DEV Community: Heidi Waterhouse

When you stare into the blank page, it stares back at you

Heidi Waterhouse — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 15:12:00 +0000

I didn’t write The Great American Novel during the pandemic. I’m good with that. Instead, I worked with an amazing team to write the best book we could on how to do technical writing when you are not a technical writer.

I finally believe this book is really real, because look, there are pre-order buttons!

Pre-order from Apress

Pre-order from Amazon

About Docs for Devs

We wrote this book because we needed it to exist. We looked all over the market and didn’t find anything for “crap, I am a code-type person, and now I have to write documentation”. We know that scenario happens all the time, because we see it in our companies, or we get hired on after it’s happened, or we are using documentation that developers wrote reluctantly.

Every time we talked about documentation around code people, they would ask us if there was a book or website where they could learn just enough documentation to get by. This book is not written for technical writers. It was written for people who never expected to be technical writers, but still have to make technical documentation happen.

We included the basics — how to get started, how to figure out what needs to be written, and for whom, where the code samples and images go, how to make a pile of documents make organizational sense. We know that there are devs who need that. We have also included some indicators for when it’s more than a developer should have to do, when it’s time to hire a professional technical writer.

Lots of people think that technical writers are only for external documentation, or only for big teams, but they can be a force multiplier for lots of teams, including the ones working on internal tools or processes. I used to have a sticker that said “Better and cheaper than making your devs do it”, and I still believe that’s true. I just also believe that there are lots of times you can’t win that argument with the powers that be. This book is for those times.

We left out so so many things that we care about, that we think are important, mostly because they were important to us as writers, and wouldn’t necessarily help a developer. We were intentionally vague about tools and software. We didn’t get into localization or accessibility standards much. We had a long talk about taxonomy, but cut it down to the barest bones. We have a huge parking lot of topics that we decided were too advanced, or too niche to be in this book. If you find one of those gaps the hard way, I’m sorry. We did it on purpose.

We hope that this is the book that you needed. The one you give to your team so they write better error messages and API docs, the one you keep on your bookshelf to refer to when you are stuck on making yourself understood. The book that you read when you’re in a code bootcamp to be just that much more ready.

Writing is hard, we know. It’s just better than not having written.

The rest of this post is pretty long, but may be interesting if you’re looking to write a technical book.

How we did it

The team was Zachary Sarah Corliessen, Jen Lambourne, Jared Bhatti, Dave Nuñez, and me. I think at one point we added it up and our combined technical writing experience was getting close to retirement age. It was kind of intimidating, really! But it was also exciting, because we could have the kinds of discussions you only get with deep, shared expertise. We talked about the techniques that we had found worked, or didn’t work, in different environments. We tested each other’s procedures and worked through our assumptions. We met almost every week for over a year.

We started by wrangling about who our target audience was. Were they at a big company or a small one? Were they doing open source? Were they doing internal or external documentation? This is where we started to see the benefits of having a diverse team — we had all worked on different kinds of projects and could speak from experience about who gets assigned to write docs, and what kind of resources they have.

Meanwhile, we were also tapping our network for other people had published to get a line on how to write a book proposal. We couldn’t have done it without help from Brian MacDonald, VM Brasseur, Anne Gentle, Torrey Podmajersky, Erin McKean, Sid Orlando, and others.

Writing the proposal forced us to put together a rough outline and start thinking about marketing and what kind of book we wanted to be writing — how long would it be, who would it be for, that kind of thing.

We put together a chapter and heading outline and shopped the book around. We had some pretty clear ideas of what we could and couldn’t write, and what we wanted, so not every publisher was right for us.

We split up the chapters and started writing. This wasn’t easy, but it was at least the part of the process we were most familiar with. After a chapter was written, we all read it and made comments, and Zach did a first-pass copyedit.

The things that we found more difficult or unfamiliar were things like sourcing graphics, dealing with layout software we weren’t in charge of, publishing schedules, and line edits that we had to trust to other people. Basically, all of the parts with publishing were us learning to breathe past our internal control-freaks, because that’s usually our job to manage. Agreeing on the title was most of 3 meetings, as I remember.

Once the chapters were drafted, we worked to stitch them together, to create a central narrative line through all the things we were talking about to make it easier to follow. We debated a few chapters up to the very end — was this a basic topic or and advanced topic? Did we get too deep into the weeds? Were we missing something obvious to us?

Literally between submitting and finalizing, we found out that someone had started a company using our example-company-name, so we had to change that through the whole book!

Now that we’ve handed off to the publisher and approved the final, final, no really-the-last edit, we have to do marketing and promotions, which, uh, is not something we have a lot of practice with. We put up a website (docsfordevelopers.com), and Jen waded through all the red tape to get a .ly domain extension for corg.ly.

Each of us wrote a few chapters, but we also all brought our experience to the book as a whole. I am a terrible copyeditor, and project management and taking notes in meetings are not my strong points either. I can’t really draw diagrams, I don’t know how to negotiate with an illustrator, and information architecture is not my nerd. I could not have written a book this good alone. Better together is really a key part of this project.

A portrait of the authors as corgies

What we learned

It really takes excellent planning and project management to get through a project this big.

Asynchronous work for deep work and thoughtful writing, synchronous meetings for group consensus and ideation.

You’re not going to get rich writing a technical book, but at least you can tell people to buy it to solve known problems.

The publishing process is longer and more stressful than you think it will be. Even if you think it will be long and stressful.

A team of kind, committed experts can get through a project like this, even with major philosophical differences, and like each other even better on the other side — if they work on staying kind. YOU ARE THE BEST, TEAM!

In which I am cranky about the urban/rural divide

Heidi Waterhouse — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 15:07:00 +0000

I just came back from a weeks-long trip to the American West. It was amazing, gorgeous.

More pictures at my blogpost: https://heidiwaterhouse.com/2021/08/30/in-which-i-am-cranky-about-the-urban-rural-divide/

What I did on my summer vacation. Yellowstone, Idaho, Coral Pink Sands, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Monument Valley, Ship Rock

You know what all this beauty has in common? Besides mostly being protected wild areas?

Zero bars of cell phone signal. Or maybe like, two bars, depending on whether there was a mesa in the way. We drove almost all of it on state freeways, not interstates, and there was, let me emphasize, NO SIGNAL.

That’s fine by me. I was taking a vacation and don’t need my phone pestering me all the time. I had even dowloaded a bunch of albums and playlists to stream to the car audio system.

