in the wrong direction – he’s approaching me from the direction where the people are, and so I run to a place where it is deserted. And I am terrified. I am not someone given to being physically afraid, but I was. I really was.

And that is stupid. I am very fit. Physically extremely strong for a woman. I remember him as being toad-like, short, soft, wide-nosed, old enough to be my father. There is no question in my mind that physically, I could hurt him. But I ran away.

I called this emergency number we have, and someone talked me through the airport, into the lounge, looked at the map and the layout and told me he wouldn’t be able to get there given he was en-route to the US and I was travelling within the EU. Tried, but failed to change my flight. I waited in the lounge, spoke to my friends and the boy. Tried to calm down. Got on the next plane, sat in the window seat with two random dudes in the other seats, and spent it pressed against the window, sobbing.

My parents picked me up from the airport in the UK, and I cried some more. Slept – a little – and the next day was on my way back to another airport, trying to get to California. And I was panicking. I had submitted my upgrade request, but I didn’t know that I had got it and I was terrified. Unsure if I would manage to get on the plane if I didn’t. Freaking out about getting a taxi by myself at the other end. Thankfully I got the upgrade for the long flight (and the short one, as it turned out) and a friend messaged me saying she would be at the airport. I picked up chocolate and shortbread for my friends, and the guy at the counter complemented my henna. I did not freak out – I took this to be a win.

And I made it to California, exhausted, shaken up, but feeling that I had proven something to myself in having done that. But so weirded out by the change in me – that I had gone from being someone who would travel alone in India, tell the driver to get there as quick as he could, to this shaking, crying mess, who was afraid to take a taxi, period.

All week in California, I was kind of functioning, mostly focused on the flight home, and how I wasn’t sure I could cope with it, but also just desperate to get home to my friends and the boy. And of course I came home, and shortly after crashed. Before I realized, I knew my friends were worried, my manager was worried, and so I went to see my doctor, and he seemed oddly concerned as well but I was like “statistically, most women experience something like this” and then the next day I go to the gym early in the morning, 45 mins cardio, spin class, and 20-some laps and then I’m crying in the hot-tub not wanting to go to work.

And my experiences in a male-dominated world, another recent no fun thing that I had to go through and – statistically – most technical women do – were all jumbled up in it. And so my doctor sent me to see a shrink, and gave me some valium for the anxiety and panic I was feeling. The first time I saw her, I had taken valium the night before, and I think she thought I was basically OK. The second time, I wa not dosed up, and at the end of the session, she tells me, I’m angry.

And it’s like, of course I’m angry. I’m tired of making this choice – be a bitch, or be a pushover. I’m tired of the things that men feel it’s OK to say to me, the things they feel it’s OK to do. Tell me my opinion - on something entirely subjective – is worthless. Behave like a jerk, but then ask me for a favor. Tell me what I should think, how I should feel, what I should do. Suggest I should be a product manager. Suggest that I need permission to travel from my boyfriend.

I think about that guy at the airport when I left Canada who said something about me meeting a nice man in Australia.

I think about the guy who said to me recently, that I must be doing the wrong thing in the gym, because I spend a lot of time there and I should look better than I do. And then, when I looked horrified, said, “it’s not that you don’t look beautiful, it’s that you could look even more beautiful” – like what I was upset about what the suggestion I don’t look good enough, rather than my appearance is what defines my worth as a person. I mean, not a person, only a woman, to this man, another one, nearly old enough to be my father.

I think about the guy who suggested it’s fine that I don’t do something because I’m afraid. And I contrast him, with the others – who were just mad that I am afraid.

And I think about that creep at the airport, how he felt he could come towards me after that, after all of that, how I made it clear it was not OK what he did. And in my mind he’s coming to make more excuses, to tell me his hand slipped, like he was saying as he followed me around the plane. And what kind of insanity is that? How would he think that I would believe that? That his hand slipped and fell – very gently, hidden by a blanket, onto my breast, THREE TIMES.

I’m angry, because now I’m afraid. I’m afraid of what some men will do, the way they will justify their actions, the things they feel entitled to take, to do. I’m angry, because I don’t think things will get better. I’m angry because the choice is between bitch and pushover, and we can never win.

