DEV Community: Tasha Ibrahim

Adding Pronouns to My Slack Name

Tasha Ibrahim — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 14:37:21 +0000

Since deleting my Facebook and Twitter accounts over the past year, Slack has become an increasingly important tool for me to stay connected to my professional network as an engineer.

Recently, I noticed an acquaintance of mine had modified their name to include (they/them) and it inspired me to also add my pronouns. Being a cis gender woman means that including my pronouns is unlikely to have any consequences since "she" and "her" meet people's assumptions. It also puts me in a powerful position to normalize the idea that sharing pronouns is helpful. It's helpful because it helps us avoid making assumptions about other people's gender.

So - I decided to try and figure out how to add my gender pronouns to my slack name in a way that was consistant and elegant.

Attempt #1:

First I tried adding them to my username.

The problem with this solution is that depending on how other slack users have their settings configured for the group they may not see my pronouns. Here is an example of what a conversation looks like for a user that has their settings set to only show the user's full name:

Attempt #2:

Then I tried adding my pronouns to both my full name AND my user name:

But then my profile that shows up when you hover my name looked busy and messy to me with all of the names and pronouns everywhere 😖

I want something elegant! So - this was not the solution for me.

Attempt #3 and success:

Finally, after much mucking around with my full name and user name settings, I deleted my username. That's right - no username just my full name and pronouns!

You'll notice that the username defaults to your full name. So now, my hover profile only has one name on it and my pronouns show up regardless of how users have their slack settings!

Some final thoughts:

I could see how this might not work for everyone. For example, some people like having their slack username match their github or twitter usernames. There could also be circumstanse that I don't know about that would lead a person to wanting a different username and full name. However, I love how up front and transparent my pronouns are now! Since adding them last week, I've noticed 2 other people add theirs and that's a pretty great reward.

On Being a Maker

Tasha Ibrahim — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 16:08:50 +0000

You’ll never be a successful gardener without first killing a few plants.

Growing things and making things is a skill not a talent. As a kid, I remember people talking about what I was or was not talented at all the time. I was a “talented artist“ and a “talented actress“ but I was never a talented student or a talented engineer. The led to a lot of frustration and insecurity when I went to college. In my mind, my success or lack of success was due to talent.

It wasn’t until I met my husband that I learned that very little comes of talent and a lot comes from the qualities he shows every day; hard work, self care, and patience. He's a very unique person.

These days, we expect to have exactly what we want immediately. Entertainment (Netflix), food (UberEats), transportation (Uber or Lyft), stuff (Amazon) is all at our fingertips and on our doorstep within an hour. Living in this new economy of immediate gratification means that it’s really easy to forget that sometimes it takes time to get what you want.

If you want to make something that’s beautiful, delicious, or helpful you’ll have to be ready to embrace failure and iterate based on what you learn. That process takes time and navigating the ups, downs and frustrations of that process is a skill that you have to cultivate through practice. Start making things and you’ll become kinder, more patient, and more skilled at doing just that … making things.

Some thoughts on Deconstruct 2017

Tasha Ibrahim — Sun, 23 Apr 2017 01:38:43 +0000

I'm sitting in the airport at 10pm, exhausted. The past two days at Deconstruct Conf have been a wild combination of amazing, frustrating, and inspiring. As a developer, I'm inspired, as an event organizer, I'm inspired, but as a woman I'm exhausted.

Deconstruct is a technology-agnostic conference beautifully crafted and curated by Gary Bernhardt whom I've never met but seems like a truly lovely person. The concept is that the conference is single track, has no sponsors and a hand selected lineup of speakers with strong track records of high-impact and influential talks. It's a gem in a conference landscape that often feels crowded with pitch-men and recruiters. It was a conference designed by a technologist for technologists who are excited and curious about technology.

The speaker line up was inspiring, and even surprising. As a vocal advocate, I frequently talk about my frustration with the lack of white men willing to talk about race and gender issues or inclusivity but Justin Searls and Michael Bernstein both brushed up against this topic in their talks.

Seeing Suz Hinton and David Nolen speak was truly transformative for me.

Still, despite the somewhat elevated selection of speakers, the lack of women and people of color at the audience was blinding. The absurdity of the situation spiraled quickly after the first talk when 300+ men got up to pee. My gender isn't usually an advantage in these situations.

Restrooms have never been so telling. The first time I ducked into the ladies, it became overwhelmingly clear that every other woman in the restroom was a part of Ada Academy's 6th and 7th cohort because very affordable tickets were offered to Ada Academy which is great! I get very excited about women learning to code.

But - I spent the entire conference feeling very uncomfortable since person after person assumed I was a bootcamp student.

I want to be clear here - there were other women who had been working in development, but they were few and far between. So few, that I frequently felt out of place.

The speaker I'd been anticipating most was Jenn Schiffer. Usually I'm laughing at my computer with my very comforting headphones on when watching her talk. My partner is amazing and he's always telling me you can't worry what others think of you. Despite his voice in my head -- my laugh felt so loud since looking around, my colleague and I were the only women for rows and rows.

JENN SCHIFFER IS BRILLIANT AND HILARIOUS her humor is unapologetically gendered and very expressive of a woman's experience. I thought long and hard about giving a standing ovation but the previously mentioned exhaustion had already kicked in and was fed further by my ballooning insecurity. I regret that I remained seated.

It's easy to complain about the power structures that are fed by exclusivity in tech and in the world at large. However, I truly believe that exclusivity is a tool that can be used to good effect. It's a tool that can be used to exclude people who are hurtful or negative and it can be used by affinity networks in order to create safe spaces for women and minorities to communicate. It can also be used to draw like-minded people together.

The thing that I'm still working to understand is how exclusivity played out for Deconstruct. On one hand, my impression is that most of the audience learned about the conference via word of mouth and personal networks which resulted in a pretty monolithic crowd. On the other hand, that crowd was self-selecting, and from what I can tell it was full of thoughtful, growth-minded developers. I've been harassed, dismissed, and typecast in the tech community for years, but overall I felt relatively safe at Deconstruct. But feeling safe and feeling included and comfortable are not the same thing.

What Gary is doing is fantastic - there are rough edges and really big questions that need to be asked, and this post is not intended to be a criticism. These problems are systemic. My hope is that next year we might be able to hack the system a bit.

Next year, I'd love to see some of the amazing women of color in our industry added to the stage.

Also - I challenge every one of this years attendees to encourage someone who doesn't look like them to attend next year. The line up is there - it's solid and a great start at being inclusive but as a community we have work to do.