I’m going to call out Amazon Music here, but none of them are good. I used to use Google Music, but I loathe YouTube music’s interface very slightly more than the Amazon interface. And Spotify is fine, but I like actually owning and downloading music instead of streaming it, because I have this silly old-fashioned notion that if I have purchased something and downloaded it, I might want to, you know, provide that to the car.

The process goes like this.

Open Amazon Music App
Reject Car Mode, because I was the passenger.
Reject the offer I get to sign up for Unlimited Whatever Streaming. I get this offer EVERY TIME. There is no way I can find to permanently dismiss it. I do not want to stream my music.
Click the Library icon
Click the Albums icon
Swear and switch into “Offline Music”, because it keeps defaulting me to “Online Music”
Select album, say, James – La Petit Mort
Sing along
Become very startled by the next thing to happen, which is rather than the app thinking “yes, album played, good job me, now I stop”, it says, “I see you have played your own music. I will now construct a STREAMING STATION based on that and attempt to communicate over this-here roaming connection, because I have never considered acting like a music player, I am here to CURATE TASTE.”
Everyone in the car with me is subjected to my rant about app developers who have never considered offline mode.

And it wasn’t just the music player — I had trouble finding books I had downloaded to my phone because it evidently wanted to dial home to confirm something? My licenses? And it wasn’t just Amazon. Aura Picture Frame app — very cool, no queuing capabilities. Marriott Bonvoy app — why WOULDN’T anyone want to spend data loading gorgeous pictures of resorts in the Maldives if one was booking a room in St. George, Utah? CovidAwareMN — help, help! I can’t find a signal and I don’t know where we are, alert!

The two apps that did not piss me off were Snapchat, which let me take and queue images without a fuss, and Google Maps, which let me pre-download maps around destinations it thought I might be headed to.

Now, this could be just a whine about how my magical communicator device didn’t do what I wanted, but I think it’s actually a pretty fair indicator of a real problem we have in software development generally, and app development in particular. We assume that everyone has data the way we have data – boundless, essentially free, always on. That streaming is just the new way radio works.

But it’s not! Radio is one-to-many, and what we are building with our always-on assumptions doesn’t map to that. Data is not free. If you look at the cost of downloads in non-US countries, or even in non-metropolitan US, or even for people on pay-as-you-go cell plans, IT’S NOT FREE. It’s expensive. And every time we lazily write a back-and-forth communication as if it were just a database call, we’re costing someone money. Mostly someones who can least afford it.

I was joking on Twitter that I wanted to drop app developers into the middle of the American West for a week and see how they felt about their product then, and hey, it would probably be good for them to get some screen-free time, but the more I thought about it, the more I do want someone to be angry with me. Because when we had to call the EMTs, I was glad we were somewhere with phone signal. And when we checked into a hotel and the volunteer-fire-department alarm was going off, I learned that they couldn’t get reliable pager coverage to summon firefighters. At the risk of sounding catastrophic, global climate change is going to lead to a lot of situations where we need our apps to do basic things without being able to phone home. If my first-aid manual is in PDF, will I be able to access it without hitting Adobe servers?

When we talk about building robust systems, we are thinking about hardware, software, failovers, unavailable humans, mostly normal failures. But this is a normal failure that I never hear us talk about.

PS – I also got in a lot of starwatching. It was marvelously dark, and I was watching for the Leonids and also resenting all the microsatellites. Yes, I know they are supposed to bring internet access to more of the world, but holy wow, they are bright and distracting and maybe we could have thought that through better, design-wise.

Lady Conference Speaker: Home Studio Edition

Heidi Waterhouse — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 16:22:00 +0000

It has taken me a long time to write this. Partially because I kept iterating on it, and partially because sometimes thinking about delivering conference talks from home makes me cry. Change is hard. In the Before-Times, I had a talk I gave about my backpack, and all the things I carried, and which cables were in my go-bag (3 meter, lightning, USB-micro, USB-C). And all of that expertise and all of my hard-won apparent poise on the stage are beside the point.

So I started recording from home, by April of 2020. And I kept working at it, trying the software, the style, the webcam, the mic, the lights, the software, the style, the lights, … you get the picture.

I was watching my devrel buddies level up (shoutout to Jérôme Petazzoni and Jason Yee especially), and then I looked at what I had scheduled to do in May. DevOps Enterprise Summit. Microsoft Build. In1ghts. Gartner. A webinar series. Internal training. External chalk talks. Nature, or at least the conference circuit, is healing.

So I asked for budget, and got it. And although it feels like a lot of money in real people money, in corporate money, it is still a percentage of what we would have spent to go to even one conference. And I’m excited about it! It‘s pretty cool to get to hack together new toys! And I have some v. 3 ideas that I’m all :philosoraptor: about.

I’m including links to the things that I am actually using, not because you should buy that exact thing, but because when I was researching, I was frustrated by not having that information.

There are so many things that I learned that it’s obvious I should have been writing these posts all along, but here we go.

Keep it simple

This is the setup for when you don’t have the company credit card or permission to use it, but still want to look and sound good on your meetings.

Ethernet cable and hub
Webcam
Light
Physical backdrop
Lav mic
Descript
Webcam Settings (MacOS)

This is what my setup looked like last April, after we started recording from home.

The whys and wherefores

Wifi is just more flaky and lossy than wired. This doesn’t matter much on your internal zoom meetings, but does end up mattering a lot for real-time talks, recordings, and especially the scenario where you are streaming-to-remote-recording (avoid this, seriously). However, if you are like me, and have a MacBook, there isn’t an ethernet jack. You can get a hub. I’ve been using this Anker hubfor a couple years. (non-affiliate links, don’t get me started on that).

You’re going to need those extra ports, because I want you to plug two peripherals in. Get an external webcam. I use a Logitech c920, which is fine, especially if you also actually have driver software. It’s not bad on a PC, but on a Mac, it’s like a potato of stupidity without the Webcam Settings app to adjust the white balance, gain, etc (none of which you need to understand, just fiddle with the sliders until you look ok). I have mine mounted on what I can only describe as a selfie clamp, which means it’s not resting directly on my monitor and also that I get a little ring light, which helps worlds to make you look better. Yes, it is annoying to look into a light all the time. It’s for people to see me, so I deal.

The other one is a lav(olier) mic. Is is ASMR-level sound? No. Is it like a million times better than your laptop’s mic? Yes. (Unless you’re on a Microsoft Surface — those are freakishly good). You don’t have to spend a lot to get a significant sound improvement. I use this set. You’ll also need an adapter, probably.

