Developer advocate, full-stack engineer, startup co-founder & CTO, bringing 15 years of experience in Silicon Valley, including at Google and Yahoo!. Public speaker.
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UC Santa Cruz Extension
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Developer Advocate at Weaviate, the open-source semantic search engine
A Senior Developer working mostly with PHP and JavaScript, with a bit of Python thrown in for good measure, all on Linux. My tooling is simple, it's GitLab and JetBrains where possible.
Yes there's going to be a level of PR about it, but given the climate and current active global movement on this, there's the fear from some organisations that they may seen to be ignoring the issues for things they have control over, and that make people uncomfortable. The cynic on me also believes there's a solid fear of missing out from marketing departments on this.
Because of where I live, and that I have deliberately spent 90% of my career in smaller organisations, I don't have a network of black developer friends with whom I can discuss whether this is an issue with. I know there's small pockets of racists in the development community, but I know the majority of the community wants to be inclusive.
The current global protests are highlighting and reigniting the negative connotations of various words, and that is going to make people feel uncomfortable. If renaming something will help remove the discomfort of some of those people, then we are being more inclusive.
Regarding the tweet in your post for point 6 - yes doing so id going to cause discomfort too. It's impossible to keep everyone happy all of the time. But if/when all of this settles down, those who were offended or uncomfortable at renaming the branches away from master will likely no longer care. The movement, however, may have stoked a fire in those who found themselves offended or uncomfortable with the terminology master.
Developer advocate, full-stack engineer, startup co-founder & CTO, bringing 15 years of experience in Silicon Valley, including at Google and Yahoo!. Public speaker.
Location
🌐
Education
UC Santa Cruz Extension
Work
Developer Advocate at Weaviate, the open-source semantic search engine
I don't have a network of black developer friends with whom I can discuss whether this is an issue with
No worries, that would be too small and too localized of a sample anyway.
I've looked at the comments here and on Twitter. All back developers I've seen either didn't give a damn on the alleged connotations of the word "master",
or...
If renaming something will help remove the discomfort of some of those people, then we are being more inclusive.
... what if on the contrary, this whole discussion is unnecessary and actually makes black developers more uncomfortable than the word itself (which AFAICT wasn't a problem before)?
Developer advocate, full-stack engineer, startup co-founder & CTO, bringing 15 years of experience in Silicon Valley, including at Google and Yahoo!. Public speaker.
Location
🌐
Education
UC Santa Cruz Extension
Work
Developer Advocate at Weaviate, the open-source semantic search engine
... may be a cheap PR stunt, given the far more serious social justice problems that GitHub has. See point 6 in my post.
Yes there's going to be a level of PR about it, but given the climate and current active global movement on this, there's the fear from some organisations that they may seen to be ignoring the issues for things they have control over, and that make people uncomfortable. The cynic on me also believes there's a solid fear of missing out from marketing departments on this.
Because of where I live, and that I have deliberately spent 90% of my career in smaller organisations, I don't have a network of black developer friends with whom I can discuss whether this is an issue with. I know there's small pockets of racists in the development community, but I know the majority of the community wants to be inclusive.
The current global protests are highlighting and reigniting the negative connotations of various words, and that is going to make people feel uncomfortable. If renaming something will help remove the discomfort of some of those people, then we are being more inclusive.
Regarding the tweet in your post for point 6 - yes doing so id going to cause discomfort too. It's impossible to keep everyone happy all of the time. But if/when all of this settles down, those who were offended or uncomfortable at renaming the branches away from
masterwill likely no longer care. The movement, however, may have stoked a fire in those who found themselves offended or uncomfortable with the terminologymaster.This is just a small change in a very long game.
No worries, that would be too small and too localized of a sample anyway.
I've looked at the comments here and on Twitter. All back developers I've seen either didn't give a damn on the alleged connotations of the word "master",
or...
... what if on the contrary, this whole discussion is unnecessary and actually makes black developers more uncomfortable than the word itself (which AFAICT wasn't a problem before)?
....should have read the rest of the thread twitter.com/Speedkicks/status/1272...
I have. I'm quoting that tweet as an argument that some black developers have been made uncomfortable by the change.