A few weeks ago I made a slightly more controversial change.

The “gender” field in a person’s profile was originally a dropdown menu, with three choices: blank, male, and female. My change made it an optional text field that was blank to start. A wide open frontier! Enter anything you want.

For a while, only a few people noticed.

But now that Diaspora is in private alpha, more people have started noticing – on twitter, in the bug tracker, and in GetSatisfaction, among other places. Some folks have asked why it’s not a dropdown with two options like everywhere else. So here’s why.

…what else is there?

Four years ago, at my first rails job, I worked at a company with a mostly-lesbian customer base. It turns out, in that context, knowing if someone is “male” or “female” gives you almost no useful information. The lesbian community has other widely-accepted categories of gender, but the company’s internal order tracking software — a well-known package from a national vendor — offered only male or female.

As a result, the company didn’t even bother to ask for gender when users created accounts.

That was my first real-life experience with the limitations of the gender binary. It was certainly interesting, but it was essentially academic. Not long after I left that job, though, one of my closest family members told me that he’s transgender. That made the whole subject way more immediate.

Now it’s personal

So in the last few years I’ve tried really hard to understand what being transgender means. I’ve done a lot of reading and talking and thinking about how we construct a gender identity, and how we perceive others’ gender. I’m certainly no expert, having not lived it myself. But I have discovered that my own gender identity is a bit more fluid than I thought. And perhaps most importantly, I’ve gotten comfortable with the idea of gender as an n-dimensional space, with two big clusters and a hell of a lot of outliers.

Then I met Sarah Dopp at She’s Geeky, and we talked about dropdown menus, and it all fell into place.

tl;dr

I made this change to Diaspora so that I won’t alienate anyone I love before they finish signing up.

I made this change because gender is a beautiful and multifaceted thing that can’t be contained by a list.

I know a lot of people aren’t there with me yet. So I also made this change to give them one momentary chance to consider other possibilities.

I made it to start a conversation.

I made it because I can.

And, of course, I made it so you can be a smartass.

a selection of the gender self-descriptions of my contacts on diaspora

Go out and have fun with it.

Diaspora is an open-source social network that puts you in control of your information. As of today, November 27th, we’ve been live less than a week. Here’s a quick overview of the project, and if you want more news, our blog. Thanks for visiting!

In practice, I’ve discovered, it’s another story entirely. After spending the better part of ten days, recently, integrating Facebook into another website, I have new rules for how I use Facebook. I realize they sound a little tin-foil-hat-style crazy, so after the rules I’ll explain a bit about why I adopted them.

Image by CycleDog

Rule 0: I’m not closing my Facebook account. I know a few people who have gotten off Facebook entirely, recently, but Facebook is the only place I’m in touch with my cousins who live out of state, my best friends from elementary school who are scattered to the wind, and my husband’s family who live on the east coast. These people aren’t going to get on Twitter, and I do want to hear about their lives.

Rule 1: I always browse Facebook in a separate browser. If I’m doing my random web browsing in Firefox, then I open Facebook in Chrome (or less frequently, Safari). It’s not sufficient to open Facebook in a different window of the same browser, or a different tab of the same browser. It has to be a different browser. (If you only have one browser right now, you can install Firefox here, or Chrome over here.)

Rule 2: I make sure my non-Facebook browser has no residual FB cookies. I used to just leave a Facebook tab open while I browsed random web sites in other tabs, but that’s incredibly dangerous. If I am logged in to FB, any of those third-party sites could be silently collecting my Facebook information without notifying me. Once I decided to separate my browsing, I deleted all cookies in my non-Facebook browser. As long as I don’t log in to FB again in that browser, other sites won’t be able to access my Facebook information.

Rule 3: I never browse anywhere else in the Facebook browser. I use Chrome for Facebook, so I don’t use Chrome for anything else. Any external links I want to click on from Facebook, I open in Firefox. This can be a pain in the ass because links on FB usually redirect you through another FB page. So in FB, I right click the link, select “Copy link location”, switch to Firefox, paste the link in, edit it to remove the Facebook prefix, and then hit return to go there.

In practice, I do use Chrome for other stuff, but I log out of Facebook and clear all my cookies first. Which leads to…

Rule 4: I always log out of Facebook. They’ve hidden the log out option; it’s at the top right, the last option under “Account.” It’s not sufficient to close the Facebook window, or even to quit the browser you’re using for Facebook. In either case you leave behind a set of “logged in” FB cookies that other sites can read. I always explicitly log out of FB when I’m done.

Rule 5: There is no rule 5.