Almost done! This last part is fun. Those background-blurring and fake-greenscreen (and real greenscreen) settings on your conference software are cool, but a) they don’t always work when you’re doing recording b) They do not understand interesting hair, or hand gestures. Thus they are dead to me. But I still don’t want to clean or repaint, so what to do? Buy a physical backdrop! I have one that is branded with my company name, but also a couple that I just enjoy. My “internal meetings” backdrop is this colorful brick background. Cheap and easy! If you don’t have a wall to thumbtack it to, you can get a curtain rod and some safety pins, or, you know, get elaborate with backdrop stands. But you don’t have to!

A stack of physical backdrops, both branded and greenscreen

With a little can-do, you can manage all this for a couple hundred dollars. It’s not cheap, exactly, but it really elevates what you present.

Stand back, I’m a professional!

Audio
- SM7B microphone
- Cl-1 CloudLifter
- Scarlett 2i2
Video
- Canon EOS 90D
- Elgato Cam Link
- GlideGear TMP100 teleprompter *
- Dummy battery
Lights
- Set of 2 Neewer barn-door lights
- Neewer giant ring light
- (there were a lot of iterations here, including two giant umbrella lights as well)
Computer
- Descript
- Webcam Setting
- Mirror flipping app (best resource I found is from a teleprompter company)
- Portable monitor
- Powered USB hub
Set
- Spike tape
- Dark grey paint, new electrical fittings for wall
- Nanoleaf Shapes starter kit+2 booster packs
- Mounting bars
- Standing desk mat
Various
- Tripods. So many tripods.
- Cables, ditto ditto.
- Ethernet cable dropped from router
- Heavy powered USB hub
- USB slide clicker
- Heavy-duty power strip
- White balance cards
- C Clamps
- Enough weird Home Depot purchases that Finance wanted to know if I still had my corporate card or if it had been stolen by an incompetent handyperson

The whys and wherefores of all of that

I keep getting stalled on writing out allll of the reasons and making all the links, and I want to get this posted, so let me abbreviate.

Sound – The Shure mic is a radio standard (and was evidently used to record the vocals for Thriller. Ok.) The Cloudlifter makes it so that you don’t need to turn the gain (think volume, but as input) up so high on the pre-amp, which is the Scarlett. The pre-amp makes the sound into magical digital pellets your laptop can figure out. I think. Honestly, I just bought what industry pros recommended, and I think it sounds pretty awesome — which is to say, I never think about how weird it sounds.

This mic does not get dropped

Powered hub, cloud-lifter, pre-amp, spike tape, and some of the many, many tripods

Video – I’m comfortable with Canon – I’ve been shooting it since high school, so it was a natural pick for me to go with this one. It is a DSLR in picture mode, and mirrorless in video mode. This does not actually matter. What does matter is that it’s a camcorder with the ability to change lenses. I have it hooked to an Elgato Cam Card, which lets it act like a very big, smart webcam and stream directly to my computer. The dummy battery powers it so I don’t have to stop and change batteries all the time. Fiddling with the settings wasn’t too hard, and YouTube is a big help. It’s mounted on a teleprompter rig on a tripod. This is an angled mirror, a platform, a blackout bag, and some other stuff that one could DIY, but I chose not to. Setting up the teleprompter with the camera part was easy, getting the stuff I wanted to show was not. My ipad worked, but even with Sidecar and Aircast, it was a pain to set up the mirror flip every time, and I couldn’t easily control what was happening on the screen I was looking at. I ordered a monitor. It was too big for the tripod and also didn’t want to mirror flip. I ordered a different monitor and found some mirror-flipping software that worked, but it only works on non-M1 MacBooks.

Camera to the right on the teleprompter. Key light to the left. Standing mat in position.

Teleprompter as I see it when it’s all set properly. You can just make out the camera lens in the image. I’m using the Streamdeck to invoke the mirrorflip software.

Lights – I was able to get rid of several of the lights I had at one point, but you still need to put more light in your face than we normally find comfortable. Remember, when you are setting up, that distance is a square, so if you can get it closer, it will be brighter. Some people have fancy controls for their lights, but this is the part I was cheap about. I have a powerstrip on the floor, and once I flip that switch, it’s just the way I set it up last time.

An earlier iteration, from when I still had the umbrella lights up. And the switchplate wasn’t on, oops. There was wiring.

Software – Descript is my most favorite-est software since Airtable. It is very lightweight input and editing, and it has a really reasonably smart (for north american accents) automated voice transcription. Once you’ve fed it audio, you can edit the recording by clicking in the transcription to jump to a place. You can also add additional tracks. Webcam Settings serves to make the webcam configurable, as if it had Mac drivers. I don’t need it with the CamLink, though.

Miscellaneous –

It turns out that the MacBook Pro is a laptop, not a desktop, and it does not output enough power to run a pre-amp, a Streamdeck, a CamLink, etc. I got a big beefy power supply and multi-port hub so I could plug all that and an ethernet cable in before I fed it into the MacBook.
I need to stand in roughly the same place, so I marked out that place with some spike tape and put a contoured standing mat on it, so I could tell by feel where I am.
I painted my background a neutral gray and put up NanoLeaf Shapes hex lights, because I find them delightful. It took a bit of tweaking to get them to not be washed out.
There are a lot of cables, all over. I’d rather have cables than depend on wireless, though. I’d tell you what I bought, but it was a bit ad hoc and also involved The Bin of Cables that most techies have in their house somewhere.
I built a platform for my laptop out of a sheet of plywood and a cheap bookcase.
The rails and C-clamps are to replace tripods once we figure out exactly where we want everything mounted.
I am displacing my wife’s makerspace, so, uh, excuse the disaster in the background of the pictures.

Use cases

Like all good user stories, it turns out that what I thought I wanted and what I actually want are not quite aligned, and furthermore, there are use cases I hadn’t considered. For example, I originally optimized for seeing my slides in the teleprompter and advancing using my usual Bluetooth slide clicker, but it turns out that it uses the same frequency as my nifty lights, so that needed some refinement.

Also, although the teleprompter-and-remote setup works well for giving a standard talk, it’s terrible for doing an interview or a Q&A, where I want to both look at the person I’m talking to and a screen full of questions or audience comments, and I don’t have a way to toggle between those. I ended up building a lectern-type thing that lets me set my laptop in front of me.

I also want to set up a second filming area so that I can do asides, which sounds easy, but is actually kind of complicated.

Conclusion

This is, at least partially, the writeup I wished for when I started recording, but it’s also a work in progress. I am pretty happy with it for now, but I also think that for professional conference speakers, it’s going to become more standard to have some kind of “studio” setup, the way we got used to having a speaking go-bag.