So I go kickboxing. I have a mean cross, a vicious hook, and I knee like I really freakin’ mean it.

It’s good to express how angry I am in a way that’s not crying, but it just reminds me of another reason I have to be furious. He touches me, but there is not enough evidence. If I hadn’t turned around, if I hadn’t run away, if I had broken his nose and stopped him from ever being able to replicate. Well his scars would be evidence, and that would be assault.

But what he did, that was just a man doing a horrible thing, and getting away with it, as they so often do.

I want to add – I realize that I had so many things here that another woman might not have – a working phone with which I could make international calls, an expense account and my own credit card that meant I could pay to change a flight, stay in a hotel, take a cab etc. An emergency number. Gold (elite) status, and lots of upgrade credits. Family at my stopover, and a close friend at my destination. I’m 27 and maybe look younger (especially when travelling, dressed low key with no makeup), in terms of women in their early, mid twenties, that kind of creep might prey on – I have more power than most. I hate to think about how some other woman without all that would have coped. The flight attendants were amazing, but once off the plane, I was alone. I should never have been in a position where he could see me and try and approach me in the airport. It’s horrifying. I wrote to the airline I was on (Lufthansa) and the airline I have status with (Air Canada) over two weeks ago now saying what had happened and pointing this out and… nothing.

© Copyright Richard Croft and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Over the past year, I feel like I’ve been working through the stages of grief about being a women in tech, and I’ve not been blogging because I couldn’t find the words to share the story I wanted to tell. I’ve denied the extent of the problem. I’ve got angry. I’ve bargained. I’ve cried, and made my exit plan. And finally, I’ve come to some degree of acceptance.

I’ve said, “there are worse places to be a woman than in tech, like a coalmine”. I’ve wondered, what the tax is – a 6 day week rather than a 5 day week? 50% extra than the dude next to you? And finally I’m at the point where I say, “well, it’s better than being an accountant”.

This isn’t a good thing. We need to have hope that it will get better to continue, and I don’t always think it will. Yeah, there are wins, and every nerdy boy we educate is a huge achievement, but there are new ones at such a rate, with their entitlement, and their straight white male privilege, and it seems like a drop in the ocean; it just won’t stem the tide.

It is hard to be on the internet and think that things are getting better, when it seems like every week I read another horrifying story. Because, I know, these are not aberrations – it’s only the horrifying stories that are posted, by people who no longer fear the ramifications. I couldn’t write about GHC last year, because the main thing I walked away with was this knowledge, that we all have these stories, these tales of horrifying misogyny and unfairness, along with a thousand tiny cuts.

I have my story, but whilst my friends know, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to write about it here, because I still fear the ramifications of sharing it. It’s a tale about how I was incredibly stupid, and did not realize what was going on until it was way out of my control, and the willingness of people to ignore the evidence, because they don’t want to believe that is the kind of world they live in.

Someone does/says something horrible, but with such confidence that whilst something rings false, it almost seems normal. And good, well intentioned people who would never do such things themselves, don’t realize how not normal that is.

I understand not wanting to believe that. I wish I still did. That – denial – is what got me into that situation. It was happening to me, and I didn’t realize how far it was from normal. And a long time later, I look at it, and marvel at how I could be so incredibly naive and optimistic about people’s intentions.

There are the thousand tiny cuts. The little comments, the gendered feedback, surprise that you’re an engineer rather than a PM or UX. The feeling of being other. Being the only woman in the room.

But what I realized, is that I wasn’t alone in having my big story, that I couldn’t share. Nor was I alone in having gone to someone nice, and well intentioned, and have them not want to believe this is the world we live in, have them dismiss it, tell me it wasn’t worse because I am a woman, that it is just how it is. And I was not alone in not knowing what to do after that.

But this is the world we live in. And so, when I meet that rare women who tells me she doesn’t have a story, I think, it’s coming for you. Or wonder if it happened, but she didn’t notice at the time and eventually, she will.

It’s hard to believe this, and stand up in front of girls and tell them – be an engineer. I finally did that again for the first time in 2012 a few months ago, with one of my favorite people in Sydney. We did a double act, and it felt like cheating, because he is the kind of nerdy boy, who is so kind, and special and supportive of everyone (but especially women) that if they were all like him, I’d still feel other, but it would be OK.