Rule 6: I never use Facebook to log in to another web site. Any web site can use Facebook as their log in system, instead of (or in addition to) letting visitors create accounts. Most of these sites are not officially affiliated with Facebook. It’s convenient to use FB for this, sometimes, instead of creating yet another username and password to remember.

But it’s also dangerous. When I authorize a site to use Facebook to log me in, that site can then access my name, my email address, all the schools I went to, all my employers past and present, my interests and hobbies, my pictures, my wall, my messages, and my friends. Among other things. And the site may hold on to that data, so even if I change it or hide it in Facebook, it’ll be in their database in perpetuity. Since the site isn’t affiliated with Facebook, it’s not bound by their privacy policy, so who knows what it will do with the information? It’s way better to just set up another account with a throw-away username and password.

Feeling crazy yet?

I am. Or maybe “paranoid” is a better word. Before I started working with the Facebook API, I had no idea how much information was available to third-party web sites. Things I don’t think of as public – including my email address – are available by default.

There are, of course, terms of service that those sites have agreed to, but nobody checks or audits them. It’s trivially easy to sign up for a developer account, create a Facebook application, stick some Javascript on a site, and start collecting the data of unwary FB members who visit you.

The public/private dilemma

Honestly, most of the information I have on Facebook is public knowledge anyway, including my email address. But it doesn’t sit well with me that FB lets third-party sites access information that non-friends can’t see. What else might they decide to share someday – the links I’ve clicked on? The groups I’ve visited but not joined? The exes I’ve searched for?

By keeping Facebook quarantined, I hope to contain the fallout of any future “experience enhancements.”

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go use my hat to make dinner.

It’s not enough.

On Being Smart

Google likes to hire engineers based on how smart they are. Their interviews are full of interesting algorithmic questions and puzzles. If you’re into that stuff, it’s actually kind of fun. They and Microsoft in particular are famous for interviewing this way, but smaller companies do it too. I get several recruiter emails each week for startups where I could work with “a really smart team!!! engineers with ivy league degrees!!!”

I’ve always been “smart” (instead of athletic or popular), and I grew up reassured by adults that in their world, “smart” was the crucial component of success. Imagine my shock when I discovered that it was not, in fact, sufficient.

It isn’t sufficient for software development, either.

What’s Missing Here?

My first job out of college was at Microsoft. The people I worked with were, individually, very, very bright. As a team, though, we could never get traction. The effect was subtle. At the time, it felt like we were making progress. We had a lot of really detailed discussions about different implementation options, and everyone had interesting input. We wrote a good bit of code.

But we never actually finished anything, and eventually, it turned incredibly frustrating. I had been programming for maybe four years total at that point, and never at a real company before, but I already knew I hated writing software no one used.

For a long time after I left that team, I couldn’t put my finger on what went wrong. Clearly, we were all smart. Somehow as a group, though, we were dumb.

“Gets Shit Done”

There were a lot of factors in my frustrating experience – Microsoft’s waterfall process, the ongoing antitrust litigation, and political machinations around the project, just for starters. But I think the same group of engineers in a perfect modern environment would still flounder. There were too many people on the team who, individually, couldn’t finish anything. There was always a good reason why – some new requirement that necessitated a rewrite, or some piece that turned out to be more complex than anyone thought.

As a junior member of the team, I took these explanations at face value. With the benefit of ten more years of experience, though, I know that while it’s important to write quality software, it’s equally important to just fucking finish it.

There are a lot of smart engineers who understand this, and, sadly, a lot of smart engineers who don’t. Microsoft’s hiring process didn’t distinguish, and neither does Google’s. If I were to take a job there, I might be on a team where everyone is smart and can get shit done. There are certainly plenty of those at Google, as their products attest. But I might be on my Microsoft team again, only this time with free food and scooters.

That’s about as appealing as another winter in Redmond.

A few of the talks at GoGaRuCo were crowdsourced – anyone who wanted to talk about anything put their title and description up on Uservoice. Folks who registered got 10 votes each, and the top vote-getting talks were accepted and scheduled.

Out of this came “CouchDB: Perform Like a Pr0n Star” from Matt Aimonetti.

I voted for it, actually, because CouchDB is one of those things that’s the new hotness and I haven’t had a chance to play with it, and besides, he wouldn’t actually put porn in the slides. Right?

The first slide of Matt's slide deck (he has removed the full deck from slideshare)

…..

Well, once he figured out that it was a problem, he’d acknowledge the error and we could move on. Right?

…..

Well, surely the fearless leader of Rails wouldn’t actually condone it.

Hey, I’ve got a crazy idea, let’s make sure everyone puts porn in their slides at Railsconf!

Hey. That was a joke. A JOKE!