Semantic meaning is everywhere

Heidi Waterhouse — Fri, 21 May 2021 22:33:44 +0000

I was reviewing a new canonical (not master, please) slide deck.

I had all my usual comments –

Make the font bigger
Please put a Twitter handle on every slide
Code is hard to read, more contrast
Yes, the font should be even bigger
Look, put the slide on your monitor and then stand on the other side of your kitchen. Is it big enough? I didn’t think so.

I realized a conflict that I’ve been having with designers for a while now, and I thought I’d share it with you. It’s not the designer’s fault, to be clear — I have been stating my needs poorly.

Designers (appear to) think: Ah! We will have a variety of 8 backgrounds, and then I will use those backgrounds and make some slides from them, and people will copy the whole slide and thus they will get the positioning and font and color and everything right, they just have to replace the text and image, easy-peasy! And thus they name the slide layouts things like “stars” and “blue 2”. And the slide layout for “blue 2” maybe gets used as the background for a code sample page, and a heading page, etc.

What I want: I am either creating a new slide deck, or updating an existing one so it looks right. I have applied the corporate theme. Now I will get going. First, a title slide!

1) Add new slide

2) Search for slide layout named “title”

3) Find slide layout named… “stars”

4) Sigh heavily, go open another tab? Window? Which contains an existing deck of the right style and era, one hopes. Copy title slide. Change text. Change speaker notes. etc.

What if, at step 2, I actually found a layout with a semantically meaningful name, like “Title”? And what if there were others like “Section heading” and “Quote page light” and “Summary slide”? And what if each of those layouts already had the text positioned in the spiffy designed way as intended? Then I could just, y’know, put headings in, and then go back and put in images and speaker notes.

AND (here’s where we get into really USEFUL semantics), what if… what IF those layout slide names were meaningful and persistent, and even if there was a massive rebrand, I could just apply the new corporate theme, and every slide changed how it looked but not what content it held? What if we decouple presentation and meaning? It’s almost 5 on a Friday, and I’m a little punchy, so I sound sarcastic, but I’m serious.

Unlinking presentation and meaning is at the heart of semantic work — I don’t care what your HTML H1 renders as on your page, I care that if we take the same content and render it on a different page, the meaning, the significance is not lost. Yours may be purple and flashing. Mine may be rendered by the voice of Idris Elba talking louder than usual, it doesn’t matter, because we are using meta-information to indicate what the significance of the content is.

The thing is, Google Slides, and I think PowerPoint and Keynote already have this concept. When you use a standard template, you get Title and Section Header and Main Point slide layouts. It’s just that something gets lost in translation when designers are optimizing for reusability or efficiency or something. Even SlidesCarnival, which I wholeheartedly recommend, is creating a bunch of different slide styles that aren’t layouts. So if you used their “Big Concept” slide, it might look like either of these, but it might also look funny because there isn’t a “Big Concept” style, it’s an overlay on the “Blank – Clouds Only” or “Blank Color” layouts. And so if I wanted to switch from one style to another, something would break, because there isn’t a “Blank – Clouds Only” style in the one that’s all in orange and red and peach.

Bianca

Alonso

There’s a whole subgenre of slide tools like reveal.js and deckset that allow you to do this with markdown. I admire that, and wish them luck. It’s not quite what I’m after.

In conclusion, it’s worth asking yourself whether your re-use pattern is about how something looks or how it is used.

I leave you with the best slide I have ever created, because it’s pretty.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B14lIlwYrHM&list=PLs4CJRBY5F1IEFq-wumrBDRCu2EqkpY-R&index=29&t=1s)

Slide background is Iago by SlidesCarnival. Click through for my PyConAU 2020 keynote

Your DevRel pipeline

Heidi Waterhouse — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 15:29:00 +0000

According to my inboxes, developer relations/advocacy/evangelism is a hot job title. I am a little surprised by this since those of us already in the industry thought we might get pushed off the ice flow if there was a downturn and we weren’t physically in front of people. But it’s really really in demand. Yay for us!

This penguin is thriving and learning to use a webcam instead of physical travel

However, most of the people who are at the mid-to-senior level of DevRel fell into it sideways. I started as a technical writer. I know people who have come to it from theater+bootcamp, from product management, from sales engineering, from pure coding positions. There wasn’t a path, there was a series of happy accidents for most of us. This un-pattern makes it really hard to say “this is the way you get into the job”. We can list some skills, but we don’t have a progression to offer people.

Happy accidents are no way to build a sustainable pipeline.

So as we’re looking around and trying to think about how to create the next generation of DevRel that companies so desperately need, I’d like to suggest…..

Support

A Black woman taking a call and writing notes

Yes, support. They’re like 3/4 of the way to doing DevRel already, and the support progression could easily include DevRel as an outcome. Here’s what they already bring to the table:

Product knowledge, especially of actual implementation as opposed to the ideal
People skills
Tolerance of reaction- or interrupt-based work
Implementation, glue code, and auth experience in a hands-on way

That seems like a really solid foundation for most DevRel roles! And the great thing is that you can retain senior support people by giving them this additional path to try, either part-time or full-time.

I think the reason we aren’t already recruiting heavily from our support departments is because we’re a little biased — we tend to think of it as an entry-level, non-technical (hah!) role. Technology culture generally values creation over maintenance . But you know, because you have been saved by that level-3 support person at some point, that it’s pretty darn technical.

So if you’re recruiting heavily for a mid-level DevRel type who can connect with your developer-users, talk to pain points, come up with creative solutions, and can get up to speed on your product almost instantly, look inside.

Extremely Online People

Heidi Waterhouse — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 19:04:00 +0000

I’m writing this the night of January 6, 2021. It won’t be posted tonight, because it’s not what anyone should be paying attention to. It’s useful to me to write something else, think about something other than a coup, a putsch.

I am Extremely Online. If you follow me on Twitter, you are already aware of this. I roll over in the morning and pick up my phone to read what’s happening in the world, and I lock myself out after midnight lest I scroll forever. It’s not just Twitter, it’s news apps and other sources.

When Minneapolis erupted over the police murder of George Floyd, the second thing I did was write my social media team and ask them to stop our automated, scheduled tweets and promotions, because it’s not ok for us to be interjecting our conference announcements in the middle of a nation’s pain.

I wrote in and did the same thing tonight, and I’ve written a note for myself, for when we go back to work:

We need a kill switch for all scheduled media, to use in the event of national or international crisis.

This is not about “I’m awesome at my job”, this is about “your team needs an extremely online person who has the authority and capacity to halt posting”. I mean, preferably you would have several, on a on-call style rotation, but let’s start with the basics.

