Rising Stars

Currently under 1k followers! Get in now so you can say, “I was following them before they got popular.”

• averydistracted gets massive cool points for owning crow calls.
• lesjames is the only person in the area with whom I can talk about hardcore CSS and runs the local front end developer meetup
• JennaPG
• thepandalion and I cheer each other on. She’s in the UK and loves tea, too!
• deisinger takes his adorable parrot to work.
• unthunk organizes the local JS meetup
• scott_gonzalez works on jQuery and explained event bubbling to me
• LordRembo is a Belgian who also makes comics about beards and enjoys a good cuppa.
• hoorayimhelping gave a great presentation on writing jQuery that doesn’t suck. The Triangle mourns his leaving to work for Etsy in NYC.
• ten1seven
• MrHoatzin makes the interactive story “Hobo Lobo of Hamelin” with some mad presentational skills
• LeftyDesigner a local frontie who seems to know everyone I wish I knew!
• greenideas
• adrianpomilio always surprises me with how much he knows about the inner workings of CSS
• natehunzaker and I worked together at Smashing Boxes. He’s always digging into interesting JavaScript frameworks.
• bfarrellforever is a Flash dev who has seen the light of JS
• danlucas organizes Refresh the Triangle with me and bfarrellforever
• humantorch wrote a 24 Ways post Your jQuery: Now with 67% Less Suck
• theCole writes code for Mozilla
• alex_young is editor in chief at DailyJS
• gmurphey is Rebecca Murphey’s brother and a JS developer in his own right

Big Fish

Have at least 1k in followers. You may or may not be following these guys already.

• rmurphey, the first front end developer I met, she inspired me to pursue a more specialized career path.
• garannm also has blog that is totes profesh and recommended
• dandenney dude organizes Frontend Conf
• ajpiano is on both the jQuery and jQuery UI teams, cohosts yayquery, and works for Bocoup. “Woah” is right.
• cheeaun works on the hacker news mobile web app
• codylindley
• chriseppstein created Compass, which is strap-on awesome for Sass. If you haven’t checked these out, you’re not living.
• teleject
• brad_frost
• rachelandrew
• bradcolbow makes comics and is my official rival
• cssquirrel also makes a comic, but is not my official rival
• rworth is big times jQuery
• phiggins is big times Dojo
• anna_debenham is a UK advocate of teaching development in schools
• antiheroine
• perishable
• mathias
• jonikorpi is a grid nerd and inventor of the Golden Grid and Frameless systems
• todd is an accessibility advocate
• CrowChick (that’s me! I draw comics about github and things.)

Big names you probably already follow

At least 10k in followers and constantly retweeted by the above.

Other languages

And that’s not counting all the UI, UX and IA people I follow! I might make a list of them in the future.

Did I leave anyone out? Comment your recommendations!

Case in point, my comics site rachelthegreat.com, which I launched a little over a year ago. It took me one year since I began building the site for me to open it to the public. I could have spent another month polishing it and making it prettier. I could have spent two months trying to figure out how I would use it after a year’s worth of posting old comics to it from my archive. I could have delayed launch for six months making things “perfect” instead of spending those six months actually using the site.

Part of the reason it took so long was that the longer I delayed, the easier the WordPress core team made it for me to implement things like custom content types and post images. Part of it was that I was a one-woman team doing the UX, development and design on weekends off my “real” job. Prior to launch, I did much research on how my readers read comics, and I used those studies to design a system that would facilitate those needs. Once I had it working and testing properly, I gave myself a deadline for launch: my 26th birthday. Without a deadline, I would have spent another six months poking and tweaking and redesigning the same home page a hundred times over. I have sketchbook entries from three years ago of that same home page that are no better than the ones I made two weeks prior to launch! After a point “ideation” turns into “masturbation.”

I released it into the wild before it was perfect. I released it when it was “good enough.”

And now, here I am, over a year after taking down the “coming soon page”, and I need to redesign the site. At the rate of posting one page with commentary per day, it has taken me this long to get through the bulk of my body of work. Now that the time draws near to post new content to the site, I’m re-evaluating how my readers and I will use the site.

