Author: JGadmin

Please Hold

Most of the time, I work on accessibility projects – either as part of my job or volunteering for non-profits. It’s usually auditing or sometimes a bit of front-end web development. But a while back I had an opportunity to do something different: I made a small web site which was featured in a short film. Not a website for the film, but a website in the film.

The film is called Please Hold, written by KD Davila and Levin Meneske, and directed by KD. So far it has screened at a bunch of film festivals around the USA and the world. Along with winning a bunch of prizes, it took the honours for Best Short at the Florida Film Festival, which qualifies it to be submitted for Oscar contention. We just found out last week that it made the shortlist for the Oscar’s live action short film category, along with 14 other short films! We’ll find out in a month or so if it gets nominated.

My husband Dave is a VFX guy and was helping out KD and Levin with this project. One of the things they needed was an interface for a prison system. It was going to be put on a big screen inside a prison cell, and the lead character would interact with it to make phone calls, order meals, and so on. In the past, Dave has found that doing this sort of stuff as a visual effect makes things difficult for the actors. They have to imagine what might be there and how they’ll interact with it, and that’s on top of doing their main job of acting the lines and directions that are needed for the story. Since there was going to be a screen there anyway, why not put an actual interface on it? Then the actors could just treat it like a prop instead. He suggested that I build it, based on the designs they’d already had drawn up by Youthana Yous.

I was pretty excited to make a site that wasn’t for work purposes. Then I read the script and I was super-excited – the story is very zeitgeisty, about automated systems and civil rights. It’s also darkly funny, in a low-key ironic way. Pure Julie bait!

A police drone hovers in front of the face of a young man.
One of Dave’s VFX shots

Dave was my art director and gave me heaps of good advice on usability aspects that would only come up on a film set. It’s a very different use case than I’m familiar with! And my friend Amy Kapernick was tech support for the film crew during the actual filming. Dave and I had scheduled a wildflower trip that just happened to overlap with the time that KD and Levin had to film in LA. We were in and out of mobile phone range with barely any internet, so Amy was on call to make any last minute adjustments they needed.

We got to see the short on the big screen during Perth’s 2021 Revelation Film Festival, as part of the Slipstream and Sci-fi Shorts session. (I also really liked the short “Dry Fire” which is an Aussie post-apocalyptic story with a deaf protagonist.)

Unlabelled icons of a phone, person, shopping bag, etc over a gentle cloud background.
Correcticorp home page

The site itself was easy and fun to make. It was designed to look like a voice-controlled interface built cheaply by a giant corporation. I got to use a lot of vw and vh units and fake a bunch of page transitions.

I also got to animate the background and buttons in a fun and over-blown way. Normally I’m all about subtle animations, with the idea that if you do them right no-one will consciously notice them. But these needed to look animated from a standing distance, rather than if you were seated at a desktop or holding a tablet. So I took a bunch of animations from Animista.net and dialed the effects up to 11. On my computer they look like way too much, but in the film you can barely notice them, which is perfect. The site is just set dressing or a plot device, it shouldn’t distract you from the people.

5 options for meals, with an image, price and short description. Cheapest is a single carrot, most expensive is a lobster dinner.
Correcticorp dining menu

The site doesn’t have a proper navigation menu, since it was designed to look like a voice interface. But it had to be controlled remotely by a crew member to make sure all the actions relevant to the plot happened at exactly the right time. So I made a kind of site map page, with instructions for how they could hide cursors and use F11 to make it full screen.

Another feature was to use editable areas in some places, so the crew could adjust the amount of money in the lead character’s bank account. I also made a few extra variations of pages, just in case, and some blank pages so they could use visual effects to put whatever they needed on top. These were used to show Scaley, the automated legal advice service – like Clippy or a chatbot, but more annoying because your freedom is at stake.

There were also hidden controls to start and stop animations that have to run while the lead actor is playing his role. I’ve always wanted to make secret controls on a site so this was more fun for me than you might expect.

A bank balance and transactions list, with an extra popup menu for buttons that start and stop animation of the bank balance.
Correcticorp banking with my ‘secret’ controls

If we’d had more time, I’d have learned just enough React or Vue to make the page transitions easier. A bit more time for re-factoring would have been handy, but that’s the same for any project.