Social media is hard. I mean really hard. We joke about the “interns who run the Twitter account”, but these are dedicated professional teams who do a lot of workshopping, study, theory, and brand education. It’s not really a joking matter. Except for the days you workshop whether My Little Pony or Spongebob is the right meme response. I am only on the very fringes of Brand Media Land, and mostly it happens because I care about other humans in the world, my company, and our brand, in that order. I can look into it and see complexity all the way down, like a Mandelbrot set. If you have that team, I want you to respect the heck out of them. And as part of respecting them, I want you to empower them to turn off whatever posts they have queued, without asking for permission up the chain.

And people, I know it’s not that easy. There are bidding markets that work in the millisecond and fraction of a cent to get ads on pages, and it’s not possible to repopulate all that. But look at what you can do, what your scheduling tool for Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn looks like, and have a plan to stop that schedule. Because if your cheery tweet about signing up for a chance to win a pair of headphones is directly under news footage of someone being murdered, that’s fucked up.

The University of YouTube

Heidi Waterhouse — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 17:54:00 +0000

This week, I learned how to roll out potica dough thin enough to see the flowers on your tablecloth through it.

Potica (poh-tee-tzah) is a kind of Slovenian sweet dough. This one has poppyseed and raisin filling.

I went from knowing vaguely that engines have carburetors to disassembling my snowthrower and repairing it. Other things I’ve used it for are video game hints for when I’m stuck, adjusting bike disc brakes, using a ruffler foot on my sewing machine, and making a five-strand braid.

That silver thingy in the middle is a small engine carburetor. The more you know!

The brake pad for an extremely worn disc brake of the bike/trike type.

This is not to say that YouTube is a straightforward win for the world — I am pretty sure the recommendation algorithms are doing some dark and troubling things. It is to say that I never thought I would enjoy learning this way, and I was wrong.

I, personally, don’t learn abstract information super-well by video. Or at least not any better than I do by reading it. But reading is not a great fit for me when it comes to learning things that have a spatial or physical aspect. I can stare at written instructions for a complicated knitting decrease for a long time, attempt to do it on my own, and still get it wrong. But if I can watch someone do it, I can usually make it happen myself. On the other hand. while I may appreciate a diagram of how a finite state machine works, I don’t need it to understand what’s happening — the text will be enough.

As I’ve been thinking more and more about video production, and how to tell the stories I want, and technical talks, and blog posts, I’m also thinking about what kind of information goes with what kind of presentation, and learning styles.

Kirby, you’re going to have to step up your slide game

Education research has pretty much blown up the idea that there are “visual learners” and “kinetic learners” and you have to teach to each of these styles to reach a whole class. That said, our brains are all different, and differently permeable, and stacking up little plastic cubes really does make decimals make sense for some kids and not others. Maybe what makes someone a good teacher is having a layered enough understanding that they can explain something multiple ways. It’s not just the method, it’s the meaning. I don’t think that excludes people who are newly learning something teaching it to others, just that a learner is less likely to have as many different ways to explain it. Their way of explaining it to other learners is likely to be much more useful than the views an expert brings, though.

This post has ended up with a lot of balancing and equivocal statements, but I feel pretty confident in saying that I would have had to hand-shovel the snow if 4 people hadn’t taken the time to videotape and narrate what they were doing with their own snowthrowers, and it is inspiring to me, and makes me hope that I can also contribute to the array of human skills. As soon as I find my GoPro, I’m recording that tutorial on lengthening bra straps!

From the editorial scrap heap

Heidi Waterhouse — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 20:47:20 +0000

Roughly a hundred years ago, I worked at a newspaper in my teens. It was a small-town paper, with a strangely hybrid tech stack. You typed your story into an Apple computer that had a monitor set on end, to be more vertical than horizontal. You printed the story out, then ran the print-out through a waxing machine, and used the physical paper to do the page layout, a process called paste-up. I’ll write more about how that changed my writing in a bit, but I remember that there was always a drift of sticky scraps of paper, rejected words, on the floor.

Paste-up was its own art form

I’m writing an article for a magazine (I may have mentioned), and I wrote this paragraph in response to a question from the editor, but I marked it as “way too political” and then wrote a second, less-inflammatory paragraph for inclusion. But I liked this one, so here is a little scrap that smells of cheap paper and hot wax.

In 2020, we got some excellent examples of how different approaches to planning, capacity management, and emergency response can make a real difference between a public-health problem and a slow-motion mass-casualty event. Countries that instituted early and rigorous lockdowns, quarantines, and payments have had lower Covid-19 transmission rates and deaths. Countries that had a scattered and laissez-faire response are still in an escalating crisis. Every country has been exposed to a novel virus with pandemic transmission, there has been no way to prevent that. However, the differences in responses have led very clearly to differences in outcomes. We also see that when it is crucial for the world to get a useful vaccine, it’s safer and more effective to invest in multiple branches of investigation in parallel than to put all our efforts into one attempt after another, serially. Pandemic is inevitable, responses to it change the fate of nations.

Sharpen the axe with personas

Heidi Waterhouse — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 18:18:51 +0000

I haven’t been writing much about writing lately, because I have a big! new! exciting! project coming up. I’ll tell you more about that later. However, this weekend I ended up in a twitter conversation about how I get myself unstuck when a piece of writing isn’t working, and I thought I’d share.

Abraham Lincoln apocryphally said that if he had six hours to fell a tree, he would spend 4 of them sharpening his axe. That’s how I feel about figuring out who I’m writing for. Once I can identify who my audience is, what they’re trying to do, and what they already know, the writing usually comes pretty easily.

A sharp axe is safer than a dull one

The problem is that like sharpening an axe, persona-creation doesn’t feel like immediate forward progress.

https://twitter.com/wiredferret/status/1329679812114456577?s=20

Persona is what we say in a design and often marketing sense. It’s a description of a reader/user that frequently includes demographics, job duties, and experience level. I’ve been on teams that created personas, but they are often skewed to product design and not technical writing.

Ichiro and Microsoft

The persona I remember best is Microsoft’s Ichiro. Microsoft has an excellent paper from just before I worked there describing their theory. I can’t find a description of Ichiro, who was from the Longhorn period, but I can tell you about him. His picture was of the Mariner’s baseball player of the same name. He was a mid-level systems administrator, he worked for a small team, and he was the main Windows administrator. He already understood a lot of Windows technologies and networking, but some things, like full-disk encryption, were going to be new to him. He hated being “baby-talked”, but he was also allergic to anything that sounded like marketing spin — he just wanted to be able to set up a test system using minimal documentation and see how it worked before he would agree to roll it out to his users. A lot of the time I do technical writing, someone a bit like Ichiro is who I’m talking to, even now.

