DEV Community: Cher

Thirty years of oppressive spiritual cultivation at Apple

Cher — Sat, 18 Feb 2023 09:44:23 +0000

It's the weekend! What a perfect time to go inside the Church of Apple and the living word of Steve Jobs to learn how Apple uses its fortress of secrecy to build and maintain a religion, exploits brand trust to sell everyone Apple, and how Steve Jobs' legacy is not of creation, but of destruction.

Discover who I am, who Steve Jobs is, and how we collided at Apple long after he died as I traversed through a maze of clues he left behind.

Decide what it all means for yourself.

This is a 5-part short memoir. Each portion takes 20-30 minutes to read. Enjoy the Forbidden Fruit of my labor.

Avoiding Hasty Abstractions (AHA programming)

Cher — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 02:28:29 +0000

I have seen a number of posts recently expressing confusion and frustration with the AHA (Avoid Hasty Abstractions) programming principle described by Kent C. Dodds. I've seen it suggested that AHA is redundant and solving a problem that could be fixed by just sun-setting the dictatorial axioms, arguing that AHA is just another prescriptive doctrine, or that DRY and WET were acronyms selected with purpose while AHA was just pulled out of a hat at random.

It definitely wasn't random. I should have explained. AHA is not a compromise between DRY and WET. It's not a dogma at all. It's an aphorism.

There's more than one way to over-engineer a system

Getting hung up on when is the right time to abstract or which is the right abstraction is falling back into the arbitrary trap that DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) or WET (Write Everything Twice) programming principles put us in. DRY is especially troublesome because while we are inherently pattern-seeking, we are also skeptical beings who are most critical of ourselves and to err is human. Is this really different than that last method I wrote? Is this actually a pattern? Did I already write this?

Why are we so self-critical? To keep ourselves safe by triggering the flight or fight response. In other words, when faced with rules that demand adherence, we panic, over-self-scrutinize, the anxiety escalates, and we end up with a haphazard obscuring of data and implementation in a system with ever increasing entropy. In chaotic environments, we are so susceptible to authoritarianism that we recklessly accept increasingly oppressive structure that provides the illusion of order. We don't make fewer mistakes with dogmatic principles, we make more and they are more complex. We're better off with pithy proverbs that allow us the freedom to thoughtfully make mistakes. Mistakes in psychologically safe environments beget order by prompting us to more carefully consider the next solution.

Eureka!

The Aha! moment, or insight, happens when the restructuring of a mental model for a problem triggers unexpected clarity resulting in the solution. Somehow, we know it will work. For insight to happen, we have to develop experience (contemplation, collaboration, Googling the answer, making mistakes, etc) and take breaks to avoid rumination. Rubber ducking and writing tutorials are great methods for disrupting the brain's structure of a problem space.

When I said we should avoid hasty abstractions, what I meant was that we should try not to abstract impulsively.

Thoughtful abstractions are planned. This can happen early—during the system's design—or more often, later, when you need it. Careless abstractions are almost always the result of abstracting for unknown scenarios—or when we code a pattern twice and immediately consolidate it into an abstraction before we've considered if the two patterns really serve a single shared purpose and will continue to.

Don't abstract for the sake of abstracting, but don't do the opposite either! Manage complexity by aiming for simplicity and maintainability with the information you have. Make it work. When it's obvious and transparent to do so: make it better.

To ask why we bikeshed is to ask why the leaves fall. It is in our nature.

Coding in the spirit of AHA is about thoughtful design that considers the entirety of the system in a holistic way. Everything from psychological safety to algorithm efficiency will affect the integrity of the software we develop.

The structure of a system reflects the structure of the organization that built it.

The universe tends to chaos. It takes hard work to create peace and order. Being mindful with not only computational resources, but our energy—and that of our colleagues—is they key to limiting chaos in the programs we code.

Nevertheless, Cher Coded in 2022

Cher — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 20:52:12 +0000

I wanted to make things more inclusive, welcoming, diverse, and equitable for underrepresented people, so I fought for it, while I was programming software.

In 2022, that had work has begun to pay off with laws passing here in Washington state, and with shareholder proposals from $AAPL shareholders being approved related to that advocacy.

During this time, I was pushed out of a career I loved, and have been driven further into a financial hole. I have continued to try to get a job, writing a lot of sample code to prove I know how to program.

I've been told I am not a principal software engineer, didn't do any work at my last job, been called a diversity hire, and even had my existence questioned by a random stranger on HackerNews.

Neverthless, Cher coded.

The Quiet Code: How tech silences with severance and fear

Cher — Sat, 29 May 2021 15:30:01 +0000

Late in the afternoon of May 24, 2021, Tessa Kriesel was informed by her leadership at Fast that the team she was hired to lead, DevRel (Developer Relations), would own Documentation. The day was wrapping up, and Tessa would follow up with direction for the direction for said documentation on the next working day.