For one, I won’t be posting a page a day or week. In fact, I can’t be sure when I’ll post anything. I refuse to hold myself to some ridiculous “every Monday and Friday” schedule when I have so many competing obligations. When I post comics, it will be because I was inspired to draw them. I’ll probably post them in lumps, entire multi-page story lines or one-page gags. But my visitors are accustomed to new comics daily now. I will need to give them a way to receive alerts when new comics go up so they don’t get fed up and stop visiting. I’ll need to make better use of my MailChimp, Twitter, and RSS feed resources. I’ll need the home page to show the first page in the latest story, not the last page posted. I’ll need the last page of every story to nudge visitors to share and/or subscribe. And I’ll need to interview all my readers again to make sure I’m going at this from the right angle and not imagining things.

If I’d taken six months to build the site instead of a year, I’d be posting new comics right now. And if I’d spent twice as long working on it, I would still have to redo it a year after launch because the situation has changed. But my readers would have had to wait longer to get to what they want, the comics. My readers won’t care if the background pattern isn’t quite subtle enough or the colors are a bit bright. They won’t care if my about page is a one-two punch. But there will be hell to pay if they can’t get to their comics!

Things change, nothing stays the same. Weigh your time, your manpower, and the needs of your users against your to-do list, and don’t shortchange the most important people in the equation to satisfy your own sense of achievement.

Note: There was supposed to be a cute comic illustration to go with this, but I spent all last night banging my head against a wall trying to get compass’s tests to run. And for the rest of the week I have “extracurriculars.” Taking my own medicine here and not letting the lack of cute illustrations keep me from posting this.

I asked my coworkers of the time how I should start. I was admonished, “When you see something broken, fork it, fix it, and submit a pull request.” Simple enough! Err, not so…

Not a single one of my pull requests made it in! So where did I go wrong?

Before I submitted my first ever pull request, I was super nervous. What if I submitted it wrong? What if there was some hidden etiquette I didn’t know about? What if I was about to breach protocol in such a way that would get me shunned from coder society for the rest of my life? Another of my coworkers (who shall remain anonymous to protect him from vicious opensource reprisals) said, “You’re doing work for free. A project owner would have to be a real asshole to get pissed off that someone’s working on their own time to try to help their project.” That made a lot of sense to me, and I submitted the request (which was later politely rejected).

All the rejections were polite. All of them were justified. I felt like I’d run headfirst into a brick wall. Some of the repos were actively soliciting pull requests for things like documentation. Others, I was just trying to pitch in. Once someone pointed out their style guide to me, but most of them had no formalized policy on pull requests or process–at least not in shiny, bright red letters wrapped in a blink tag.

I bemoaned my situation on Twitter, and Doug Avery replied thusly:

@CrowChick personally, i get irked when people pull without emailing me first or filing an issue to discuss. but i guess it's contextual

— Doug N. Avery (@averydistracted) April 9, 2012

I’m supposed to email people first? Have I been the Crazy Pull-Request-without Emailing-First Lady?

Jackson Fox put out the good word and helped rustle up this handy post on the topic of GitHub issues and pull requests.

I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface, though. Do you maintain a repo? Do you contribute to one? What do you want do-gooder, hutzpah-badge-questing would-be contributors to know before they submit pull requests?

The fallout was worse than the explosion.

I wanted to wait a week or two before posting followup so I could gain some perspective after stepping away from the matter for a bit. Looking back, I can say that Mr. Jaquith’s original tweet pales in comparison to some of the comments left here and on Hacker News. I originally posted to vent the frustration I felt from struggling with negative attitudes about women, and Mr. Jaquith just happened to be saying something asinine at a time when I felt in an authorly mood. But then to see the full spectrum of male attitudes about females in the workplace laid out at my feet, it was like some some bogeyman I’d long suspected had been hiding under my bed suddenly crawled out to pay a visit. So my worst suspicions were confirmed.

But cooler heads prevailed.

Although I was alarmed by the bad attitudes that reared their heads, I was pleasantly surprised at the number positive, thoughtful commenters who chimed in. It was comforting to see the comments and perspectives of so many upstanding people. It definitely gave me hope that while, yes, there is a problem, there are also problem solvers who are actively trying to fix it.

The solution is for men to call this bullshit when they see it. For some reason when women complain about things (like unfair treatment) it is seen as nagging and written off as an indictment of women; when men complain about things (like in your example) it is not used to critique men as a whole. I’m aware this is anecdotal.