And then I did a panel at a retreat we hosted. I was so nervous, and I asked myself, “how do I tell them it’s OK?” – but they were university students, and so some of them already had their story, and they know, so I admitted that things happen, but told them “We have each other”.

My friend laughed when I told her I was giving up online dating because “I spend all day surrounded by dudes, the last thing I want to do in the evening is meet more dudes”. It’s true, some days I worry my life doesn’t pass the Bechdel test. But I’m also surrounded by amazing women.

We give – to each other, and those behind us. But we also take, from those around us and ahead of us. I don’t think there is any other way to survive.

I’ve organized things, helped build communities, I’ve mentored, I’ve encouraged, I’ve stood up in front of groups of people so they know there is such a thing as a female engineer. I’ve taken calls from friends in tears, advocated for and tried to protect other women. Told the truth. I’ve held myself to such high standards, researched extensively before ever asking a question on a mailing list because you suck at math / girls suck at math.

New to a city, I’ve been grateful to find those communities ready made. I have mentors, people who encouraged me, who believed me, and in me, I’ve called friends in tears, been advocated for, and been protected. And every year at GHC, I watch these amazing women stand up on stage, and I know, that OK, there may be a tax on being a woman in this industry, but we can work harder, smarter, and better, and we can find the extra that we need to be successful.

I have my story I can’t share. It’s likely you do too. We can tell them in person, if we need to, because they are so depressingly similar and we know. And on bad days, when we want to run away, we can remind ourselves, that we have each other. Which doesn’t always sound like much, but it’s actually pretty incredible.

Credit: Flickr / Hans Pama

I used to be very into “productivity”, but I’m somewhat over it lately. Whilst I still favorite the articles on twitter to read later, I’ve stopped buying books about it.

There’s a lot of advice out there, keep a todo list! Keep a done list! Keep a don’t list! Various ways to arrange, and schedule, and avoid, and ACHIEVE. But find your way through this, and then there is the problem, productivity doesn’t mean effectiveness. If you’re getting a thousand things done but never the most important thing, you’re gonna have a bad time.

For me, given what I do, I distilled everything down to an idea that has not changed in the past year:

You get 4-6 hours of good coding time a day. Be ruthless about finding it.

Of course, my execution has evolved and changed and will continue to. I used to be more overt about it, I would tell people I only checked email once a day. And it’s been easier and harder at times – easier when I was working on my own thing, mostly by myself and just sending stuff out for code review. Hardest it’s ever been now, when I have two engineers fulltime sending me codereviews, another part time on my section of our project, and then two more on another team wanting the occasional code review or advice. It’s easy to feel pulled in so many directions and scattered, like a day has gone by and at no point did my thoughts follow the track they were on to their natural conclusion.

And it’s hard to be ruthless. We know that guy who is ruthlessly selfish, and gets a lot done but never helps anyone else, who’s always achieving his own thing but anyone who needs his input needs to fit in around him. We don’t want to be that guy. And we know it’s harder for women too, who are punished for being selfish – I remember I once got feedback saying “6 months ago you were a bit slow at this, for this understandable reason” and thinking would you have said that about a dude? Really?

But it’s necessary. I look at people who are successful, and I see them finding a way to be a little bit selfish, carve something out for themselves so that they can keep having impact. And people who are just as brilliant but who seem to be stalling, they’re not managing to do that. There’s a big difference between the successful person finding a way to be a little bit selfish and the jerk. The jerk, it’s a way of life, they don’t realize they are doing it and that we’ve noticed means we’re probably safe from becoming them. The successful person is just carefully carving out a little bit of time that isn’t dictated by other people to do their thing. And it looks like it pays off.

So now I carry out what I am calling “guerilla ruthlessness”. Which means I’m carefully picking off the ways that I can keep my focus without inflicting that goal obviously on other people and annoying them.

Email.

I don’t have it open all the time. I don’t check it that frequently. I just don’t tell anyone not to expect a reply from me. It turns out, I don’t need to tell people to IM me if it’s important, they just know. And they do, or they speak to me. Normally I open it up between tasks, which is probably more often than really necessary, but people feel like they get a decent response time whilst I’m never interrupted by new mail.

