Setting the scene for a Coderetreat

Last weekend, I ran Coderetreat (https://www.coderetreat.org) with a colleague of mine, Natalia Zon. It was the first time running such an event for either of us, so we were kind of feeling our way a bit. But one thing we did want to do was to make it an inclusive, welcoming event. 

We knew we needed a Code of Conduct, so we adopted the Berlin Code of Conduct (https://berlincodeofconduct.org). But we went further, and Natalia emphasised why it was important to have such a code. She made it clear that anyone who couldn’t adhere to the CoC was free to leave. And we published our HR Managers email address, so that attendees could report us if they needed to. We wanted to make it clear that we took this seriously. 

When we introduced ourselves, we gave our pronouns too, and then we invited everyone else to introduce themselves, and to give their pronouns too. It’s one of those easy things that can mean a lot. 

Now, we had decided to follow the Coderetreat format pretty closely, so we knew that we wanted people to pair our mob during the day. And we were also both aware of some of the recent controversy about pairing where women or non-White people have had awful experiences. We wanted to avoid that. 

We wanted to discuss how a skills-gap can make pairing very uncomfortable, but we wanted to do more...

I went to Lean Agile Scotland this year, and one of my favourite talks was by Romeu Mourau (https://twitter.com/malk_zameth) on Bordieu’s social theory (there’s a version of the talk here: http://videos.ncrafts.io/video/342450313). He discussed how privilege is invisible to those who have it, and ever-present to those who don’t. In particular, he asked whether this was the kind of thing that 17 white middle-class men thought of when they created the Manifesto for Agile Development... 

So, we decided to discuss this in our introduction. I pointed out that Natalia is an immigrant women, who doesn’t have English as a first language. I’m a white middle-class man, with English as a first language. I have more privilege than Natalia, so there are things that I never have to think about which might dominate her thoughts. And we wanted people to put their efforts into software, not into bottling up feelings. I also pointed out that we’re both White, so we have that privilege over some of the attendees. 

We pointed out that having a privilege-gap can be more damaging to good pairing than a skills gap can. 

Discussing this was a bit uncomfortable, but the outcome was fantastic. Many of the attendees have thanked us for setting the tone like this, and said that it made for a better, more welcoming experience. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SoCraTes UK 2024 trip report

In September 2024 I attended my second SoCraTes conference, and once again, it was enlightening and fun. There are two formal parts to the conference - a training day, and then two days for the unconference. I say formal parts, because there are plenty of informal sessions as well. One of the great things about SoCrcaTes is that we all stay at the same hotel, so there is loads of opportunities for social interaction. You meet people at breakfast, you maybe go for a walk with other people, there are board games and music sessions in the evenings... It's a strange mixture of really intense and very relaxing! There's a lovely Italian Garden at the hotel, which is a very nice place to sit and chat: SoCraTes has a pretty strong XP focus, but there are plenty of non-technical discussions and workshops too.  The day before This year, the conference was at Milton House Hotel just outside Didcot in Oxfordshire. So on the day before the conference, I took the train from Edinburgh to Lon...
Read more

We always start from where we are

Image
Earlier on in this year, I had a really interesting discussion online with Duncan Hothersall about Scottish Independence, and Brexit. I support independence, and Duncan very much doesn't. Scotland is currently about evenly split between supporters and opponents of independence, with a small number of hardcore unionists and nationalists on either side. But many people are in the middle, and weigh up the decision based on the perceived pros and cons. In itself, this disagreement between Duncan and myself is interesting. We share a similar world-view and similar hopes for the future. We agree in many ways on the kind of future we would like to see. But we disagree on how we want to get there.  This is of course a common pattern. We often share a purpose with other people, but we disagree on the tactics or maybe even the strategy for how to achieve it, and there is a wealth of literature on how to resolve such disagreements.  But what I found fascinating was how we both responded...
Read more

Naming things and Cunningham’s Law

Naming things is hard.  Naming things is very hard.  And, in software, we often want to name things when we know least about them. We create a variable that we plan to use later. What should it be called? How should it be used? We only have a vague plan at this point. And plans, of course, can change.  In my mob, we sometimes struggled to name things. And we would then fall into long discussions about what to call a variable. This often felt like bike-shedding, but we wanted a good name, so we carried on talking.  Then one day, we came up with a new plan. If we couldn’t name something within ten seconds, the person at the keyboard would just hit the keys at random and produce a gibberish name.  We would then use this unpronounceable name in the code, and move on.  And, as we moved on, we would have to talk about the unpronounceable thing. So we call it by what is was doing, by how we were using it. And, often, the name would then become apparent.  By ...
Read more