Weathering Software Winter

Summary

weathering software winterThis is a blog post based on a transcript of a talk by Devine on November 26th 2022. Watch the video version on (YouTube). The slideshow presentation was made using Adelie. Thank you to Matt Mascarenhas for providing us with an auto-transcript, it would have taken us ages to put this text together without it. While we are grateful to have had the opportunity to give this presentation, an event in 2025 has resulted in us distancing ourselves from the conference responsible for hosting this talk. Below is a text by Devine explaining the situation. Click to expand February 2025. Some months ago, attendees of the Handmade Seattle conference expressed their grievances with the November 2024 conference in regards to its pivoting to include talks with mentions of social justice awareness and a slightly more diverse panel of speakers, at the cost of the usual guy-packs-bytes-in-the-right-sequence talks. Which I have nothing against as someone who tend to give talks of that exact flavor. In any case, the conference organizer apologized for the poor selection of speakers which did not correspond to the expectations of ticket holders, promising to resolve the issue in the following year, and in passing, that free and open source software developers would no longer be welcomed as speakers. I happened to be present in the chatroom when the apology letter went out and merely questioned whether the choice was really about the lack of low-level talks, and not something else. It did not take long for bigots of all sorts to come out and lament the good old days of the conference and soon the chatroom was ablaze with some pretty vile things against trans people, this went on for hours without intervention, the usual. What I did not expect was for the conference organizer, who ghosted me for months, to finally break radio silence to slam me for speaking out and partially blaming me for the unraveling of the conference organization, and decided against covering...