I get the digest for everything. This means I get the day’s messages for that group (e.g. my team) I get it in 25 message batches. Then I skim the headings, read anything that stands out (it’s amazing how much doesn’t) and archive.

I don’t send it. Seriously the #1 productivity tip of all time. STOP SENDING EMAIL. It’s amazing how much less you get if you don’t send it in the first place. There’s some thing where I can’t reply to messages in our team group because I get the digest and it’s turned off in the web interface. So I haven’t responded to one of these emails in over 3 months, and this has not been a problem.

Headphones, all the time.

I have these great chunky purple headphones. They look like they keep the sound out. They don’t, really. Unless I’m in the zone and someone sneaks up behind me. It just means I can ignore people without seeming rude until I finish my thought or what it is that I’m doing.

“Just let me finish this…”

I do things in small increments. It’s less to load in my head, less barrier (intimidation) to starting, and it doesn’t take hours. So when someone says “Hey Cate, do you have a minute?” or “Cate, can you do this code review”, I say “sure, just let me finish this” and then I finish it, or at least to a part where stopping is no big deal (like the code is written but I need to write the tests). Turns out, if someone is asking you to help them, they won’t usually mind waiting 5 minutes and will just go and get a drink, or do something else. And then whilst I’m reviewing their stuff, or whatever it is, someone will often be reviewing mine…

Often you’re in a position of responsibility because you take responsibility, you feel responsible. You make other people a priority because you never want to be that jerk who thinks of noone but himself. But taken to it’s ultimate conclusion, it would drive me mad and leave me feeling wrung out and miserable. And these little bits that I keep back for me, not always but mostly, they add up to my 4-6 hours, and I still leave work at a reasonable time.

Not today though. Today I had constant interruptions, was distracted by the election results, and I’m waiting on a new computer and it felt like every time I approached “the zone” mine froze. And so it took me over 12 hours in the office to carve out my 4-6 hours and achieve my Most Important Task. This is not something that happens often, and I so I was reminded why.

I was looking for a picture of me kickboxing, but I couldn’t find one. I did find this picture my friend Sarah drew, which I love. I’ve linked it to her blog with more of her art - zealousceles.blogspot.com

A long time ago, when I was training in China, I was struggling to learn a form correctly and my master threatened me with no food until I got it right.

This seemed like a terrible idea, I mean, it was hard enough to focus and be physical on the small amount of food (mostly chicken) that we did get, let alone without.

But today this came back to me as I continued a long battle with some code. That maybe he had a point and the answer was that I should lock myself away in my apartment, where there is no food, until I get it right.

(Knowing I was going to be working from home today, I did try to buy some, but it turns out after 3 months in Sydney I didn’t know where the fresh food in Woolworth’s was, not having had occasion to buy any yet.)

I’ve been trying to change something for nearly a week now, and I feel like I’m making very little progress. There’s a monster in our codebase, something we’ve written and rewritten because it deals with this poorly documented API and it’s been a case of look at the documentation, do something, try it, discover it fails on data quality or battery life, think, try again.

So there are a number of things that at the time seemed like good decisions, mostly were good decisions in the context of what we thought we knew, are there, and every time I go to change something, it’s a cascading thing of, oh, then I should change that, and that, and that. And so I cut change after change, making concrete improvements, trying to turn the monster into something that I can operate on.

And I just berate myself – how did I, who am so fanatical about design, who wrote or reviewed every line in this monster, let it get that way? Approaching it with fresh eyes after a break, having figured out this new way to do it (basically, all of the ways we’ve tried so far, in combination. Way more complicated that it should be with a decent API, but que sera sera).

Maybe this is the process, of figuring out how to do something that there’s no API well suited for, no blog posts explaining well, no expert down the hall to ask and review. Maybe this is just the part of what we’re doing that is learning, because everything else is pretty easy and I look at the design, or the feature spec, and know. This is the challenge.

And so I’ll go back to the office and keep poking this thing into shape. I’ll keep making improvements until it’s more of a Stegosaurus than a T-Rex. The compiler won’t hit me with a stick, but it might make me cry. And the determination that got me to master that form (long since forgotten), the thing that pushes me out of bed in time for early morning spin class is the same thing I need here to keep on fighting with it, until it’s tamed and improved.

