rmurphey

I need to say a few things.

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Over the weekend, there was a tweet announcing that Google was going to provide "scholarships" to qualified women to attend JSConf.eu. There was then a tweet by another person calling this "disgusting" and "illegal." Nicole Sullivan has a level-headed and well-articulated roundup of the back-and-forth and some of the surrounding issues, and I suggest you read it.

I take no position on the scholarships. I question whether they will have any meaningful or lasting effect. I fear the availability of the scholarships will lead to ill feelings about the women who do attend. Simultaneously, I yearn to discover, against hope, that they make it possible for some highly qualified but unknown woman to gain access to the JavaScript community. Whatever. Smarter people than me have a better idea than I do as to how effective they will be, and lawyers can tell you whether they're illegal. I'll stand firmly in the "no" camp on the disgusting count.

You know what's disgusting? Being groped at a conference after-party by a drunk married man. Opening your hotel door to discover said drunk married man stumbling down the hall, asking himself into your room, and literally having to slam the door in his face. Having a video of you posted on the internet, suggesting that you were engaged in a sexual act with the yayQuery logo. Seeing someone ask, publicly, on Twitter, if anyone knows the name of the hot conference chick. That, dear reader, is disgusting.

I adore my male friends in the tech community. They have encouraged and supported me and welcomed me into their inner circles. But even they can act like 12-year-old boys sometimes, and while I don't begrudge them that, it is hard, because it's at those moments that I realize how much I am not them, how much I long to have more than the barest assembly of female peers who have any idea what this is like. And then I remember: those peers I long for will have to put up with so much shit to be in that cool kid's club, and you know what? If Google wants to pay them a measly few hundred bucks to put up with it, maybe that's OK. Hell, maybe they ought to pay them more. Perhaps, as ham-handed and questionably productive as the scholarships may be, it's only fair to pay women to look the other way when some asshole treats them like a thing instead of a person.

I am angry. I have been angry since Saturday, when this all started. I have spent the last year trying to be the thing that I want to see: the woman on stage. I have formed groups to encourage other women to do the same. I have reached out to women who show potential and tried to give them the encouraging nudge they need that no one really gave me. And right this very moment, I feel incredibly selfish. This weekend reminded me what I am asking those women to enter into: a world that presents no tangible barriers, but that will objectify them every step of the way. And if these women have the guts -- well, let's be community-appropriate here -- if they have the balls to speak up and say that it is hard to be a woman in this field, that it takes a thick skin and determination and a willingness to be one of the boys even when that's the last thing in the world they want to do, then they should brace for a chorus of men to rise and tell them they are wrong.

Men, guys, boys: I am not asking you to give up Star Wars and The Matrix. I'm not even asking you to give up gratuitous phallic references and #twss jokes, though I hope we're all grown-up enough to know that there's a time and a place. And you know what? If you want to DM your friend about trying to hook up with that hot conference chick, well, good luck with that. We're all human. But for the love of all that is good: this being a woman in your world thing, it's not easy, OK? Maybe you can't understand it, and I even believe it when you say you don't mean it. But when you deny it, you just look like an ass.

Introducing yayQuery -- A jQuery podcast

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yayQuery 1.0 from yayQuery on Vimeo.

If you'd like a download: mp3 audio (30mb), mp4 video (94mb), ogg video (61mb), Vimeo In this our first episode of the official yayQuery Podcast, Paul Irish, Adam J. Sontag, Alex Sexton and I stayed up way too late on Monday night and had ridiculous amounts of fun talking about:

• Underscore.js, the new functional programming JavaScript library.
• The demise of Thickbox (and some good, modern alternatives).
• Using (or not using) jQuery for mobile development.
• Paul Irish's antipattern of the week: css(key, value)
• $var vs. var (Hungarian Notation)

Perhaps because it was so late when we finished, there was also chair dancing. Make sure you don't miss it, but don't fast-forward to the end or you'll miss the good stuff. This is our first try with this, and who knows what will become of it, but we're very grateful for any and all feedback. You can find us on Twitter @yayQuery, or on the #jquery IRC channel. Enjoy!

Inaugural North Carolina jQuery Camp

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I'm just back from the inaugural North Carolina jQuery Camp at Viget Labs in Durham, N.C., and a couple of people have asked how it went, so I thought I'd write a quick post. I had a whim a few weeks ago to organize the camp; I envisioned an unstructured day where fellow jQuery developers could get together and talk about how they use the library. I figured that since the jQuery Conference had sold out and had a huge waiting list, getting a couple dozen people together on a Saturday in Durham, N.C. wouldn't be that hard. We had around 25 people show up to the camp today, from novices to experts, including Scott Gonzalez, a contributor to the jQuery UI library. True to my (utter lack of) vision, it was a very unstructured day, but productive and fun I think. My only experience with unconferences was at BarCamp RDU just a few weeks ago, so it took me a bit to get into full go-with-the-flow mode, but when I didn't know what to do, I just asked "what do I do now?" and usually someone would tell me. We started out by writing some topic ideas up on the wall, and quickly had enough to get started. I split off with the novices to give an intro to the library, while the main room dug into the topics that had been suggested, starting with a talk by Scott about stateful plugins. Up next was Brian Landau from Viget, showing off the code for his mapping plugin and giving an overview of ScrewUnit; then, David Eisinger, also of Viget, showed us some simple strategies for improving perceived performance. Lunch -- made possible by the generosity of Rich Orris, FireStream Media, Ignite Social Media, and DesignHammer -- was time for informal conversations and demonstrations. Here's Scott and someone whose name I don't remember doing some quality whiteboarding:

We came back from lunch with a reprise of my presentation from the jQuery Conference about using objects to organize your code, minus FAST FORWARD but otherwise largely intact. I was grateful to have more than 30 minutes this time, and we ended up having some good conversation about code organization in general. From there it was on to some great show-and-tell -- people are doing excellent things with the library, and doing them with ease -- and then Scott wrapped up the day with an overview of jQuery UI. Probably the biggest hit of the day was Scott's "just one more thing ..." moment, when he showed us a whole new API for using the position method as a setter, coming soon to a plugin near you. Lots of oohs and aahs about that one. I said at the end of the day that this first camp was really just a proof of concept -- yes, I can get 25 people to show up to talk about jQuery. I'm hoping to do another jQuery camp in January, perhaps. There are a few things I'd like to do differently next time. For one, I'd like to be a little bit more intentional about having more than one session that's suitable for beginners -- a lot of the presentations were super-interesting, but way over the heads of people just getting started. Also, there were a number of people who signed up who didn't make it, which is a shame because I ordered food expecting a larger turnout. I'd asked people to let me know if they couldn't make it, but alas only a handful did. Next time, I think I'll charge a token amount to attend -- say $10 or so -- so people will feel a bit more committed. If they don't make it, at least their food will be paid for! Charging a few dollars will also help reduce the need for sponsors -- not that I don't love the sponsors, just that it was a bit of work and stress to line them up. Finally, next time I'd like to be a little bit more intentional about setting up and promoting the event. This time around, I started promoting it before I even had a venue, and shortly after I secured a venue (thank you Viget!) all the slots were filled. Next time around, I might approach that a little bit differently, especially if I can line up a few different venue options. That's my report. For more pictures, visit Flickr.

On speaking at the 2009 jQuery Conference

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One of my personal goals for this year was to start being part of the solution to the dearth of female speakers at tech events. Though I’ve talked at a couple of smallish local events over the past few months, this past weekend I got to do it in a big way: I presented a talk on using objects to organize your jQuery code to an audience of around 100 people, more by far than I’ve ever spoken to before.

[This post isn’t so much about the talk itself as my first experience with talking at a conference. If you’re interested in the talk, I encourage you to check out the slides, links, and code at the link above.]

I decided I wanted to try to talk at the jQuery conference after I saw the initial very smart, very male speaker lineup. I submitted my talk based on an article I wrote earlier this year, and by the time it was all said and done, mine was the second most popular topic and I was slated to have 30 minutes in “the big room.”

There is something sort of out-of-body about that moment when I am standing in front of a roomful of people right before I talk — I had it when I gave my first Refresh talk, when I taught my first jQuery class, when I spoke at my first BarCamp RDU, and yet again this weekend. For that moment, in my head, I am a complete and utter case, and can’t quite fathom that I thought this was a good idea. And then I start talking, and then it is OK. And then when it’s over, people clap, and I like that part.

Back when I set out to start speaking more, I decided to take an improv class. For six weeks, we practiced being spontaneously funny, and at the end, we got up on stage in front of a bunch of strangers and tried to do it for real. Knowing what that feels like — what it feels like to run up the aisle like you’re excited when really you’re terrified because you’ve never done this before and in real life you sit at a desk all day and talk to no one and what were you thinking? — makes the thought of talking to a bunch of strangers about what you actually know how to do seem like a completely reasonable thing.

My experience this weekend was nothing short of excellent — people I barely knew rallied around me throughout the weekend to help me improve my presentation (most notably Chris Williams, organizer of JSConf, to whom I owe many thanks for all the images — especially the Liger). The audience graciously tolerated the part in the middle where I had to leave the podium to (very publicly) blow my nose. People asked great questions, and audience members gently pointed out things I might want to rethink. With the exception of one creepy off-the-wall comment about my “fine-boned features,” the reaction was overwhelmingly positive.

Reliable sources told me that of 300 attendees, approximately 282 were men. I was the only woman to submit a talk. So this is the part where I encourage other women to do the same. I think women, on the whole (of course there are exceptions), are way more inclined than men to think they aren’t good enough speakers, that they don’t know a topic well enough to tell it to other people. Two truths: one, the speaking skills of the speakers I’ve seen have been all over the map; two, you’d be surprised how much you actually know about a topic, especially given the right audience. Go speak at a small event — a local meetup, a Refresh, even a lunch-and-learn at your office. Get to know the people who do speak at events, and discover that they’re people just like you. Go out on a limb and try something that’s