Before she had the chance to do that, she was invited to a meeting by a male coworker for a meeting she should have been giving the autonomy to organize. This meeting was scheduled for the following day, outside of her agreed-upon working hours. She was marked as optional.

Tessa replied that she should not be optional on the meeting (after all, she was lead of the team that owned docs, her presence should be required, and encouraged by leadership). As a mom, it's often impossible to compete with colleagues who don't have the job of being the only or primary caregiver. It's not because people who primarily give care to their dependents aren't as dedicated, or are regularly unavailable during work hours, it's because many of their colleagues, in cut-throat competition, specifically work beyond normal expectations, including outside of business hours.

At a company like Fast, where this is encouraged and rewarded, it quickly turns into discrimination.

What followed was dismissing of her concerns, including being laughed at in an email thread by the colleagues attempting to move forward without her.

The next day, she went straight to her leadership about the toxic, hostile environment that she was working in. By 5pm on the day on May 25th, 2021 on the left coast, she was fired.

The CEO laughed at her.

She was presented an NDA (Non-Disparagement Agreement) and was offered $17,000 USD severance, which she struggled with turning down for financial reasons, but ultimately refused to accept.

Later that evening, she started tweeting about the hush money. Peter Grassi called her telling her to remove the tweets.

Tessa's not alone.

In 2017, I left a job that was a toxic work environment at World Wide Technology, Inc. Women around me were overlooked, no matter their tenure, while new developers, both to the company and the discipline, climbed the company in levels. One of the women I worked with had been there for 20 years.

One woman gave a talk on unconscious biases and the majority-male development work force snickered and scoffed for the majority of her presentation. Upon dispersing, I overheard my male colleagues discussing that they weren't real, that the discussion was confirmation bias for what could easily be explained by women's lack of interest and "different biological traits" that made them less likely to be developers. Mind you, this was before the James Damore memo.

We had a meeting everyday at 9:00am. Stand-up. It's that morning meeting where everyone stands in a circle and shares their status update. Fine.

The problem is that my commute made it difficult for me to be at the office at 9:00am. I lived 30 miles from the office, and if there was any traffic, it was impossible for me to get there before 9:30am. Why? My daughter's school started at 8:30am. I asked for the meeting to be pushed back because of this, despite that I would call into the meeting when I was stuck in traffic.

We moved the meeting to 9:15am, and I had to call into the meeting less often, but again, it still happened 1-2 times a week due to the traffic. On these days, I was always the last one to leave, as my daughter participated in an after school program. As long as I left by 5:30pm, I could get to her. I also often ate lunch at my desk, continuing to work. I rarely took breaks unless I had an emergency with my daughter.

Eventually, I was presented with a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan). We had just been given a "work from home day" the week before, as a company, and the stipulations included both that I arrive at 8:30am (which was 30 minutes before the office's working hours, and obviously outside of my availability) and that I wasn't allowed to work from home. The deal was I sign, or I quit. I refused to sign it, as it was discriminatory. They already had an NDA ready for me to sign that gave me one month's pay (~$3,000).

The NDA said that I agreed that I was leaving by my own choice, that I wouldn't sue the company, and that I wouldn't make an "disparaging" remarks about the company. I had to sign it. I had to pay my rent while I looked for another job, and I was in the middle of buying my first home.

The threat of lawsuit also terrified me. I couldn't afford a lawyer, nor did I have the breadth of knowledge or network to inform me that I had a case against WWT, not the other way around.

I ended up filing for unemployment, as it took me a few months to find a new job. WWT fought it, and I made the case with unemployment that they forced me into quitting with a discriminatory PIP. They agreed. WWT had to pay my unemployment. I should have realized then that they had intimidated me against standing up for myself. Bullied me with money I desperately needed to go against my own interests, and the interests of other parents, and especially women, in our industry.

I know it's not just Tessa and I.

Sexism, Racism, Toxic Positivity, and TailwindCSS

Cher — Sat, 08 May 2021 15:32:31 +0000

You might think that these things don't belong in the same article, but here we are, this week in front-end development, having the same conversation that seems to be never-ending.

There's a complexity here that I find is being painfully pushed aside to focus on one thing: TailwindCSS versus... not TailwindCSS.

In defense of TailwindCSS

I want to start by saying that I am using TailwindCSS professionally on a project. It is doing exactly what we want - it's making our development and maintenance of the project faster. To say it "does nothing" is factually incorrect. We are using Ember to build this particular application and the way in which we modularize this application works very well with TailwindCSS.