Becoming a better engineer, becoming a better programmer, I think it’s really about being able to embracing this process of sucking. Of breaking things. Screwing up. Being mistaken. Thinking you’ve discovered all the goddamn ways you can be wrong, and then finding out you were wrong about that, too. And then making it better, whether you rip something out and replace it in a caffeine-fueled epiphany or snip away at it like you’re sculpting a tree.

This time 5 years ago, I was 22 and had just started on my year of being an “international hobo” (aka, fuckwit). And it seems like I did some really random stuff, but for all I joke about how grad school was a terrible life choice, I never feel that year was a waste. I learned so much about humans, about how to have an adventure, but I also learned how to suck.

I say learn how to suck, because it’s something we make such efforts to avoid, especially women. It’s not safe for us to fail, we view failure as a judgement on our innate abilities, not our learned ability to pick ourselves up and keep moving. And you know, that year, I got really, really good at sucking. I lost count of how many times I hit myself, hard, spinning my 5 foot staff. I came in last from climbing the steps, but I went up and down all four times instead of giving up part way through. I concussed myself and ended up in hospital. I concussed myself again (and again, and again, and again), but learned my lesson about the hospital. I wiped out in less dramatic ways. Flew out of my skiis leaving them upright in a ditch. Swam downhill in the sugary power that just kept knocking me over. Broke a ski pole, another, so many I used to buy them 2×2 at a time.

And now, you know, I suck less. I suck less at skiing. Less at kickboxing. And I suck less at sucking at programming.

So I went and lifted weights, and reminded myself that a year ago I couldn’t have lifted those, because my shoulder was such a mess.

And I came home and reminded myself of all the other things that I’m less terrible at now, than I used to be.

And tomorrow, I’ll go to work, and by the end of the day, this bit of code might not be amazing, but it’s going to be less monsterous than it is today.

Couldn’t find original credit for this – if you have it, please send it over.

I’m tired of reading novels about drippy pathetic women waiting for a man to rescue them.

There are the truly awful – Twilight, for example, “one woman’s difficult choice between beastiality and necrophilia”. Or the horrifying 50 Shades. By all means, let us have erotica, but what is sexy about a pathetic, spineless woman being degraded? The best thing about 50 Shades is that it bought us this hilarious review (for all the books – this reviewer suffered for her art).

Those ones are fairly easy to avoid, but then there are those that start out well but end up with the woman realising her dream job is not actually her dream, and her real ideal is about 75% less ambitious and handily convenient for the man in her life.

Don’t get me wrong, I like escapism, but is it really too much to want to get to the end of a novel and still respect the female protagonist?

Jennifer Weiner’s novel The Next Best Thing (Amazon), for once, did that. It’s about a woman, a real woman, and it’s a really great story.

Emily Griffin’s Where We Belong (Amazon) I didn’t love quite as much, but also, good. Depressingly realistic in the way that women are punished, punish ourselves.

And Marian Keyes is always amazing. I love her work, sadly not all of it is available on Kindle.

Always looking for new things to read so if you have recommendations of novels I’d love them!

Credit: flickr / brunoccunha

This Thursday, it will be two months since I arrived in Sydney. I came to work on a specific project, and that project came with a pretty ambitious deadline. I don’t know if anyone, including the person who thought this deadline up, really believed we would make it. But we did, just about. We as a team, did. And that moment, where you can say, “yeah, did that” – pretty awesome. But there are moments that happen before that, where people start to look at what you’re doing, and say, “hey, you just might do that”, and those are pretty cool, too.

I ran this project. Which means if we didn’t make that deadline, it would be on me. Making it, well, good leaders give away credit and take blame. But I do get to feel satisfied. But the biggest thing I get to feel satisfied about, is that in the last two months, I have consistently worked around 40 hours a week. I have gone out, a lot, and found friends and things to do in Sydney. Got (kinda) settled in my apartment, even taken a day’s vacation. Worked out 4-5 times a week, and averaged 4.5k fuel points a day. My life is a little loopy, but it’s definitely diverse.