A baseball that has seen a lot

Theory of mind

As I’ve read more psychology, I think another way to describe this part of writing is theory of mind. Theory of mind is the ability to understand what another person knows and might be thinking. For example, theory of mind helps us understand that other drivers won’t be able to tell that we’re about to change lanes unless we signal. We know we are about to change lanes, but we project ourselves into the mentality of the driver behind us, and understand that they won’t know unless we tell them. In the same way, persona creation and usage is about understanding that other driver, that person who understands less than we do about the product, so that we can usefully and compassionately communicate with them.

The hard part of this, of course, is that you can’t know what anyone else is actually thinking. They might not be looking for turn signals, or they might be fiddling with the defroster. In an audience-analysis sense, you’re only going to be able to take a broad guess at what they do and don’t know. But still, a broad guess is better than assuming that they are exactly like you. After all, if they were, they would already know this stuff and you wouldn’t need to write (as much) about it.

(Yes, you still need to write documentation for yourself. Have you ever searched on an error and found the answer… and you were the one who wrote it? Give your future self that gift.)

Whose job is it?

That Twitter conversation was really interesting to me because the marketing writer I was talking to assumed that marketing would create the personas and share them with the technical writer. That has literally never been my experience, and I’ve been at this a while. At first, I thought about how great it would be if I didn’t have to do that work myself and could just consume known personas. But then I thought about how marketing personas, sales personas, and technical personas are all slightly but crucially differently focused.

For example, when sales is doing personas, they are trying to persuade people who know about us that we are the best choice. They are frequently dealing with management who doesn’t have their hands on keyboard, but consults with technical experts. They need ROI and cost-benefit analysis, and a high-level view of what we want their company to do. If I go into too much depth about OAUTH, I’m wasting their time.

When I am writing a technical persona, I am imagining someone like one of my friends, who is installing and managing a product they may or may not have helped pick. It’s not their only focus, and they have to plug it into a complex existing software stack. They don’t need ROI from me, they need installation and administration advice. If I tell them how much better we are than that other product, I’m wasting their time.

One of the fascinating parts of joining an early-stage startup is that it is legitimate and useful to care about and understand almost everything. When there were 40 employees, it totally made sense for me to give a sales training in the Mystical DevOps Words. As you grow, though, you need to change focus from breadth of knowledge to depth. My friends, there is so much domain knowledge in sales and marketing tools, trackers, analysis, drip campaigns, CRM… it’s every bit as complex as a development stack. But those areas of expertise are bigger than a person can rightly span. So we silo off.

In the DevOps world, siloing is axiomatically bad, we should all be working on the same product, supporting what we write, launching it ourselves, stuff like that. But in any sufficiently large organization (and it’s not very large), we need to have specialization. The point of breaking silos is not to have everyone know everything, but to have a shared common plane of communication. We need to be able to pass information and products from one area of specialized knowledge to another and get rapid feedback on it.

Silos

Sharing personas is one way for us to use this common plane. There shouldn’t be tech writer-created personas and marketing-created personas, there should be personas representing the installer, the purchaser, the user. But they shouldn’t be created by just one team, they should be created by every team that has experience and expertise, and then shared, updated, and referenced universally.

Where to start

So maybe you’re stuck on writing something and you would like to try this method to get unstuck. Here are some questions to answer to build yourself a persona.

What are they trying to do?
What do they already know?
What are they worried about?
Where do they sit on their org chart?
What resources are they likely to use?
Who do I know in real life that is like the person I’m writing for?

A persona can be as detailed as you find useful, but this might be a foundation. Give them a name, maybe even a stock photo. See if writing to this one particular person works better for you than “writing documentation” in the abstract.

Good luck!

Ergonomics in my middle ages

Heidi Waterhouse — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 16:00:00 +0000

I don’t have hEDS. But I don’t not have it, if you see what I mean. My ligaments have the approximate tensile strength of that one sketchy rubber band you find in the bottom of the junk drawer. When I was a teenager, I once dislocated my kneecap while stretching. When I was 22, I spent months on disability because of a mousing-induced shoulder injury. What I’m saying is I’m maybe not a perfect genetic specimen.

I’m thinking about this tonight because I was trying to clean my keyboard, and I may have wrecked it instead, and I’m extremely particular about my keyboards. Which led me to thinking about how many ergonomic/accessibility changes I’ve made over my career. Each one is totally reasonable and logical in isolation, but then I try to explain to someone why my workspace the way it is, and it just seems like injury stories all the way down.

When I started college at 17, my mom had already had carpal tunnel surgery on both hands. As part of my exciting new college life, I also decided to teach myself to type with the Dvorak keyboard layout, instead of QWERTY, because it involves less hand motion. (The actual studies on this are complicated and contentious, but it’s certainly what I thought then, and retraining a touch-typist to former speeds is merely tedious, not hard)

Heatmaps of keystrokes on two keyboard layouts

I got through college without significant hand and wrist problems, although another kneecap dislocation ended my college volleyball career before it even started.

But then I got the job that crippled me.

I was working for a smallish company, doing a bunch of PDF document production. I was seated in a sort of atrium, and there was a constant cold draft. And I was moving my hand from the keyboard to the mouse and back about every 5-10 seconds. The consequences were not immediate, but they last to this day, and they made me think I’d lost my career just as it was starting. Did you know, that if you have reasonably strong muscles, they can knot up so badly that they dislocate your rib from the spine? Yeah, neither did I. Nor several doctors I saw. It was a long journey to figure out what was happening and how to treat it, mostly.

That’s when I started showing up to jobs with my own keyboard. You look like a dork when you do this, but I didn’t care. Adesso made an ergonomically-curved keyboard that had a centered touchpad, so I never had to move my arm. I’ve bought …. 6 of them? The oldest had PS2 plugs, and the newest a wireless USB dongle. Some people show up to new jobs with favorite coffee mugs, I have a keyboard.

The sixth Adesso keyboard I have bought.

That helped a lot, but it’s not perfect. I got tendonitis in my right wrist, and ended up needing surgery after months of splinting and PT. My left elbow was next, months of PT and cortisone and I still have to be nice to it. I sprained my ankle so badly I was on crutches for weeks. Right this minute, I’m wearing a wrist brace because the laxity in my wrist caused my forearm to tighten up, which gave me tendonitis in my right elbow.