I want to specifically point out that the "it's WET not DRY" argument is flimsy and wrong. It definitely encourages "AHA" programming, and I find that we are creating components in a smarter way, recognizing when UI blocks have more in common than they don't and splitting them off into their own component.

I also want to point out that while the idea of "separating content from presentation" was once very pragmatic, and may still be for some cases, it's no longer a blanket rule. We're not slicing our front-end development cake the same way we used to, and it's perfectly acceptable that this varies from team to team and project to project.

I do think it's important that we frame our critique and support for technology in a way that makes it clear we understand that while it did or did not work for us, or our team, or our project; we know it's for our case and our reasons are reflective of that specificity.

TailwindCSS is working for this project on my team. That's not to say it will work for you, or your project. And that's perfectly okay.

Sometimes it's simply about what your team's best majority agreed-upon course of action is, as a team, and none of us is necessarily right or wrong. (Even though, I, definitely am, for sure, always right.)
For more on this: Lumpers and splitters

In defense of criticism of TailwindCSS

When I saw Adam Wathan's tweet at Sara Soueidan's tweet of "TailwindCSS: Adds complexity, does nothing" I (wrongly) assumed that this article must be incredibly toxic to warrant such a response.

Link to tweet

The commentary going around about being considerate of the people behind software development (something I absolutely champion frequently) was mainly people standing up for Adam and TailwindCSS with supreme vigor. I thought back to A fucking rant about fucking const vs fucking let and even though I knew it wasn't meant to be taken that seriously, I'm critical of toxic satire, and so I came to const's defense, and I thought that this must be an incredibly toxic article because of the response to Sara's tweet of the article.

Then I read it. While the framing was lacking the nuance I expressed above, and the title is mildly negative in a click-baity way, it wasn't toxic. Not even remotely toxic. The article is a perfectly fine piece of critical thought. It's a great resource (despite lacking nuance) for folks who want to know if TailwindCSS might be the right tool for their project.

The criticisms aren't incorrect or invalid, and they need to be stated. If TailwindCSS wouldn't be good for a person, team, or project, we should care enough about those folks' time and effort to elevate those criticisms so they move quickly to the best tool for the job for THEM.

Isn't that the entire point of creating these tools at all? The name is tailwind... it's not a tailwind if it's going in the opposite direction the plane is traveling. Do we want our tools to create friction and slow people down? No? Good.

Toxic Positivity

As the day went on, I saw Sara's tweet of the article disappear. When I investigated why, what I saw was a Lebanese woman being bullied for sharing an opinion with a white dude in tech and simply linking to it.

Social media has created a culture where we track and measure positive engagement. Actually, positive isn't even the right word. Adoration, favorable opinion, and endorsement are much better words for the kind of engagement we've come to not only expect, but anything outside of that is unacceptable and flat out rejected. I personally feel the need to "like" every single reply to me because I am so worried about giving folks who interact with me the idea that I hated what they said.

It's become so polarized: either you emphatically adore and approve of the things people make, or you toxically hate it. Not because that's what's actually happening, but because anything neutral or critical is now going to ruin someone's day.

While this was the majority of the bullying that Sara received, the response to the article, of course, is far more tame and respectful. So tame, in fact, that the author used it to share that he is working on his OWN tool (because, well, of course he is).

Adam himself stated that he was unbothered by the article itself, but rather held Sara accountable for daring to not only agree with the criticism, but to share that with her audience.

Link to tweet

So while yes, this is toxic positivity, it's not about the critique of TailwindCSS. This is entirely about Sara sharing that critique at all.

Sexism and Racism

While Adam may not be consciously aware of what he's done, his response to Sara is absolutely rooted in his own biases to give the benefit of the doubt only to folks like himself. The criticism is easy for him to internalize and move on from because it comes from someone that he views is like he is. Sara has had to earn his respect and admiration, as a non-American woman of color, instead of getting it from default in-group bias, and anything other than the admiration he gives her is felt as betrayal.

People in majority groups in communities (and, frankly, in societies in general) act incredibly entitled to reciprocity of affections from those who are marginalized in those groups.

Adam's response is a prime case study in this. He expressed how it literally ruined his day that she did not return the same admiration and respect he felt he gave her. And what's worse is that he passive aggressively thanked her for using her platform to accomplish just that.

But here's the thing: while there may be admiration, there's certainly not respect.

A man incited bullying onto a Lebanese woman for sharing a critique of a framework he wrote not for the critique itself, but because she didn't give him the admiration he felt he deserved. That's not respect. That's systemic entitlement.

Edit:

This isn't a commentary on Adam's intentions. This isn't a commentary on Adam's personal beliefs. This is a commentary on the systems we live in which empower a white man in our industry to publicly shame and guilt a Middle-Eastern woman and to expect certain behavior of that woman that white man does not expect of himself, nor of other white men.