When more men start calling each other out on being sexist then we will see progress.
gatlin

In my original post, I went out of my way not to draw parallels between sexism and racism, although it would have been easy to do with the example material I worked with. I feel these are similar fights, but I honestly haven’t been keeping an eye on racism in the development community, and thought it wasn’t the appropriate place to start that discussion. But commenters ended up making their own connections between the two, as in this comment:

The problem is theirs, not ours, so long as we stay aware and continue to speak out against their behaviors. Racial bigotry is a disadvantage in making a living today (at least in communities I choose to live in) because we do not let “off color jokes” slide with an embarrassed smirk. Gender bigotry needs to be shown the same public shaming or it will stick around. gruber76

And the Slow Clap award goes to sslemon’s comment:

First off, I agree on your thoughts about the tweet by Mr. Jaquith is off-putting at least, and at the most.. well, I’m sure we all have our own ideas on how we’d like to respond, verbally and possibly physically.

Secondly, props for calling it out. I know I’ve made less than stellar comments, and I’ve been called out on it once or twice (by female and male developers), and it actually stung for a second, when I redirected the words at myself. If the behavior is not consciously recognized, how can the behavior be changed and subsequently improved? This type of behavior is not just in the workplace; I see it a few times around in the department (I’m a graduating senior this May), and most of the time (it’s not terribly common anymore; the female population percentage has progressively increased), it’s shrugged off. If it is cultured in the educational circles, then it just propagates upwards into the higher levels, whether academic or professional.

Finally, I doubt this behavior is restricted to just this field; I think it even goes further down: the dominating group (not necessarily males, but those in power) behaves in a way as to what they perceive to be preserving their dominance. What that group fails to see is that change, in the longer term, is always good. By taking sides (the dominant group always picks itself), the discussions seem ready to boil into debates instead of constructive conversations that allow both sides to move forward. Holding back the ideas of one part halts the progress of the whole sum.
sslemon

And at no point did I feel the conversation devolved into an attack on me personally. If this were the comics business, where we have these throw downs on a monthly if not weekly basis, it most certainly would have gone that way. It’s good to know that the web development community is that much more mature and able to argue over the post itself and not the person who posted it.

Common Themes

A couple of things just kept coming up in conversation, both online and off. I attempt to address them here.

“But so-and-so is a girl, and she’s cool with it. Aren’t you just overreacting?”

I don’t remember electing so-and-so as Supreme Ambassador for All Women Ever. I don’t remember every woman everywhere consenting that so-and-so’s opinions would represent all of ours. There will always be women with differing opinions. Even if half of a population is distressed by something, the opposing opinions of the other half should not be interpreted as a reason to dismiss that distress.

“You’re taking it the wrong way!”

This comic by Kate Beaton says all I need to say to Mark Jaquith and the other people crying out, “You’re taking it the wrong way!”

Handy social tip: Don’t ever tell someone how something should make them feel. We all mess this one up from time to time, and it’s a miscommunication that spans genders. Humans don’t like feeling like little kids being told how to feel and react, and if you’re the one who “said the wrong thing” there’s no nice way to explain yourself that doesn’t involve either losing some face or escalating the situation. It doesn’t matter what you meant. What matters is how you makes others feel. This is why you need to weigh your words carefully before unleashing them upon the public, especially about things that cross gender issues.

Should you ever find yourself in this position, I advise against using the expressions “you took it the wrong way” or “overreacting.” And the apology, the acknowledgement that you have hurt someone, is the key. I use this formula, “I’m so sorry. *insert one-sentence non-combative explanation of your intention* I was being facetious/didn’t know all the facts/wasn’t trying to tell you what to do/put my foot in my mouth. You’re important to me, and I don’t want to upset you.” (And non-apologies don’t count! Non-apologies usually start with, “I’m sorry my comment made you feel…”)  If you apologize in earnest immediately, you can defuse a potentially explosive interaction.

“Why is a ‘golden uterus’ comment offensive? I don’t see what’s wrong with it.”

Many women have been in a heated conversation with men about something near and dear to us: Our reproductive rights, bearing children, in general things going into and out of our vaginas. Some women, who may have trouble conveying why they do not agree with their male counterparts’ opinions about an organ he does not possess, may be forced to resort to a phrase like, “Who has a uterus in this conversation? Yeah, that’s what I thought.” To dismiss what is, at least to me, a quip of last resort could easily be extrapolated into a dismissal of all those uncomfortable arguments.