Extensive reading around personal development, and watching other people run things, and running my own, much smaller, things meant I had some ideas about Planning, Leadership, and keeping sane under pressure. So this is my three most important things in each area, most of which I tested by breaking at some point.

Software Development Planning In General

Eliminate your Known Unknowns

This is the most important thing. You have a feature set and a deadline, some things you know how to do, and some things you don’t.

The thing you don’t know how to do is the most important thing you need to do today. This unknown falls somewhere on the scale between being very easy, and being hard / time consuming / requiring someone else to change their thing / flat out impossible. The sooner you know what it is, the sooner you can adjust your estimates, or your features, to be more realistic.

Think Medium Term

I don’t hack. I worry, actually, that I literally can’t hack. I can’t fight with something, and be happy with a one line fix labelled “DO NOT TOUCH THIS”. I always need to understand why, and to rationalize why things interact, or work the way they do.

Hacking is short term thinking. I’m in a hurry, do this quickly, come back later. It borrows time from future-you, to save time today. But you don’t know when future-you is going to pay the bill. You might find it’s tomorrow (before you ship) – that’s the worst case. And hacks multiply, the more you have, the more expensive each one will be to fix, so here’s the next worst case, you ship something full of hacks, and now you can’t do anything interesting until you unravel them all.

The thing about long term thinking, is that the world is going to be different a year, hell, a month from now than it is today. Long term is an investment in the future, but you have no idea what the future is going to look like. Isn’t that one of the awesome things about working in tech? Everything changes, all the time.

Medium term is the balance, and I find when I think medium term I know what issues will result from that decision, and I know roughly when they will occur. Choosing X over Y will mean that we have to adjust some things, in a relatively minor way, if we do Z, but I’m confident Z won’t be on any of the next few iterations I’m OK with that, but document it somewhere.

Medium term is doing things that will get harder over time sooner rather than later. In this case, Y is a pain, but needs to happen for Z. If we do it now, it’s very easy, and has and intermittent slightly higher overhead for a while. If we wait, it becomes a huge problem that takes someone a long and miserable time to unravel.

Ruthlessly Prioritize

Feature creep is the biggest problem with tight deadlines, and the temptation is always to slip things in because “things are looking so good”.

But why are things looking so good? Because you eliminated so much of this stuff. Because you were ruthless in the first place.

UX wants the widget to slide in and out, but when they realize it is as much work some feature, maybe they will reconsider.

I think it’s pretty easy to eliminate the large things, if you are ruthless about it, you’re clear about how long things take, and your PM and UX people are realistic. The thing to watch here is the small things. I find these are the things that I could fix in an hour or less, and it’s tempting to just agree to them, because it wouldn’t take much more time to write the code than have the conversation – and coding is more fun than having meetings! But I think you get 4-6 hours of good coding a day. So 4 “little things” and you’ve just allocated most of your day away, and were these things the most important things you could be doing?

Maybe not.

Leadership

Give Away The Stuff You Know

It is super tempting to look at the list of things to do, identify the things that you know and could do quickly, and just get cracking on them. You’ll feel an awesome sense of accomplishment, you’ll make super fast progress, and then there will be barely anything left, so that won’t take long at all.

This is complete nonsense. Especially if you have new people who you don’t know. If you give them something you know, you can evaluate how they do it, provide guidance, easily conceptualize it in the bigger picture. If there’s an issue with it down the road, you’ll be able to fix it.

And, importantly, you can instead work on one of your Known Unknowns. And when you’ve figured that out, you give that away too, so you are continually at the boundary of what you know and what you need to do, figuring out how it all fits together. You have the big picture in your head, and enough detail on everything to dive into it at need. Maybe you don’t know anything the best, but you can rationalize about everything, and that is really, really useful.

One of the biggest mistakes I made, that came closest to causing us to miss the deadline, was that I gave away something I only 50% knew how to do. I missed something crucial, and it became an emergency as a result.

This isn’t about being a control freak, it is about you knowing enough about everything, even if there is nothing you know everything about.

Learn Your Superpowers

I learned one of my most important lessons about leadership from someone I worked with, not at the time, a year after the fact.

We worked at a camp, and she was the director. A year later she tells me, “I always used to show you the numbers of how many kids we had in each class, because you would just remember them”. And so she could ask me at any time and I would just know. I could also lay out the classrooms in my head at need.