Women's History Month: Computer Science Pioneers

Cher — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 13:34:20 +0000

Ada Lovelace — Created the first algorithm intended to be carried out by her and Charles Babbage’s proposed analytical engine.
Rózsa Péter — Pioneered recursion theory. Published and notable for several key works, including literally writing the book on Recursive Functions in Computer Theory.
Barbara Liskov — Liskov substitution principle; Turing award winner; wrote two programming languages; software methodology and language design led to object-oriented programming.
Katherine Johnson — Known for accuracy in computerized celestial navigation, she conducted technical work at NASA that spanned decades. Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom. When NASA adopted the first electronic computers, colleagues refused to fly without her verification of the accuracy of the computers first. Her ability and reputation for accuracy helped to establish confidence in the new technology.
Grace Hopper — Invented one of the first compiler related tools, and popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages. Her ideas and work on her compiler inspired COBOL.
Grete Hermann — Her doctoral thesis, The Question of Finitely Many Steps in Polynomial Ideal Theory, is the foundation of computer algebra. Her algorithm for primary decomposition is still in contemporary use.
Lynn Conway — Invented generalized dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by modern computer processors to improve performance.
Adele Goldberg — Pioneer in GUIs; Developed smalltalk-80 and introduced a programming environment of overlapping windows on graphic display screens.
Frances Allen — Pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers; Thesis Program Optimization laid the conceptual basis for systematic analysis and transformation of computer programs; Papers Control Flow Analysis and A Basis for Program Optimization established intervals in data flow analysis and optimization; Turing Award Winner & IBM Fellow.
Selina Tobaccowala — Cofounded evite as the VP of engineering, revolutionizing and paving the way for online invitation management. Led engineering teams for the product creation of TicketMaster and SurveyMonkey.
Deborah Estrin — Pioneered the development of mobile and wireless systems to collect and analyze real time data about the physical world and the people who occupy it. Associate Dean of Cornell Tech.
Lixia Zhang — Designed Resource Reservation Protocol, pioneered the development of named data networking, and coined the term “middlebox”. (A firewall is a middlebox) IEEE Internet Award winner and IEEE fellow. Fellow of Association for Computing Machinery.
Helen Greiner — Co-founder of iRobot, designed first Roomba. CTO of CyPhy Works.
Cynthia Breazeal — Pioneer of social robotics and human–robot interaction. Designed robot that was used to investigate social cognition and Theory of Mind abilities on robots with application to human-robot collaboration.
Divya Manian — Pioneer and advocate of open web standards. Co-creator of the HTML5 Boilerplate framework, member of the W3C, published tech writer in TIME magazine.
Mave Houston — Founder and head of CapitalOne’s USERlabs. Pioneer in fail fast and often innovation. Learned to code at 8 years old.
Sophie Wilson — Director at Broadcom, Inc. Was named one of The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History. Designed the Acorn Micro-Computer. Designed the instruction set of the ARM processor, still used in smart phones today.
Michelle Simmons - Founded the first quantum computing company. She is literally leading the race to build the first quantum computer.
Coraline Ada Ehmke - Drafted the Contributor Covenant, now used by tens of thousands of software projects, including Linux.

Originally posted on Medium: https://medium.com/@cherp/incredible-women-who-have-pioneered-computer-science-7178df826c8

Disabling click events outside of your popup

Cher — Sat, 05 Oct 2019 20:54:25 +0000

Never inject an overlay div again (unless you want to 😉).

useLayoutEffect(
    () => {
      const {current: menuDOM} = menuRef;
      const body = window.document.querySelector('body');
      if (menuDOM && isOpen) {
        body.style['pointer-events'] = 'none';
        menuDOM.style['pointer-events'] = 'initial';
      } else if (menuDOM && !isOpen) {
        body.style['pointer-events'] = null;
        menuDOM.style['pointer-events'] = null;
      }
    },
    [isOpen]
  );

Nevertheless, Cher Coded

Cher — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 15:40:24 +0000

"Why would anyone ask a girl to tutor them in math? You knew what he wanted."

"You're probably just a designer."

"You got hired because of your tits."

"You're only in the industry because you're the token female."

"You probably only know girl languages like CSS."

"You're not a real software engineer, you only know how to code on the web."

"You're too pretty to be an engineer."

"You don't look like an engineer."

"Who writes your code for you?"

These and other pop quizzes, being the only woman in the room, and being underpaid... for 20 years of math, science, and software.

SheCoded

Hi, I'm Cher

Cher — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 20:19:20 +0000

I have been coding for 17 years.

You can find me on Twitter as @cherthedev

Nice to meet you.