There’s this thing that we programmers do called code reviews.  This means that someone else needs to review your work before it goes ‘live’.  As experienced as we may be, engineers are humans and thus fallible.  Over the years, I’ve used many different tools to conduct these code reviews and many different teams do it to different levels of scrutiny.  Sadly, sometimes that scrutiny is none.  For at least a decade, I’ve advocated that we need to conduct code reviews for all changes.

The downside is that everyone gets busy; there have been times when I’ve been waiting for someone to sign off on my changes for over a week.  This caused me to eventually walk into a teammate’s office and insisted she pull up the code review on her screen (and refused to leave until she did).  She didn’t necessarily need to do it that moment, but when she returned from lunch, it’d be there waiting for her.

Continue reading “My pronouns are he and him”

I spent my early years in the warm island of Puerto Rico; we left that blissful and simple life a year after my father passed away.  Subsequently, we moved to Florida where we started the next stage of our lives.  My sister and I were in the same bilingual classroom, sharing it with students from first through fifth grade.  However, recess included the entire school; we were collectively unleashed upon a field where we worked off our energy.  It was during recess where I made a new friend, David.

Continue reading “It’s not indoctrination that we fear”

My parents immigrated three times, and twice during my lifetime.  First, they married in Hong Kong, then moved to Spain.  A couple of years past my birth, we moved to Puerto Rico.  We lived there until my father passed.  We planned to move to Florida, and the rest of us did within a year.  I won’t say that my life was full of strife; life is what you make of it.  I will say that it gave me a different perspective, and oftentimes it wasn’t voluntary nor necessarily welcomed.

I have spent my entire life as an outsider.  Among the most interesting parts of this difference is accountability.  In my high school English class, I was once called “sumo wrestler” by our class president.  My proportional response was to call him a “spook”.  Yes, he was black, and I knew it was a racial slur.  The moment that word escaped my lips, our teacher barked at me.  His uttering a slur was fine, but somehow my uttering a slur was not.  This incident repeated itself weeks later with precisely the same results.

Continue reading “Establishing paternal accountability”