If I were to do it again, I’d make more editable text areas. Those take 30 seconds for me, but might have been very useful to let the director and crew adjust things on the spot. And I’d add a settings menu to make changing the appearances of things easier for the crew.

And before you ask: no, the site is not fully accessible. It works with a keyboard because that’s just how I build things, but the contrast is low, nothing has a visible text label and the animations would definitely fail WCAG. I reckon this makes it more authentic – a money-grubbing corporation profiting off human misery wouldn’t bother to have an accessible digital product!

After awards season is over, Please Hold will be available… somewhere! Online, probably. I’ll post a link when that happens, because apart from being proud of my tiny contribution I really enjoyed the film. So I reckon everyone should give it a watch when they can.

 

Resisting Facebook

After reading How To Do Nothing, I decided that I should do a regular spring clean of my Facebook account. I’d like to close my account altogether, but it’s the only way I have of keeping in touch with some people.

What I’ve done so far:

  • Installed a privacy thingy on my desktop computer (I already had an ad blocker)
  • Unfollowed and unliked all the brands I was following
  • Unfollowed news sources (except for The Chaser)
  • Hid the trending topics
  • Unfollowed a bunch of people I only slightly know (nothing personal if that was you!)
  • Checked all my profile settings on phone and tablet
  • Put a reminder in my calendar for a year from now to do a spring clean

I’m assuming that since I’m not perfect, I’ll end up following a few more brands and will need to clean them out every so often. And Zuckerberg loves to change the settings, including overriding your preferences, so I’ll need to keep an eye on them.

What I’ll be trying to do from now on:

  • Post jokes, or updates on what I’m up to, or cool things I’ve found outside of FB. No hot takes on politics or celebrities!
  • Avoid engaging with clickbait that other people share
  • Only checking once a day

This will not bring about the downfall of Facebook.But I reckon it’ll help reduce the time I spend there, and make it a bit more pleasant.

Canvas, HTML and the future of the web

A few months ago Google said they were going to start using the canvas element to render the content in Google Docs, instead of the full set of HTML elements. They’re already testing it, and are finding that it gives them performance improvements.

A chess board with a hand using a white king to knock over a black king.

Accessibility

Of course, the accessibility community is worried about this. The <canvas> element is a black hole for the accessibility APIs – information goes in but doesn’t come out. So assistive software like screen readers or switch controls or speech recognition can’t tell what’s going on in there, and therefore they can’t provide support to the people who need it.

I’m sure Google can make Google Docs accessible though. They’re already looking at something similar to the shadow DOM, I believe. And they’re working on an Accessibility Object Model (AOM, link goes to the draft specification), a kind of partner to the DOM. I’m not so keen on the side DOM based on my experience of the shadow DOM so far. But I’m interested in the AOM as I think it has a lot of potential. And honestly: you can make anything accessible if you’re willing to put enough time and energy into it. Google certainly has the resources to do this.

My fear is that just like a bunch of other tech “innovations”, accessibility will be treated as an edge-case which can be fixed with a plugin or by turning on a setting. Google really should take a note from WordPress and Gutenberg – they assumed that accessibility could be added later, like a nice-to-have feature. But bolt-on accessibility is never as good as when it’s considered from the very beginning. It’s always patchy and poor quality and needs workarounds to get basic functionality happening. And people with disabilities shouldn’t need to run campaigns to remind developers that they exist and have the right to access digital information.

I don’t think this will matter too much in the end. Google will bolt on some access, and the performance improvements of a fraction of a second per document will be worth it because of the sheer size of the thing. They had a billion users several years ago, I can only assume there are billions of documents too, so it all adds up for them. Google Docs isn’t great for accessibility as it currently is anyway, so most likely it will just change to a different flavour of awkwardness.

But then you’ve got the question of power. As Matthew McDonald says in Can Canvas Rendering Replace The DOM?:

…it centralizes the power in the hands of the app. If you control the pixels you can do anything — bypass automated tools, defeat adblockers, restrict browser features like search and text copying. It’s a JavaScript-flavored reincarnation of Flash or Silverlight, without the installation requirement or compatibility questions.

He’s a lot more cheerful about this than I am, and predicts that this move will lead to huge changes to make writing web apps more like writing native software.

