Erik Pukinskis, Snowed In

I would really appreciate it if you’d do this thought experiment with me:

Imagine everyone you ever met was single. They lived in their own apartments, or with roommates. They dated people, often for long times, but no one ever formed a partnership. You grew up with your biological father, but your biological mother is a distant friend of your Dad’s. They were dating, and your father wanted a child. They parted amicably years later, but there was never even discussion of partnership of any kind.

Imagine that every relationship started with the premise that it would end within five years or so, that things would get hard or complicated, or your lives would change and you’d separate.

Imagine every story you ever saw growing up was a story about single people. Periodically there was a kookie “couple”, but it was generally accepted that that was strange, if not deviant, if not a little pathological even. Imagine you never really heard stories about partnership. Imagine every fairy tale, every sitcom, every movie was about people who were committed to a path of being single the rest of their life. Imagine every president, every celebrity, every role model was single. Except maybe the ones who weren’t, but no one ever really talked about their partnership. It was an open secret.

Now imagine you live in this world, and you deeply desire a partner. You feel that life would be easier in so many ways if you had a partner. That it’s natural and beautiful to have a partner that you share your life with and grow old with.

Imagine whenever you talk about this to people, they bring up all the dangers of partnership. “What if you fall out of love?” they ask. “What if they beat you?” “Won’t you get bored?” “It’s going to be so hard!” “What if you need to move somewhere for your career?” “What if you want to raise your children differently?” “Why would you subject yourself to that?” What if every conversation you started with other people about partnership ended up being about why it was a bad choice, and why it wasn’t for them? What if everyone around you believed vehemently partnership was bad, even though they had never really tried it for themselves?

What if many of the partnerships that people DID talk about were partnerships where schemers and tricksters had used “partnership” as an excuse to take advantage of other people? What if the single people around you were quick to conclude that partnership just results in people being taken advantage of?

What if you had thought about all of those things, and still thought it was worth it? Or worth trying at least? What if you just wanted to be able to have a conversation that recognized partnership as a viable way to live, with challenges and rewards all it’s own? What if you wanted to find common ground in your experience of partnership with your loved ones’ experience of singledom, but they only seemed to want to distance themselves, to reassert that they had made the right choice in choosing singledom?

What if every time you told someone you were dating someone new, they reminded you that it wasn’t going to work out the way you hoped?

What if no one even wanted to think about the possible nice qualities of partnership, how nice it is to age with someone, how secure it feels, how convenient it is, because they had already decided long ago that singledom was for them?

That’s sort of what it’s like for people who are practicing or questioning polyamory.

(Trigger warning: disapproving talk of violence against women and animals)

* After calling a woman accidentally (wrong number) and having her call back in a panic, worried that he was a stalker, that women have it rough

* About the 26 year old mom at her aunt’s house (with a 14 year old kid) who was terrified her boyfriend would come by, see him replacing the heater, become enraged for “having a man over” and beat the crap out of her.

* That he has zero tolerance for such men

* That having been the victim of violence as a child is no excuse

* That you don’t hit women for the same reason you don’t hit children or animals

* His father beating him during the one week out of the year he saw his father

* Violence at the military camp he grew up in

* How similar computer programming is to fixing heaters

* Techniques for debugging broken heaters

* How cookies slow down his computer and one time he had to spend 4 hours deleting cookies one by one because on his computer you can’t delete them all at once.

* His 17 year old friend who taught himself to program a Macintosh by reading the manual

* A boy he knew who found a cat, tied a rope around its neck and flung it over a tree branch

* That his father (in his twenties) came and grabbed the kid by the neck, and held him up until his face turned white and his tongue came out of his mouth, and how his father asked the kid how it felt, and how he thought the cat felt

* How his father went to war after that and came back crazy.

* The time he physically subdued and talked down a 6′3″ 250lb Irishman who attacked him (Flavio said he looked like the actor who played Pee-wee Herman, not realizing that was an insult)

* being smart enough to know that violence solves nothing

* That I didn’t freak out when the heater caught on fire, as many would have

* That he didn’t freak out when he cut off his thumb, baffling the nurse who took his blood pressure in the emergency room

* The guy who was freaking out when the main gas line to the heater accidentally detached and started leaking gas into the house

* That freaking out won’t fix the problem

* That Ambur probably would’ve freaked out

In the wake of the release of David Kadavy’s Design for Hackers, folks are discussing design on Hacker News. BasDirks’s tips for getting better at design stood out to me:

If you lack the eye for design, the strategy I would recommend to develop some sort of proficiency is to “harvest” materials and ideas (good fonts, well-proven rules about proportion, color palets etc). Treat it as a repo, throwing stuff out and putting new stuff in. Ask feedback from designers on your choices, and try art. Really, try art. The whole art vs design debate is for decadent old men, but just exercise your creativity in different ways.

