Sarah Mei Profile picture
Software engineer & founder of @RailsBridge and @LivableCode. Currently stirring the pot at @SalesforceUX. Black Lives Matter. she/her
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Oct 4, 2018 12 tweets 3 min read
IMPORTANT: responding to hundreds of boring misogynists has finally led me to a conclusion

✨🔥Benedict Cumberbatch looking disappointed is hot af🔥✨
Oct 2, 2018 12 tweets 2 min read
I am 1000% unsurprised that Kavanaugh's best friend Mark Judge is pro-gamergate. All the nazi assholes we're dealing with now - Milo, Bannon, Breitbart, etc. - all cut their teeth on gamergate.

They targeted women for abuse, spun fake stories about why, & then noticed that NOBODY in charge did JACK SHIT either about their lies, or the harm they caused.
Oct 2, 2018 4 tweets 2 min read
Equality is one of Salesforce’s core values, which is entirely consistent with helping all our open source projects adopt well-thought-out & inclusive codes of conduct.

If you think tagging a random execs into your ranting will get me to be quiet...you don’t know me very well.😊 Hey @CenterPolitical - you missed the exec I roll up to, @btaylor, the group I’m in, @salesforceux, and our Chief Equality Officer, @tony_prophet.

Next time you want to threaten someone’s employment, at least do enough research ahead of time to get the people right.🙄
Oct 1, 2018 36 tweets 6 min read
Men, the best thing you can do today is be quiet and retweet women. Let’s have a day where we wonder where all the men are. If you want more feminists in the world, this advice actually isn't terrible. Having my first baby (while married & unemployed) was my radicalizing event. It was at that point I realized that my wider society wasn't interested in supporting me. So....🤔 A screenshot of a tweet from @PipesAreCallin, wherein they advise me to stop working, get married, have babies, and stay in the house to be more happy, ending with a clumsy insult about how men wouldn't be interested in marrying me.
Sep 27, 2018 5 tweets 2 min read
The pro-bullying Linux zealots were out in force today, mostly while I was away having fantastic conversations with actual people at Dreamforce.

I figure some terrible chan or subreddit must have sent them over. There were so many that I ran out of time to find enough appropriately dismissive gifs. I had to just mute a bunch of them with no gif response :(
Sep 25, 2018 6 tweets 2 min read
I'm working on this too!

I'm also working on using "they/them" when I'm referring to someone I don't have explicit pronouns for, rather than assuming she/her or he/him based on first name & presentation. I'm finding that one awkward sometimes, but mostly in a good way. Another one on my list. I often use "ridiculous" instead.
Sep 25, 2018 4 tweets 1 min read
When I was 15, I watched on the evening news as Anita Hill got up in front of some senators & talked about being a woman.

I'd already been in some of the situations she talked about.

I believed her, because I ALREADY knew she had nothing to gain from talking about it. I have never forgotten how they treated Anita Hill - with suspicion and doubt.

I have never forgotten how they heard about her pain - and then decided it wasn't important.

And I have never forgiven them for giving another generation of boys permission to treat women as objects.
Sep 24, 2018 4 tweets 1 min read
Linus can’t revoke his code - and neither can any contributor who doesn’t like the new CoC. Linux as a product is explicitly designed to outlive any individual’s involvement. Linux as a product is mission critical to the modern world. It will continue to exist, improve, release security patches, etc., even if ALL the current contributors who “hate having to be nice” quit.
Sep 24, 2018 5 tweets 2 min read
I bought this and it is SO AWESOME. Tempted to print some out and leave them in the bathrooms at work, just like I used to print out my anonymous punk rock zines & leave them in the bathrooms in high school 😬 ...just realized that this makes it sound like I’m going to distribute them at work without paying the creator, which I definitely would NOT do. @b0rk does such fantastic work & I want to support it so we get MORE!
Sep 21, 2018 8 tweets 2 min read
SF’s current system for assigning kids to public schools is an opaque and frustrating process that optimizes for parents who 1) can use spreadsheets and 2) have infinite free time to visit schools.

Oh and you have to go through it AGAIN for middle school & AGAIN for high school. There are more dogs than kids in San Francisco, and this is a big reason why. Families that can move out, do, often because of the uncertainty around schools.
Sep 17, 2018 5 tweets 1 min read
Linus is a narcissistic asshole, & his “letter of atonement” is just another egocentric outburst. It’s all about him.