Mr. Jaquith says he was trying to make a joke. But he didn’t think of how his words could easily be taken as dismissive of women–or an endorsement of dismissing women. He has 7000 followers and didn’t think that one of them, male or female, would “take it the wrong way?” And then for other males to come in after him and say, “No, you’re wrong. He meant it like this,” or “You shouldn’t be upset by that because of x, y, and z.” That’s the heart of the issue. That attitude is my problem.

What can you do?

If you are a man…

Call them on it. Women have two options when they experience male chauvinism: Complain and risk getting shunned and shut out as a “harpy” or a “bitch,” or say nothing and let the behavior continue unchecked. As a man, your words carry more weight. Your coworkers look up to you, rely on you, respect you. You’re “one of the bros.” If you’re not cool with something, it’s not just some uppity woman getting her panties in a knot. A line has been crossed. This is something you and you alone can do to help make the community more woman-friendly and awesome.

Good guys don’t let the bad guys walk away.

If you’re a man who is afraid he might be a jerk…

Listen to this convenient podcast from a Nerd of Advice. Actually, all dudes, listen to this podcast. You might still learn something or see something in a way you didn’t before. (And the part about Arkham Asylum was pretty darn hilarious!)

If you are a woman…

Call them on it. What you need more than anything is empathy. Try to get the other party to understand how their behavior makes you feel, and how they might feel if the tables were turned. Use humor to keep things from getting too awkward, but never apologize for how you feel. (And when I say call “them” on it, I mean other women, too. Women can be big misogynists, too. Open up discussion.)

Don’t give up. It’s easy to get discouraged. Many female students turn away when they encounter the brogrammer fraternity. Keep going! Go around them, through them, over them. Find the real developers and stick close to them. Don’t turn back. We need you in here.

If you run a conference…

Have more female speakers. Heck, have a few panels geared toward women. That’s all it takes to send the right message.

Think hard about having speakers from the adult industry or any other organization that might make women attendees feel uncomfortable. Comic conventions (and often stores) are loaded with stuff that can make women who aren’t used to it feel weirded out. And that might have something to do with why the comics industry struggles to reach women. The “boys only club” feel of that industry is something I was glad to escape when I transitioned into web development. I don’t want to turn around and find it following me.

He Said She Said: The “Golden Uterus” Timeline

For archival purposes, I have collected the play by play of the original Twitter thread that started it all. (Note: Jane Wells is the UX lead on WordPress, by the by. She’s pretty outspoken with regards to women in tech.) It’s a little out of order, but you get the gist.

@markjaquith isn't that pretty much just always implied, though? Many women experience that.

— Jane Wells (@janeforshort) February 19, 2012

@markjaquith Swinging penis is not as subtle to women as you think. Virgin or effeminate man doesn't have same authority as 'manly' man.

— Jane Wells (@janeforshort) February 19, 2012

@markjaquith it's a metaphor to you, but not to lots of women who deal with it every day. To them it is a constant gender-based dis.

— Jane Wells (@janeforshort) February 19, 2012

@janeforshort Why do you have to start this convo just as my husband puts brunch on the table?

— Rachel Nabors (@CrowChick) February 19, 2012

She puts out a call to the ladies just as bacon and toast hit the table.

@janeforshort @markjaquith Win a guy talks over me at a conference, he's saying, "I have a penis, so fuck you."

— Rachel Nabors (@CrowChick) February 19, 2012

I sincerely apologize for my misspelling of “when” as “win.” In my defense, my hands were covered in sticky jam.

@markjaquith YOU have never acted that way that I've seen, so it seems like it would be more abstract to you as an observer vs participant.

— Jane Wells (@janeforshort) February 19, 2012

@CrowChick You misunderstand my point. Men don't think they are superior because of sex organ usage. Mothers do. They explicitly mention it.

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) February 19, 2012

Oh, I’m sorry, with all the senatorial hearings about birth control coverage, I thought he was generally sweeping aside valid female perspectives on all levels, not just motherhood. The speed of tweeting doesn’t leave much time for reflection or deep interpretation of people’s 140 characters. My bad.

@markjaquith Or maybe you feel there aren't enough women in this industry that you'll get called out on it.

— Rachel Nabors (@CrowChick) February 19, 2012

@markjaquith I don't buy that, and even if I did, I'd still think you're an ass for saying it the way you did.

— Rachel Nabors (@CrowChick) February 19, 2012

And then I posted How to Scare off Female Developers.

@markjaquith I am only honestly telling you what other women are too polite to say that you may better weigh your words next time.