This, to me, was completely normal, so it didn’t occur to me that not everyone would remember a list of numbers after seeing them. But my friend knew it wasn’t, so she used it to make her life easier, and I never even noticed her doing it.

I think people can be really bad at knowing what they are good at. They don’t always value or notice things that are so natural to them that they don’t realize they are doing them. The more you notice about it, the more you can give people the things that they are fantastic at. The person who has a really good eye for UI flow, and usability, they get that slightly un-specc’d feature. The person who is really stubborn and diligent gets that tedious problem that is going to take patience and bloody-mindedness, rather than a flash of brilliance to fix.

Create a Space

This is about balancing the desire and need to shield your team from the outer world – politics, negotiations, long term planning, and the need to situate what you’re doing in some wider coverage.

Too little shielding, and too many people are worrying about things they have no control over. Too much, and your decisions can seem arbitrary and unfounded.

Some things are “PM problems”. I can’t do anything about them, but I need to know the status of them. I stay out of them and try not to worry about them. I probably want to share that there is a PM problem, when it is clear that it is going to hold something up.

Eng problems I’ll share as they come up. Like, I know it seems like I’ve gone mad on test coverage, but this is coming from these directions and this is why it’s important. I know it’s frustrating that we are doing X, but there is this medium-term plan of doing Y, and investing in X now pays dividends then.

Personally

Don’t Miss What You’ll Resent

I took a day off to go skiing. I knew if I missed it, I would be sad and resentful that I didn’t ski during the winter here. So I went, and it really energized me. Those things if you miss out on, you’ll really miss, you don’t want to lose out on those. Your work is part of your life, it’s not something that should happen at the expense of it. And your life is not something you should put on hold for something that is not 100% under your control.

Don’t Borrow From Tomorrow

My theory of working late is that in the best case I borrow time from tomorrow, and in the worst, I do that and I break things, which I then also need to fix.

So when I feel like I’m done, I go home. I go home well before I start breaking things. One of the things I find as a result, is that I am consistently productive 5 days a week. There’s less of a range. In grad school, I had insanely productive days, and some which were just a write-off. There was so much variance, that it was really hard to know how much I could get done in a given week. Now I have a pretty good idea, and I have evenings and weekend to myself, both of which greatly improve my happiness.

It’s Not Just Hours, It’s Energy

Last Thursday night, my friend and I are in a cab headed out to a comedy show. We were running late, because we’d both been completely absorbed in what we were doing and hadn’t really considered how we were getting there, or even where we were going, and there was terrible traffic.

And we got there, and had a great time, but waiting in the traffic jam, I admit that I think Thursday nights should be reserved for the gym and mall food (the mall food here is delicious, and the mall is only open late on Thursdays).

My friend says “Yes! By Thursday, I have made so many decisions, that if I don’t recharge I have no decisions left for Friday”.

Even the “worst” weeks I had probably didn’t exceed 45 hours. The most stressful day I had, I finished working before 5. But that didn’t mean I had any emotional energy left when I left the office for the day. I was exhausted.

And it’s hard to go out with someone new, when there’s really only one thing on my mind and I just feel like I have no conversation. I have to make more time to do things that recharge me – reading novels, hanging out at the gym watching How I Met Your Mother. The morning after the most stressful day, I went in late because I felt compelled to spend 2.5 hours in the gym before I could face the next onslaught. The biggest challenge I’ve had, is feeling like because I leave the office by 6 I have the time and energy for daily early morning workouts and going out almost every night, and I just don’t. I’d sooner work out in the evening, because it decompresses and de-obsesses me before bed. I want 9 hours sleep when I’m stressed. And that’s OK.

Credit: David Wilbanks / http://www.fotopedia.com/users/8pcck49cd9o7o

Tell me that I am not alone, in sometimes wanting to run away to an unspecified location, thereafter to never encounter a nerdy boy again.

It is at times deeply exhausting to live in a world where the other inhabitants think it’s a meritocracy but you know, and studies show, it isn’t.