My underlying concern is how many other web developers will move to rendering whole sites in <canvas> just because Google Does It, so it must be the best thing. We’ve already seen the shift from static and database-driven sites changing to full reactive state frameworks because Facebook Does It, even though hardly any of those sites benefit from it. But the chances of all those devs doing the same amount of work on accessibility as Google is pretty slim. They won’t have the staff, time or skills, they’ll just plonk down a drawing of some text, add the latest in advertising tech, and call it a day. Then it will be the new standard just because it’s the most common way to do things.

Gatekeeping

Part of why I’m assuming the tech bros will try to leap to <canvas> is because I feel like all the big corporate Computer Science folks are super excited to ditch HTML and do “real” programming instead. Any day of the week you can find people complaining about how terrible HTML and CSS are because they were only invented to present documents, but real applications have much more complex needs. You can do all sorts of fancy programming and treat the <canvas> element as a compile target, with the bare minimum amount of time spent writing HTML.

It smells a lot like gatekeeping to me – people who have invested a lot of time, money and effort into something don’t want other people to be able to just show up and do it for free. So they pretend the tools that are easy to use are inferior, and so are the people who use them.

That kind of attitude can be easily taken advantage of by corporations who want the word “internet” to be replaced by “Google” or “Facebook”. They promise developers the power to change the world, while they try to control as much of it as they can. Walled gardens are back and although they’re more sophisticated than AOL, they’re still a poor imitation of what the internet could be.

Because the beauty and promise of the web is that you don’t need a Computer Science degree to make a site. HTML and CSS are easy to learn even though (like chess) they can take years to master. If your HTML has mistakes, the browsers will make a guess at what you mean instead of throwing errors. CSS will just ignore anything it doesn’t understand and move on to the next line. Anyone can have a go.

You don’t need to wait for some corporation or Rupert Murdoch to give you a platform – a cheap hosting plan and a free text editor and you can DIY your own crappy site where you can say what you want. Yeah, it’s mayhem out there. But it’s also given billions of people a path to international communication.

It’s a bit like when digital cameras came out – a lot of professional photographers complained about the devices, complained about the quality of the photos and laughed at the terrible mistakes made by all these new photographers. Meanwhile, millions of people had a new way to express themselves and communicate. Flickr didn’t really survive the transition to responsive design but for a few years at the beginning of the digital photography era, it was amazing. You could see the whole world in your browser, when before it was just a whole lotta text.

Putting the means of communication and art into the reach of more people doesn’t mean we don’t need professionals or native software. If you want to make software and complex applications, that’s very cool and I’m very grateful. Some of my favourite web sites are web apps! But just because software engineers have particular requirements, doesn’t mean that other tools are worthless or outdated. The web should be flexible, accessible, ubiquitous and open. That might mean a trade-off of performance, or style. But simple, robust tools which can be used by anyone are still powerful and disruptive. Even when, or maybe especially when, they’re not “elegant”.

Credits: Photo by GR Stocks on Unsplash

How To Do Nothing – Jenny Odell

Book cover with white text over a photo of a flowering hedge, all green leaves with pink, red, white and yellow flowers.This is less of a review and more of a set of notes on Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. The title makes it sound like it might be a how-to book or a Luddite diatribe, but it’s not. It’s more of an exploration of the ways we could reframe our thinking, and it’s written in a “form meets function” kind of way. As she says in the introduction:

“Less a lecture than an invitation to take a walk”

Odell lays out the familiar problems with social media. It pushes us to constantly be online, demands that we participate in the hype of the moment, and puts humanitarian crises on the same level as someone’s new shoes. It distracts us while our attention is monetised for someone else’s benefit. And it creates a context collapse, so that we become the blandest version of ourselves.

If the little drips of negative effects of distraction accumulate, we don’t do what we want to do each day. Many days of this lead to us not living the life we want, or even having capacity to know what we want.

Whenever this topic comes up, people say we should delete our social media accounts. As Odell points out, that’s quite a privileged take. It assumes that you have enough social capital that people will seek you out offline, or that someone else will take care of your social life (I’m thinking particularly of married men who “let” their wives handle that for them then are lonely when she leaves him or dies). And it ignores both the fun and useful aspects of socialising online, plus the way that the internet has enabled people to make genuine connections and raise awareness of real problems.

Another frequent suggestion is to do a digital detox, a temporary break to refresh ourselves. But digital detoxes are usually marketed as a way to take a break so that we can return to work more productive than ever before. What if we don’t want to take a break from the endless now of social media just to get better at grinding our way through a capitalist work life?