I’m a designer at heart and studied design in school, although I love to build things.

There are kinds of design that require an “eye”… graphic design is the prime example. I’m not very good at these, because they don’t interest me much.

I am much more interested in what might be called “future” design¹… making interventions that will shape the direction of a certain future. Certainly graphic design at its best does this while being beautiful. But from my perspective, graphic design is only one tool of many in the toolchest of the Future Designer.

Writing code, talking to people, putting on performances, building physical spaces, creating plans for neighborhoods, making sales, attending city council meetings…. all of these are indispensible tools for the Future Designer, and these activities all mesh well with the “hacker” mindset. In a real sense, this form of design is about hacking the trajectory of a neighborhood, or a person, or a city, or some other niche.

And yes, many great artists absolutely qualify as future designers. Banksy surely does. And many graphic designers: see James Victore². And many technologists too: Mark Zuckerberg surely does. The Kickstarter team surely does.

I’m embarrassed that this list doesn’t contain any women or people of color. Maybe it’s because I’m trying to find examples that would be convincing to the audience of hacker/designers on Hacker News. Certainly Joycelyn Elders has the stature of all of those men. As does Audre Lorde. As does Pat Summit. As do the Dixie Chicks. As do many more.

In some sense there are no specific technical skill requirements for you to be a great designer (as in: good eye, programming skills, etc). You do, however, need to know what your technical skills are. If you don’t have a great eye, and the future you’re designing requires a beautifully and powerfully presented image, then you need to find a graphic designer who does. Recognizing that makes you a great designer.

Because in the end great design isn’t about the practice of any specific craft. It is about outcomes.

¹ with a nod to Eli Blevis: http://dspace.kaist.ac.kr/bitstream/10203/5536/1/DRS-WonderGround-BLS-SoftwareMaterial-V2.7.pdf
² http://youtu.be/X3pXEdvI9xA

I was looking for coffee in the Mission here in San Francisco, and this place called Four Barrell seemed well reviewed, so I walked over. But when I got there, there was a huge line and it was full of hipsters in designer clothes (as opposed to thrift store clothes, or hand made clothes) and as I walked through the door there was a man taking a picture of his MacBook Pro with a thousand dollar camera.

I backed slowly out.

A few blocks away is a little place called Cafe Petra (no web site). I got a small cup of coffee for $1.80 in a real mug. There are metal spoons next to the sugar. It was quiet with plenty of space to sit, benches down either side of the room with mats and pillows, like you might see in a middle eastern restaurant.

Just now a man walked and in a french accent exclaimed “Martin!” and sat down across from the man eight feet to my right. “Bonjour!” Martin said.

“Bonjour! Eh… bon soir, non?”

“We. We.”

So cute. Sometimes it’s really worth it to find a place that suits your taste.

Thinking you are never sexist is like thinking you never have boogers hanging out of your nose.

Sure, you never see it… that’s makes it easy to pretend it’s not happening. But the folks with eyes below your nose level definitely see it.

And your only defense is developing good rapport with those people, being on their team, and giving them reason to believe that you’ll respond graciously when they point it out.

If you and a stranger were standing at a bus stop, someone in a passing car lit an oil soaked rag on fire, threw it at the stranger, they caught fire, and you did nothing? That would make you an asshole.

You = White People
Stranger = Black People
Person In Car = Systems of Oppression
Fire = Racism

Racism is idleness.

“Eventually the world will move to the model that makes the most sense. In the short term, yeah, the system will get locked up by the entrenched interests. But over the long haul I’m pretty optimistic it’ll move to the place it needs to move to.” – Fred Wilson, on TechCrunch

I’m really interested in whether this attitude represents the Rich White Man Bias (RWMB). After all, Fred Wilson is a Certified Wealthy Motherfucker (CWM). Things seem like they’re going pretty well for him. He runs a successful venture capital firm. He’s got what appears to be a healthy family and kids. I don’t get the sense that, in the grand scheme of thing, he’s bearing the brunt of the world’s cruelty.

And really, I’m not talking about Fred Wilson, I’m talking about myself. Rich White Man Bias.

It’s easy for people like me and Fred to say “You know what, shit may happen, but in the long term the world figures out the right way to do things” because in general, the world already figures out the right way to do things by us. The world is tilted to bend over backwards to make life easy for people like us. It’s natural when something seems hard but then it turns out the cards were always stacked in our favor. That’s our daily reality.

