Mr Walé’s Inclusion Fusion Vernacular Spectacular!
or Decoupling from (Bad) Shibboleths in the Developer Community
Link to Slides
A problem with developers is that we often say and do things that are esoteric and treat them as criteria for being a “developer.” This conflicts with the fact that a developer can come any background.
Today I’m going to talk about shibboleths. What’s a shibboleth? A shibboleth is a proverbial line in the sand that determines who belongs and who is an outsider. Many are in programming. Text editors, paradigms, languages, type systems, are all topics of… um…, “vigorous conversation.”
If you want to think about it in terms of middle school Venn Diagrams, the developer community does not do enough to encourage seeing different developer groups as unions instead of as intersections. This can have a lot of different manifestations. Say you're working on a pr