Odell says that history shows that a better way forward is to resist rather than retreat. We need to develop our skills for thoughtfulness so that we’re not pushed around by the demands of the attention economy. And we can try to be too weird and difficult to be consumed by Mark Zuckerberg!

Some ways of training ourselves to do this are to get into art and nature, as hobbies or just by going for walks. Both art and nature are difficult to manipulate and monetise, and so to enjoy them we have to actively change our perceptions. Once you start paying attention differently, you can become engaged with what’s right in front of you. If you connect with the people and wildlife around you, and learn the history of your place you live, you’ll have more challenging and interesting things to do than sit back and be spoon-fed smooth algorithmic content.

Odell reckons, and I think I agree, that if we can manage that we’ll be genuinely refreshed and have time for contemplation. By doing what the attention economy considers “nothing”, we might just be able to put our attention towards big problems like civil rights, and climate change.

This is a pretty rough summary. If any of this sounds interesting to you then you absolutely should read the book. You might get a different set of ideas from it than I did.

Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. – Gilles Deleuze

Interesting stuff mentioned in the book, mostly art

Woodcut style poster, of someone working, sleeping and reading in a boat
The old union saying “8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, and 8 hours for what we will” was started by the Federation of Organized Trades & Labour Unions. This image is linked to Ricardo Levins Morales Art Studio, where you can buy it as a poster.

Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality – Robert Louis Stevenson

Added to my to-read list

Programmatic advertising, a summary

Cover of the book, which looks like it's covered in text-only banner ads with little close iconsRecently I read Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang. I was hoping to find out if advertising was the reason for social media changing from chronological posts in your timeline to a grab-bag of algorithmic bullshit. I didn’t get an answer to that question, but I did get a shock about how fragile the digital advertising economy really is.

Most of the information in this post comes directly from Hwang’s book or articles I looked up from his bibliography. If this topic is relevant to your work, I strongly suggest you read the book instead! If you’re local to me, you can borrow my copy. Or if you prefer audio, there’s a great interview with Hwang on the Freakonomics podcast.

What’s the problem?

These days, most digital advertising is programmatic. This means that people with things to advertise buy slots on websites via a trading system that runs a lot like the stock market. Hwang explains how that came about, then suggests that the current programmatic ad market has a lot of similarities to how the stock market was running just before the Global Financial Crisis. The features he reckons they have in common are:

One factor that Hwang touches on a little, but I’ve seen discussed more in web developer chats, is the performance cost of all the data-gathering. Most big-name websites have dozens of advertising trackers to find out when a page is loaded, who’s loading it, what else they’ve looked at today, and what demographics they’re part of. That information then gets fed into the stock-market of advertising to help all the third-parties bundle and re-sell your attention. There’s no evidence that this improves ad targeting (PDF), either in the relevance of the ads you get shown or the likelihood of you buying the product. But it creates a lot of jobs and opportunities for fraud so hey, why not take an extra 7 seconds to load the page?

So what can we do?

Alternative 1: Get rid of online advertising

This is kind of the scorched earth option. If current advertising sucks, why not just ditch it altogether? The problem with this is that someone has to pay for content authors and design and hosting, etc. If advertising isn’t paying the bills, who will? It’s not a huge stretch to guess that a lot of sites would move to a paid subscriber model.

Given that so many sites are dependent on Facebook and Google for traffic, they have a lot of control over how this plays out. They’ve never given half a damn about democracy or equal access before, and they’re always looking for another way to make a buck. So a two-tier internet for the Haves and the Have-nots seems like a real possibility here. And as soon as that happens in any other market sector, you get predatory businesses trying to scam or take advantage of the Have-nots (see: pay-day loans, pawn shops, US health insurance, etc).

So I’m not keen on letting go of advertising altogether.

Alternative 2: let the industry sort it out

Hwang reviews the current attempts by Google, Facebook and the advertising industry to fix this. The short version is: hah! as if!

They’re all getting rich from programmatic advertising and will survive just fine even if there is a market crash. They’re just tinkering at the edges to look like they’re trying. Their efforts aren’t designed to make any real, lasting change.

I don’t think we can afford to wait for the advertising industry to grow a conscience.