It’s like flying economy whilst your friends fly exec, except, somehow, and you’re not completely sure how this is the case, a good number of them are convinced you were flying exec too. And so they complain about the wine list, say the food wasn’t as good as last time, but don’t realize that whilst they got a good night’s sleep in their fully reclining seat, you’re not sure you slept at all, between the screaming child across the aisle and the child behind you who kept kicking your seat. Let’s not get into the trouble you had at security, but you’re trying to be grateful, because you did, after all, reach your destination without being strip-searched, you never drink alcohol on planes anyway, and it’s not such a big deal to remember to buy some food to take on board…

But, two days later, you still don’t have your luggage.

Credit: Flickr / Honda News

I had a bit of a career crisis earlier this year. I asked myself, when did I become an iOS developer? I did not mean for that to happen. And so I made a plan, where I would diversify, and expand my skills, and explore. There’s are many good reasons not to tie your career to one platform, (as someone once observed to me, “there are a lot of unemployed BASIC programmers”), and if you work at a competitor, all the more reason.

At a crossroads, I had choice between mobile, and non-mobile, and whilst there were many other reasons and thoughts in this decision, I ended up staying with mobile. But I wasn’t feeling great about it.

A year ago, I gave a talk, where one of the things I mentioned was that I had the second best job in the world, because I get to build things for humans. It was why I wanted to work where I do – but I’d lost sight of that, in the day to day, fix this bug, build this feature. The bigger picture was obscured.

Mobile is Where Your Human Is

Here’s the thing about mobile though, humans often hate their computers, that thing they sit down at with a heavy heart and a large coffee every morning, but they love their phones. They take it to bed, to the bathroom, with it they capture the highlights of their days and lives, they turn to it in crisis. A mouse and keyboard separated humans from the computer, but a touch device is closer to them. Pet it, play with it, know where it is every minute of every day.

I build things for humans. I take pains over and pride in creating a great UI. There are those who despise UI, “real” engineering, after-all involves zillions of cores and unimaginable amounts of data. And we need that stuff – I don’t disparage it – but as far as your human is concerned, the UI is the application. Creating a great user experience is gift a software artiste gives a human.

Bridging the Gap Between the Analog and the Digital

I’ve been on a bit of a blogging hiatus of late, and one reason for that is that I upped and moved to the Southern Hemisphere. But whilst my accessories have yet to arrive, my personal computer has been sitting in my apartment since the day I moved in, well over a month ago. But I haven’t turned it on. I didn’t even have internet in my apartment for the first month – why did I need it? I’m rarely home and I have a data connection on my iPhone, that at a push, I’ll just tether my iPad to. When I was on vacation in San Juan, not deliberately disconnected, but coincidentally so (our cabin was damaged, and we were relocated to a more luxury one… without internet), but I didn’t take a laptop. I went “low tech”, with two smart phones, an iPad, and a Kindle.

Engineers sometimes find this weird, but it’s not. I see people at airport security – well dressed businessmen, young urbanites, pulling the tablet out of their bag, the cell phone from their pocket, but no laptop. Moving, I was pulling out two computers. This was difficult and seemed like lunacy – but I remember when it wasn’t so odd, your work machine was locked down, so of course you would take your personal one too. Once I got my iPad, once of the best things was that on business trips I could just leave my laptop at the office – who wants to carry it around? There’s exploring to do.

But I am never parted from my smart phone. The closest I get to disconnected is when I’m in another country and turn off data. But there’s always internet in some form, free wireless in cafes, or broadcast from a friend’s phone.

So my smart phone knows where I am, every minute of every day. My calendar is sync’d, and that says where I will be. Around my wrist, my nike fuel band tracks my activity, combine these and it’s pretty evident what I’m doing – Spinning? Skiing? Walking my usual route to work? My contacted people via twitter, email, text, phone, reveal the most important people in my life.

And so little is done with all that information, but there is a lot of potential there.

As an example, I’m not a huge downloader of apps to my phone, but two I’ve seen lately that I’ve thought were exciting:

Pair, which uses the device a human is closest to, to bring them closer to their favorite fellow human.

Twist, which uses information about where the human is to keep who they are meeting updated with their ETA.

There’s a gap, between the digital and the analog. I find these apps interesting, because they bridge some part of it. That gap is where I think software artistes can create transformative, compelling, experiences for humans, particuarly on mobile, and it’s where I like to play.