If he really meant any of it, he’ll shut up & spend a bunch of time just listening. Not to his shitty kernel echo chamber either - to all the folks he drove off. There’s no coming back. Any place he’s welcomed in the future will be at the expense of the people he abused & belittled & drove away - over DECADES of abusive behavior.

Many of them will never go any place he goes.

Don’t prioritize Linus’s redemption over his victims’ safety.
Sep 9, 2018 10 tweets 2 min read
I have many Opinions on this, as a mostly-backend software developer who spent the last decade doing increasing amounts of JavaScript, and then the last year firmly in the land of CSS.

My first opinion: Amber is completely right.

I used to be one of those people. However, I get why the CSS cascade is hard. And it starts with the fact that the cascade is structurally equivalent to inheritance.

Even in backend code, inheritance is a tricky technique to use well, & overuse leads to badly-partitioned code and/or shittons of conditionals.
Sep 9, 2018 5 tweets 1 min read
This is a great thread about conflict styles in personal relationships. But it’s really important at work also.

Knowing which style someone is using when you’re having a technical disagreement with them is just HUGELY useful The conflict style someone is using can be pretty hard to determine though. At least for me.

I remember the first time I realized that someone using the “competitive” style wasn’t always blustery and negative and insulting - sometimes they were super chipper & polite o_0
Sep 8, 2018 12 tweets 3 min read
“IBM contributed to the holocaust” was a rather abstract bad thing for me until I read this thread & started to understand that it was deliberate and profitable and _crucial_ to the Nazi’s machinery of death.

More info: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag The numbers the Nazis tattooed on prisoners’ wrists were IBM identifcation codes.

The IBM computers decided where people were sent. I wonder: is this the first big example of using the fence of “it’s just algorithms” to declaim personal responsibility?
Sep 7, 2018 4 tweets 2 min read
Oh look, terrible redis dude is at it again!

His previous hits include “people who point out the gender problem are the real problem” 🙄

Today’s offering? “I’m not racist, I just want to use racist words” 🙄 Gender post, 2012: oldblog.antirez.com/post/different…

Racism post, 2018: antirez.com/news/122

This dude sure doesn’t learn much.
Jul 27, 2018 4 tweets 1 min read
I am about to head to The Middle of Nowhere, Wisconsin (where there are BUGS) and go camping.

😬😬😬😬😬
🔥🐞🐜🐝🔥 To make this even better, it’s a big annual family reunion at which I will know one (1) person

😬😬😬😬😬
Jul 12, 2018 4 tweets 2 min read
Hey @OReillyMedia, why did you add new wording to your code of conduct that gives you a way to eject members of marginalized groups for talking about harassment and threats?🤔 Something like this, that looks neutral on the surface, automatically favors those who are already in positions of relative power - because of power dynamics.

Racism, sexism, transphobia, etc., are built on power dynamics & do not exist without them.
Jul 8, 2018 21 tweets 4 min read
This is a fascinating result! Read the actual study (linked directly below) for a lot of nuance & a thoughtful discussion. Here’s what I get out of it: (1/?) The study looked at what happened at two large companies when they went from divided office space to full-on open (i.e., 100+ folks across different roles in s totally open space with no dividers between desks).
Jul 8, 2018 7 tweets 2 min read
Headed for home after another marvelous @brightonruby. Great talks, great venue, great weather, and of course, as always...great people. 💖 I thought I’d do a technical talk this year about type systems and how they’re starting to show up as a layer over HTML & CSS. Sooooo I wrote that talk, and then realized I’d left out the most important topic: why anyone who doesn’t do that sort of code should care.
Jul 4, 2018 18 tweets 3 min read
Silvio puts a finger on something I’ve been thinking about for awhile, but not articulated before: the slow, long-term shift in day-to-day programming practice from algorithm-centric to API-centric.

Some thoughts on what this might mean for us (1/?) It used to be that day-to-day, being a programmer meant spending most of your time writing code for a system that all fit on your box. Even if it was a network app, like a website, you could start the whole thing up locally to run tests, either automatic or manual.
Jul 3, 2018 18 tweets 3 min read
A lot of folks are (rightly) taking issue with the “low barrier to entry” asserted in this tweet.

I want to explore something a little different - a blind spot that we in the tech industry have, that this reveals. We often assume that the percentage of women graduating from computer science programs tracks the percentage of women entering the industry overall. As in, if 25% of CS grads are women, then 25% of the engineers entering the market that year are women.