Alternative 3: Gently deflate the market bubble

Hwang says that instead of waiting for the financial bubble to burst, we could attempt a controlled demolition instead. His suggestions seem pretty good to me:

  • independent research – currently all the research into programmatic advertising is done by Google, Facebook and marketing companies, usually via astroturf “industry associations” staffed with their mates and full of lobbyists. We need to fund truly independent research into the value of digital advertising, the impact of ad blockers, the amount of fraud, and so on. Without an accurate picture of the situation we can’t do much at all.
  • whistle-blowing by employees who know their bosses are committing fraud or covering up inconvenient facts. For this to have an impact, we (the general public) have to follow up on scandals and demand punishment and prevention.
  • regulation to prevent a crash. As with the stock market, large financial transactions should be monitored for fraud and have regular health-checks.

We’re seeing some efforts in the US and the EU towards regulation. Usually politicians aren’t up-to-date on technology, but with solid support by the tech industry (the parts of it who care about ethics and long-term stability, at least) they could really help. I’d certainly trust politicians like Elizabeth Warren or Katie Porter in the US, or people like Scott Ludlam and Senator John-Steele here in Australia, to do their homework on this and make some good changes.

I’d add one more suggestion: that people buying advertising space do an audit of what they’re spending on. There’s been a few examples lately of brands reducing their daily ad spend by checking conversions and blacklisting sites that aren’t brand-friendly (i.e. racist blogs, Covid disinformation, etc). And getting rid of fraudulent vendors didn’t reduce effectiveness for Uber (podcast without a transcript, but the page gives a summary). At least this way the clients aren’t contributing to the inflation of value.

Alternative 4: Get rid of the “programmatic” aspect

Hwang also suggests that the programmatic stock-market model of advertising isn’t necessary, and we could go back to category advertising. I was already persuaded of this idea. Category advertising is where you say “I have a website for people who geek out about productivity software” and so you sell ads to businesses that sell productivity software and related things like cool notebooks and pens, office furniture or all those everyday carry tools. You don’t need to know my age, gender, postcode or eye colour to know that as a productivity geek I will always be interested in buying far too many pretty notebooks.

I know that the only two ads I’ve ever clicked on deliberately were from The Deck, an advertising platform which is now sadly closed. They did the sort of category style advertising which isn’t common anymore, and the ads were always simple yet effective. Maybe they had a style guide or constraints on what their advertising partners could do? Anyway, I deliberately whitelisted sites that used The Deck so my ad-blocker would let them through. And one of those two times I clicked an ad, I bought a really great product that I’m still a customer of today.

A more significant example is NPO, a Dutch broadcaster (like the BBC or the ABC) who got rid of advertising cookies to avoid the hassle of complying with the GDPR. They still auctioned off their ad space, but buyers got information about the page being viewed instead of the person doing the viewing. Their digital revenue is up.

This also seems to be backed up by a detail that Hwang briefly mentions: when HotWired started putting banner ads on their sites in 1994, click-through rates were 44%. Nowadays clickthrough rates are more like 0.5%. Not all of this can be put down to the change in advertising techniques, but surely some of it can?

So what next?

I’m a big fan of options 3 and 4 above. But I think we have to move quickly on it, and I don’t actually have any control over any sites with advertising or products which need marketing. This makes my support a bit theoretical 🙂

I figured I’d write up a blog post though and see if I could persuade other people in the tech industry to start looking into how advertising is working for them. Is your current setup helping or harming your work?

Conference captions

Unn points to one of the screens used to display the captionsOne of the most considerate features of CSS Conf AU and JS Conf AU was the live captioning. There were three large TV screens in the main theatre, displaying live captions of what the speakers and MCs were saying. The captions were provided by Lindsay Stoker of White Coat Captioning. I stole the picture of Unn with the captions from Jonny!

I wish live captioning was more common at large events. Apart from enabling Deaf and hard-of-hearing developers to get the most from the talks, I noticed heaps of other people who were grateful for them too. Some of the reasons I heard or saw in the event hashtags were:

  • People with English as a second language were able to understand all the speakers more easily
  • Audience members more easily understood the accents of speakers with English as a second (or third!) language
  • People with attention issues (and those who got distracted by their phones!) could keep up with what was being said

I’m also guessing it was easier for the organisers to provide captions for the videos of the talks too.