Most of the bullshit we have to deal with is acts of god, or self-imposed. It’s no wonder we develop god complexes.

Now I’m not trying to say that poor people, women, people of color, trans people, disabled people, and anyone else who is at least sometimes systematically oppressed, aren’t optimistic. I think optimism is universal, and people in the toughest situations almost inevitably find ways to think optimistically through them. But there are different kinds of optimism. There’s “I know people will be mostly OK and things will keep rolling *somehow*” and there’s “I think the world tends to eventually do right by everyone.”

It’s the latter attitude that I think us RWMs and CWMs are biased towards. And I think it’s not a problem, unless it makes us complacent. I worry that believing that the world tends to sort things out make it easier for Fred to sleeping at night, know it’s his job to make rich people richer.

I don’t think RWMs and CWMs, as a category, check our privilege enough, and I worry that this attitude isn’t one of the many little things that make it easier for us to go on ignoring the extent to which we are harming people.

I’m sure Fred would object to the idea that he’s harming anyone through his job or his whiteness or his maleness or his wealth. But I’m too tired to justify the assertion. I’m tired of trying to convince people that all white people are racist, that even good men push women down the ladder. You can only have “but is the sky really blue?” conversations so many times. If you really want to have that one out, start a fight in the comments.

Edit: Changed “comparatively screwed” to “at least sometimes systematically oppressed.” Added last paragraph.
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When he is not frothing at the mouth, Erik is the founder of SproutRobot, a comparatively optimistic web site that helps you grow vegetables.

Last night I was dying to do a deploy. I had worked furiously all day on a new feature, hacked it together with tests, all but one of which was passing. The tiny devil on my shoulder was goading me on, telling me I could finish and deploy in 10 minutes, but the angel on the other side knew it could take hours and told me to go home and sleep.

The angel won. And I am glad. Because I woke up this morning with a fresh mind and more importantly: an obvious place to dive in and get something done.

I coded myself a cliffhanger.

Years ago, I was slowly working through the spy show Alias on DVD. Every episode ended with the protagonist (Professional Badass Sydney Bristow) dangling from some ledge, captured by terrorists, about to drink a glass of poison, etc. All good T.V. leaves you wanting more, but Alias made me want to throw things at the TV screen:

“I just want to go to sleep, you piece of shit, but you’re suckering me into watching another episode!”

Since I had entire seasons on DVD I would get sucked into watching for hours. Eventually, I learned to just watch one episode, plus the first five minutes of the one after it. It allowed me to go about my life with peace, without any nagging worries about Sydney Bristow.

And that’s how I’ve typically coded. I work until a “good stopping point”.

But as a consequence of tying up those loose ends before quittin’ time, I often feel lost when I sit down to work the next day. So maybe I’ll try making a habit of coding up to a climax and just walking away…

Code m’self some cliffhangers.

Until next week’s episode….

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Erik Pukinskis made SproutRobot, a web site that tells you when and how to plant a garden without making you get a Ph.D. in Gardenology first.

Roseanne sums up Charlie Sheen:

Doing tons of drugs, smacking prostitutes around, holding a knife up to the head of your wife—sure, that sounds like a dream come true for so many guys out there, but that doesn’t make it right!

Via Feministing.

In the last few days I’ve been hit with a bunch of interest stuff about women an geek conferences:

• Elise Worthy wrote about her experience of LessConf, whose marketing materials I had called out a few weeks ago. She had a great time, and felt totally supported as a woman. Great to hear it!
• Garann Means wrote a great post about her experiences at JSConf being tainted by sexist bullshit. Amongst other things, the organizers tried to convert the ladies room into a unisex bathroom. Classic. Edit: Conference organizer Alex Sexton says in a comment on Garann’s blog it was either the venue or a rogue attendant who put up the unisex bathroom sign, and the organizers took it down as soon as it came to their attention, so I was wrong to attribute it to the organizers.
• @thesethings pointed me at Farmhouse Conf which not only had 50% women speakers, they had 100% vegan food! A conference after my own heart! And in Los Angeles, to boot. I knew there was a reason I wanted to move to that city.
• Which is not to neglect my brand new city of residence, Austin Texas… I’ve been working at the Conjunctured co-working space and I happened to meet Christopher Schmitt who is an organizer of the CSS Summit, which has more than 50% women speakers for two years running.

So, good stuff and bad stuff. But there’s some motion going on, so that’s a good thing.

And I’m putting this post on the books for all of you who think I post too much negative stuff. Look! I’m talking about good things!