So when I started looking to replace my keyboard, I knew that I wanted the split keyboard with a trackball or touchpad in the center. Most of the cute custom ones won’t work because I sit in a glider rocker to work, with my keyboard in my lap. That’s the most neutral position for my hands and shoulders and elbows and wrists. I’m not wild about how poorly the wireless receiver worked for me, and kinda want to go back to a direct connection. Lossy typing makes me hysterical pretty rapidly. My feet are up on a gliding footstool, because rocking while I write helps me think, so foot controls are out.

For so long, my serious writing and typing has happened at home, so it hadn’t occurred to me how funny my workstation seems to people who are used to putting their macbook on a desk and sitting in an office chair.

My “office chair”, a swivel glider-rocker, footstool, and lapdesk. The monitor arm allows me to swing the monitor to the standing desk, which I use mostly for conference talks and recordings.

The view from my standing desk. Behind me is a backdrop for recordings, and I have also put a backdrop on the wall behind the chair, for meetings.

The view from my keyboard in my lap — a baleful one-eyed cat who likes to yell at video conferences.

Hopefully, tomorrow I will get up and my keyboard will be healed! And if it isn’t, I can go back to one of the older ones, which I keep around because I’m that intense about not using a mouse. But in the meantime, I’m going to go window-shopping, because there are a lot more keyboard nerds than there were when I started this journey, and some of them have some pretty cool ideas.

Advice? Of course I have advice.

Try not to piss off your body in the first place. Keep it strong and limber.
A good physical therapist or occupational therapist is probably better trained in body mechanics than many doctors, even the orthopedists. Ask your friends for references.
Keep doing your PT. For the rest of your life. Mind you, if I did all of mine, it would be about 3 hours a day, but you figure out ways to work it in. I did ankle strengthening standing on one leg in scrum meetings.
Listen to your body. Really listen. Lots of things that aren’t ergonomic best practice may be best practice for you. Or things that you “should” do may be physically uncomfortable. Like “type with both your feet flat on the floor”. (This is me laughing in ADHD/hypermobile bisexual)
No laptop is designed for long-term work, by the constraints of being a laptop. It’s not a keyboard for typing, it’s for looking things up quickly. Please don’t spend all your time typing on it.

In the US, we’re probably looking at working from home for at least another 6 months, unless a lot of things change. So if you have an office job, it’s time to treat home like an office. If you have to work at the kitchen table, can you get a better chair? Can you invest in a real keyboard? Can you mount a monitor on the wall over the table? If you have an office space, make sure you’re not looking down at your monitor, reaching with your arms, or hunching your back when you fit into your furniture.

And on the topic of RSIs and accessibility, let me recommend Josh Comeau’s great post on using voice dictation and eye tracking to code hands-free. If you are able-bodied, remember that’s a temporary condition.

Stay home if you can, stay as safe as possible, remember that good ergonomics are an investment in both your happiness and your health.

Talking about my internalized ableism

Heidi Waterhouse — Sun, 16 Aug 2020 01:28:39 +0000

This isn’t a technology post, or a speaking post. It’s a post about realizing that I’m sometimes my own enemy.

Let’s start with a story about where I’m coming from. When I was 12, I was going on 10-20 mile rides and dreaming of someday biking the STP.

The wine country of eastern Washington, full of rolling hills and empty roads.

When I was 14, I went on a bike camp tour of the northwest and got in a crash doing 30mph. When I was 16, my regular loop was 15 miles and included over a thousand feet of climb. My beautiful bike got stolen in college, and it took me a long time to get back to riding, but I did. When I was 40, I came the closest I’ve ever managed to riding a century – 100 miles. I had to stop at mile 76, and I’m not ashamed to admit I cried.

Tour de Tonka, but not me

Since I was 14, I’ve been fighting “tender hands”. That’s the bike-nerd term for numbness, pain, and tingling from resting weight on your palms. Today I “graduated” from physical therapy, for the umpteenth time. I have tendinitis in my elbow because, it turns out, my wrists are part of Team Hypermobile, and my forearm was trying to keep shit together, and that was straining the elbow. I have weird-ass bike handlebars that let me put my hands a lot of different ways. I’ve raised the handlebar, all sorts of things. When I stopped at mile 76 of that century? It’s because I was literally pissing blood. It turns out my hands aren’t the only tender parts of me. I’ve spent so much time and effort on saddles, fitting, and trying to increase endurance or cushion shock. Many things have made it better, nothing has solved the problem.

I just bought a recumbent trike.

I’ve been toying with the idea of a recumbent for a while now, and wavering between two and three wheels, but the trike seemed like it would be more fun. The problem is my brain, and the stories it tells.

Trikes are for people with disabilities
If you weighed less, you wouldn’t need a special bike
How lazy is it to sit down instead of balancing?
No one will take you seriously as a rider
You already have 3 bikes, why do you need something more?

All of those can be interrogated or debunked, but it got me thinking. What if… WHAT IF it doesn’t matter if I’m disabled enough. The body I have does not work well with a conventional bike to achieve my goals. So change the tool. It is probably still a satisfying accomplishment to propel yourself 100 miles, even if it doesn’t hurt as much.

And then you have to start wondering… why do I assume that exercise should be hard? That something “counts more” if I do it the hard or painful way? Physical therapy is all about restoring my function for whatever it is I want to do, but not always the way I used to do it, because sometimes the way I used to do things was hurting me.

AND THEN I thought about all the ways I subtly punish myself for not being neurotypical, or for being big, or somehow imperfect. Like if I feel like a typo was stupid, I will make myself backspace all the way back to it and fix it and retype all the intervening stuff, instead of just accepting the spellchecker suggestion. WHAT? What is the point of that? Do I somehow believe that punishment will make me type better? Or do I just have old, old scripts in my head about it?

I’m friends with someone deeply into positive dog training, and it’s influenced my thinking about corporate life so much that I gave a conference talk on it. It’s life-changing to think about encouraging desirable behaviors instead of punishing bad ones. Why don’t I feel that way about my own behaviors? Guilt and shame are the sticks I beat myself with all the time.

So this is a small start to working on what I tell myself. Maybe I don’t need to get to an impossible place before I change something, maybe I just need to love “the soft animal of my body”.

By the way, the trike previously belonged to an 80+ year old Lutheran pastor who died this spring. His daughter, who sold it to me, says that if I have any extra-amazing riding on it, I should thank Dave.

I will.

I had also written all this stuff about why you should believe that I am a responsible person who takes care of their body, and sure I’m fat, but I’m hella strong, and all that.