So if you’re undecided about paying for live captioning at an event, I hope you’ll decide to go for it. It really does help so many people get maximum value from the speakers you’ve worked so hard to present.

CSS Conf and JS Conf 2018

Last December I found out that my proposal for a talk at CSSConfAU had been accepted. I was so freakin’ excited, you wouldn’t believe. CSSConfAU has a deservedly great reputation as being an excellent conference, and I’d be able to stay for JS Conf AU as well.

Lincoln the echidna tries to get into the food bucketSo on the 17th March I packed my bags and jumped on a plane to Melbourne. I had time to see my sister and her family before the conference events started. On the Sunday there was a speaker activity day – we started with breakfast, then went to Healesville Sanctuary (highly recommended, I got to pat an echnidna!), then on to a winery. I got to know a bunch of the other speakers and get excited to see their talks. On Monday I met up with friends and rehearsed one more time before getting an early night.

CSS Conf AU

Tuesday was CSS Conf AU. One of our speakers wasn’t able to enter the country (thanks to our racist Immigration Department, I’m guessing, although I don’t know exactly what happened) so I was speaking a bit earlier than I’d planned. I got to the venue in time to grab a coffee and say hi to people before the other talks started).

I enjoyed all the talks but the ones that were particularly useful to me were Jeremy Wagner’s on responsible web fonts, and the one-two punch of cultural talks from Teresa Ma on communication between designers and devs, and Ivana McConnell’s on respecting the expertise and passion of developers who took a different path to the stereotypical computer science degree.

Me on stage, wearing a headset mic and looking all professionalI think my own talk (on using CSS to support users with low vision) went well. I didn’t fall off the stage or forget any major points, so I’m going to claim it as a huge success! But people said I gave them practical, easy-to-apply advice which is always my main goal so jokes aside, I’m glad people found it useful. Also Kevin Yank took a nice photo of me so I’m stealing it and putting it here!

There was a fun, relaxed after-party at the venue with board games and video games as well as drinks and dinner. Amy and Patrik managed to tie in a game of Ticket To Ride, and the Perth gang crammed ourselves into a photo booth which was hilarious to us and probably worrying to the photo booth staff.

JS Conf AU

The next day was the first of JS Conf AU, but I missed the morning sessions because I had to finish preparing for another talk at a meetup that night. I did get there in time to see Suz’s talk about the new and still evolving WebUSB API. I love poking at hardware as long as I don’t have to acheive anything practical so it was super interesting to me. (Note to self: finish blogging about Stranger Strings!).

There was a party that night as well but I headed out to the Melbourne Junior Dev meetup with Mandy, Jess and Amy. LJ had claimed us to give talks at her group once she realised there was a gaggle of Perth devs visiting the same week as her meetup was on.

Junior Dev meetup

Me, Mandy, Ash, Amy and Jess all squished in for a picture together Junior Dev in Melbourne is a great group and I really enjoyed myself. I gave a talk about Accessibility Basics that went way too long, and no-one threw eggs at me for that, so they’re clearly a wonderful group of people. The juniors asked me a bunch of great questions during our hang-out time afterwards, which always makes me feel like I’ve done a good job. Amy talked about how she was using CSS Grid in production, and Mandy showed her amazing text effects. I hope everyone had a good time!

Back to JS Conf

I was able to make it to all of the second day of JS Conf AU. I particularly loved Madleina’s talk on raytracing in Javascript (difficult stuff!), Tim’s speedrun through the concept of generated art, and Brittany’s talk on helping juniors (and ourselves) by writing better error messages for our tools, and raising bugs/issues when we come across any which could be improved. I think following her advice will help my own written recommendations in my work too.

The after-party that night was fantastic. I got to chat with friends old and new, and join in with a bit of a dance and a sing with karaoke. I was tempted to join the Mario Kart tournament, but I knew that Madleina and Pilar would kick my butt easily so I stuck to dinner instead.

Decompress

Mandy giving a presentation to a small groupThe final day was Decompress. I love this idea so much – some casual talks, some easy-going workshops, some chilling out on couches and noodling around on laptops. After an epic week of learning and presenting I didn’t have room in my brain for any more learning, but it was a pleasure to hang out at the venue and chat with folks while poking at my email and written projects.