You know what? That stuff is not the point. You don’t have to respect my fitness at all. I have to get along with my body the best way I can, the way that works for me. That’s all I owe.

Plus this thing is just hella fun to ride. Remember go-karts? It feels like that.

This is how the world looks from trike-level

Location, location, location: A perennial discussion

Heidi Waterhouse — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 23:39:58 +0000

Last night, part 87 of a perpetual discussion flared up again. The one about where you live and why it matters. It started with an article by Sean Blanda – Our Remote Work Future is Going to Suck. I encourage you to read the article, it’s not 100% right, but Blanda brings up excellent points about market forces, communication patterns, and the difficulties of moving to remote.

From there, the conversation split into a couple things:

Remote transformation vs born-remote organizations
Money
Co-location as a requirement/limiter

I have this weird view on in-person conversation, because on one hand, I miss it desperately, and it was a huge part of my job, and I am grieving the loss of it. On the other hand, I’m the person who wrote a LinkedIn article about refusing to move to California in 2016.

I’m going to set aside the first part, because I feel like that one is being discussed adequately*. Yes, we have to change a lot of things to make remote work. A lot.

Money

Let’s talk about money. It objectively costs less for me to live in Minneapolis than it would in Oakland, where my company is based. My quality of living is higher with the same amount of money.

I know a lot of companies are talking about adjusting people’s pay if they move out of expensive metropolitan areas and into someplace cheaper, because after all, they’ll be able to maintain their quality of living. That is… so wrong I can’t even with it. It’s the same impulse that has led to us historically underpaying women because women’s jobs were a side-gig, and men were the breadwinners.

Please pay attention to this:

Your value to the company is what it would cost to replace you.

What would it cost to fill a you-shaped hole, and how much will they lose/spend while trying to do so? That’s what your worth is to the company. That’s all.

Now, obviously, if the requirement for replacing you is someone else who is willing to live within commute distance of the office, that’s a premium they’re willing to pay. But if what they want to use your labor for is unique to you and not locationally specific, then, well, dropping your salary because you live somewhere cheaper is a jerk move.

I say that as someone who has been getting paid west-coast software money while living in the midwest. Go ahead. Try to find a Me to hire in the bay area. If you want a Me, you will pay me.

Co-location, or The Room Where It Happens

I didn’t capture the eye-rolling VC tweet about how he’s only going to give funding to people he can meet with in person, and that’s why it matters to be in Silicon Valley, but a lot of us were reacting to that tweet and the hundreds of similar comments we’ve heard before.

Bullshit. Watch me. pic.twitter.com/C3yKwUajcd

— Ian Coldwater (@iancoldwater ) July 26, 2020

And here’s the thing I care about: It’s really easy to be working in technology and not be ~in tech~. And that is hard to remember when you are trying to straddle the lines. It’s like when Extremely Online people are talking about the latest meme, and then you try to tell it to your kids and they aren’t amused because it’s not part of THEIR world.

I built my career here, and it's good.

And living here helps me remember that the vast majority of people doing technology aren't "in tech" in the sense of "working for VC or FAANG".

— Heidi, The Sticker Thoughtleader (@wiredferret ) July 27, 2020

Do you know what the biggest DevOps Days in North America are?

Minneapolis/St. Paul
Chicago
Toronto
Austin
Boston

When I go to these conferences (I’m only missing Austin, and I was supposed to go this year!), I talk to “the usual suspects” — folks I see on the conference circuit, working for vendors, that sort of thing, but I also get time to talk to all the other people, especially in the open spaces.

You might think that DevOpsDays MSP is full of Target people, but you’d be wrong — there are so many people from Target wanting to talk about DevOps that they run internal events. I’m talking to people from US Bank and Jostens and SPS Commerce and West Publishing and Medtronic and 3M and Cargill. When I go to Seattle, I’m talking to folks from Starbucks and Nordstrom and REI and Home Depot. And these people are at a technology conference in their hometown because it’s accessible and might not eat their entire training budget for the year, and because it gets them what they need. 8.4 percent of the jobs in Minnesota are “technology”.

These are the people I think of as “doing tech” instead of “being in tech”. Most of us who are “in tech” are also doing tech, but it’s fatally easy for us to get in a little bubble of thinking that all the interesting problems happen in companies with SaaS-problems and Facebook scale. Nope. There are plenty of interesting problems, smart people, and technical solutions everywhere. They’re just not building the things we are. They have different constraints. They really would love to stop using COBOL, but on the other hand, COBOL works for what they’re doing. Also, if you are wondering where many of the people over 40 and women go when they “age out” of the tech centers of excellence, I have a hint for you.

When we get these think pieces about why co-location is essential, it seems like we’re only talking about a few cities, in a handful of countries. That is bubble-thinking, and it’s what a lot of people from ‘flyover country’ push back against reflexively. And when you think about it, even more so for people from other parts of the world. It’s a terrifying idea to me, as someone earning America Tech Money, I’ll be real.

Counterpoint

Marco made some really good points in his Twitter thread. I don’t want to just hijack the entire thing, but he’s correct that where you live or don’t live is an expression of privilege and it’s not the same calculation for everyone.

It’s one thing to call out xenophobia. It’s another thing when you’re mad at Silicon Valley and you take any opportunity to talk shit about those how are based here. If you think living in the Midwest with a tech job means you’re not the problem, you don’t get what the problem is

— Marco Rogers (@polotek ) July 27, 2020

If you call yourself advocating for global worker rights and dignity, you need to get that shit out of your system. I wasn’t “in the right place at the right time”. I moved myself across the entire fucking nation, away from my whole support structure, in pursuit of what I have.

— Marco Rogers (@polotek ) July 27, 2020

What I think we’ll learn

I think this involuntary experiment with all-remote is going to be really educational, and we’re already seeing some of that.

It has always been possible for disabled people to work from home, just a lot of employers have not bothered to try.
Childcare is not a nice-to-have, it’s essential, and its failure kills women’s careers disproportionately.
We had automatically shaped our jobs to our preferences before this happened, and having remote forced on the people who didn’t want it has felt miserable. And we miss each other.
The important part about co-location is not actually sharing ideas, it’s getting to know each other so that lossy communication didn’t get interpreted badly.

* Blanda says that soft skills will get flattened and not appreciated as much when it’s not possible to witness them. I would argue that soft skills/communication skills are even more vitally important when we are dealing with restricted/low-bandwidth remote communication (as opposed to in-person, not in the technology sense). The glue work may or may not be about remembering birthdays, but it’s absolutely about seeing gaps, helping teams communicate across boundaries, and making sure people don’t get stuck in their own rabbitholes.