Once more, with feeling

The venue and the food and drink were amazing. The swag was perfect for me – tshirts with CSS and JS slogans on them. I’m sure others will write more about those. The effort the organisers went to to make the speakers and the attendees comfortable was impressive. I’ll have to write a separate post about the live captioning, just because that’s my professional interest, but I really feel like they thought of everything.

The sad part is that this is the last CSS Conf and JS Conf in Australia for now. The current organising team have been doing it for several years, which shows in the quality of the event but also leaves them pretty dang tired. I’m convinced they’ll all be moving on to other wonderful things in the industry and commmunity after they’ve had some time off. Best of luck, gang, you are all champions.

I’m glad I got to be a part of such a thoughtful and inspiring event. I’ve been joking/not-joking that since I don’t have time for a heap of side projects, I’ll have to roll all my inspiration from last week into one project: an accessible 3D typography-based art project generated from people interacting with hardware, which is written in Elm and has really good error messages. I’ll let you all know when it’s ready 🙂

Speaking up

I originally wrote this in my old site, and cross-posted it to Medium. But I think that writing I put a bit of time into should go here.

You’ve probably seen the #MeToo hashtag on social media, with women sharing it if they’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted. It was started (without a hashtag, I think, but definitely the same phrase and purpose) 10 years ago by Tarana Burke, but got a boost from Alyssa Milano after she read commentary about Harvey Weinstein’s abuse finally being revealed.

I’ve noticed that a lot of guys are surprised and disappointed to learn how many of the women they know have experienced this problem. If you’re one of those guys and you’re looking for ways to help support women with harassment, or to prevent it from happening in the future, there are a lot of articles out there with good advice. I like this one from Nicole Silverberg at The Guardian: Men, you want to treat women better? Here’s a list to start with.

One of the most frequently listed ways men can help is to speak up when a guy (or a group of guys) you know start discussing women in a sexist way. Like, if they start giving ratings on their looks, or point out which ones they would or wouldn’t have sex with. But there’s not a lot of guidance on exactly how to do that. Speaking up in front of friends or randoms isn’t as difficult as the harassment women put up with, but it isn’t easy either.

I really want more guys to speak up about this stuff with their friends, so I’ve got a few tips to share. I’m often the person in a group who speaks up about crappy things, including sexism, so I have some experience with this.

1. Understand the purpose of speaking up

Knowing why you are doing it makes it easier for you to decide in the moment what approach to take. The goal of speaking up isn’t to completely convince That Guy to become a full-time feminist ally (because ahahaha, as if). It’s to get him to realise that not all men think the way he does. He’s assuming that your silence on the topic means you agree with him.

So even the most vague comment is better than nothing. He’ll still be That Guy, but now he knows you don’t support treating women like objects. It puts an end to at least one sexist conversation, and discourages people from starting similar talk with you next time.

It also reminds other guys that this kind of talk is crappy, even though it’s so common that it happens without anyone thinking about it. They might be too intimidated to say something themselves, but now they know you’re the kind of guy who sticks up for people.

2. Prepare some stock phrases

Have a few phrases you can say without having to think about it too much. The usual suggestions are “ugh, not cool” or “dude, cut it out”. I also like “nobody cares about your boner” followed by a change of subject. I saw on Twitter the other day that someone told a guy in a restaurant “cool it, Harvey Weinstein” which gets heaps of points for being topical but might not work so well in a few weeks when the media has moved on to the latest scandal. There’s a good article for dealing with similar conversations in the workplace: “We don’t do that here” by Aja Hammerly.

Try to remember some of the conversations like this you’ve heard or been part of in the past. Imagine what you could have said to put an end to the conversation, and keep it in mind in case you’re in a similar situation in the future. It doesn’t have to be the most persuasive thing you’ve ever said. Funny is good, but not essential. Just anything to indicate that you don’t approve.

3. Be prepared for resistance

Most likely That Guy will give one of two cliched responses: he’ll say he’s just joking, or that he thinks you’re less of a man now in some way. Don’t bother responding to whatever he says as if it’s a real justification for his behaviour. It isn’t, and he doesn’t care anyway. He talks crap about women because he can, and now he’s wondering if he can’t and stalling while he figures it out.

This is another place where some stock phrases might be useful. Shrug and say “yeah whatever you reckon, dude” in the most bored voice you can do. Or just repeat that it’s not cool, or give him your most unimpressed face. It’s not a debate and you don’t have to listen to him.

If he gets more aggressive than that, or he doesn’t want to drop the topic, walk away. Yes, that might mean leaving a social event early, but more likely it just means going to talk to some other people instead. You’ve already achieved the goal of pushing back on his attitude towards women in the moment it happened; there’s no need to fight about it and no-one gains anything from that. Walking away also underlines the message that people won’t tolerate his behaviour.

However you choose to respond to the pushback, it’ll be easier if you’ve considered what you’ll do beforehand. Even a vague plan will be enough in most situations.

A final suggestion

One more idea for you: if one of your friends is the first to speak up and say “not cool”, make sure you back them up. Join in and say “yeah, I’ve had enough of this” or “why do you think we care?”. Or give him a high five, or whatever works in that group. Your friend is probably feeling awkward about it and could do with a little support.

The men who are predators and abuse their power over women are using society’s general disrespect for us as camoflage. If we can remove the camoflage, it’s easier for everyone to see who is dangerous.

Speaking up when people say sexist things is not going to fix misogyny and abuse – but it does help, and lots of people will appreciate it. I hope these tips help someone figure out how to speak up when they know it’s the right thing to do. Remember – it doesn’t have to be done perfectly, it just has to be done.

How I manage to read so much

As a kid I was a voracious reader. I read everything I could get my hands on, and spent as much time as possible in libraries. All the way through university I spent whatever spare money I had on buying books, and as much time reading them as I could manage while still having friendships, a job, and so on. It helps if you have friends who also love reading!

Nowadays it’s so very easy to spend hours at a time on social media, reading nothing much, just clicking like and leaving little friendly comments. I still buy books at the same rate, but I’m not reading them as quickly or as frequently. So I’m challenging myself to read 52 books this year, an average of one each week. To make this a fun stretch goal and not a dreadful chore, I’m being quite easy on myself: work books count, and I don’t have to actually finish 52 books, just start that many.

As with any resolution or challenge, it helps to have SMART goals and decide what habits you’ll use to work towards reaching that goal. SMART goals are:

  • Specific – 52 is pretty specific
  • Measurable – I’m making a note in my diary each time I start a new book
  • Attainable – I used to read about 70 books a year in my glory days
  • Relevant – well, it’s relevant to me and I don’t much mind if other people care
  • Time-bound – I’ve got one year, and read fast enough that the average novel takes me a few days to finish

The habits I’ll be using to make sure I do the work needed are to:

  • Always have a book with me – I have the Kindle app on my phone and many books bought using the One-Click Purchase feature on Amazon after a few glasses of wine and an enthusiastic recommendation from a friend.
  • Schedule time to read – Monday afternoons are when I usually start a new book and that’s on my calendar app

If you want to be reading more than you already do, why not do a little challenge like this? It doesn’t have to be 52 books, and honestly you’ll be more excited about it if you make the goal easy to achieve. Start with one book a month, or whatever feels right to you. If it’s more than you’re reading now, that’s perfect.

Other tips for reading more:

  • Turn off the TV or music – background noise is okay, but reading for pleasure rather than work isn’t particularly good for multitasking.
  • Make yourself a little treat when you sit down with your book – a cup of tea, a glass of wine, some biscuits or whatever. A little reward for working towards your goal is helpful and creates a pleasant association with picking up a book! Also sitting in a cozy chair is easier than reading in bed (sore neck!) or at a desk (this isn’t your job).
  • Ignore the snobs and read whatever you like. Fiction or non-fiction, trashy pulp or fine literature… it’s all good.
  • Likewise, ignore the classics lists and the must-read lists and the best-seller lists. Read a book because the plot or the characters seem interesting to you, not because lots of other people think it’s good or important. Those lists are useful when you’re looking for new-to-you things to read, but there’s no law that says you must follow them. Recommendations from people who like similar books to you are much more likely to help you find a new favourite.
  • If the book you’re reading isn’t working for you, for any reason at all, put it down and start a new book. Maybe you’re just not in the mood for it now, maybe it’s not well-written, or maybe you’re not the target audience. But forcing yourself to read a book like it’s your duty is a guaranteed way to make you wander off and hit refresh on Facebook. Move on to the next book – it will almost certainly be more fun.

I hope this is helpful for you. I’ll be posting some more about my reading throughout the year.