— Rachel Nabors (@CrowChick) February 19, 2012

Mr. Jaquith is scandalized.

@markjaquith That'd be one way of doing it. But I wouldn't say it was about you personally. You were just a handy example of a trend.

— Rachel Nabors (@CrowChick) February 19, 2012

@CrowChick No, I'm not. You misunderstood me, as is clear from your post. I made zero generalizations about women. Read it again.

— Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith) February 19, 2012

I think he blocked me on Twitter after this, as I don’t have access to his individual tweets–or it could be a Twitter bug.

Mr. Jaquith did have a reply to my post–which he shared on hacker news, not here, for whatever reason. (And yes, I did google  the “Golden Uterus Complex” before I wrote the post. I found it so grating and offensive that I felt compelled to vent publicly.)

Actually, I feel the whole “Golden Uterus Complex” is a generalization about women–one that dismisses a woman’s opinion any time she brings up the very real implications of having female sexual organs. Yeah, it can be used in some fairly harmless ways (i.e. “I’ll raise these kids how I want because I had ‘em myself!”), but it can also be called upon in some very serious ways, ways that Mr. Jaquith must not have considered (i.e. “It’s my uterus, so I’m in charge of what happens to it because none of you have ever had to deal with owning one, thank you.”).

The above thread shows how easily things can get out of hand when people do not take the time to weigh their words and think carefully about the reactions of others. We’ve seen this before with Penny Arcade’s “dick wolves” incident.

A final word

Ok, guys: I’m not the only woman with an opinion. Don’t take what I write as the Will of Women Everywhere. I’m just one woman. I have concerns and feelings that other women share. But not all women will feel the same way. For instance, I have no problem attending a conference with a panel about challenges facing high-traffic adult industry sites. But other women will have problems with that. Likewise, there are going to be women who don’t have any problem with some kinds of insensitive and anti-female behavior. They are not all women, either. And just because they’re cool with something, I and other women might not be. When in doubt, just ask yourself how something would float past your mom or your sister. And whatever you do, never hold up just one woman and point to her as a justification for anything.

Mark Jaquith is one of the lead developers on WordPress.

I know developers of both sexes don’t have a reputation for being the most socially adept creatures. But would it hurt male developers like the aforementioned Mr. Jaquith to try to not piss female developers off by making sweeping and dismissive generalizations about us?

I feel Mr. Jaquith’s remarks are a symptom of a greater issue within the developer community, which until recently has been something of a boys-only affair. And I worry that this sort of open hostility to women, while not the norm, is certainly enough even in small doses to keep female would-be developers at bay.

Do you want to know why women stayed out of comics for so long? This attitude. I can attest to it. I lived through it in the comics biz, and I’m living through it again here in the web development world. It is the exact same shit only with different flies.

Women have a lot to offer both industries, and both industries constantly mewl and whine, “Where are all the women?” You want female comickers and developers. We make great presenters, fun coworkers, and we bring new perspectives. A gender-balanced community is a sane community. (And I’ll say what others are thinking: Isn’t it great to fall in love with someone who is passionate about the same things you are?)

It can be discouraging to women with weaker stomachs than mine. There’s a lot to… tolerate in this industry. I don’t like standing at the water cooler, pretending not to hear the “good old boys” next to me yucking it up at some poor woman’s expense. I am tired of shrugging and trying to move away when the Python developer next to me in the line for pizza starts railing about “why women have to get so angry when I try to hold the door for them.” I hate it when I’m at a conference or meetup, trying to talk to someone, and a man starts talking over me, completely hijacking the conversation.

But what can I do? I’m a minority here. Sometimes, I’m the only female who shows up at these events, the only one who comments on these blog posts. Do I just grin and bear it and wait for it to all get better? Somehow I don’t think that’s the best longterm strategy.

I want to make this a better place for women to work, a more welcoming environment. I desperately want more women coding next to me. So from now on, when I see this stuff going down, I am going to call you out on it. And I might not be pretty or friendly or sweet or nice while I’m doing it. I might not get popularity votes for telling it like it is. But someone has got to do it.

Update

The many comments from developers below have convinced me that we can, as a community of developers, go one step further. Guys, it helps when you call each other out. If women are the only ones who take offense, we get written off as “sensitive” at best–harpies or “feminazis” at worst. That will really help make make this community a more welcoming and fun place to be for everyone.

Update 2: March 5th, 2012

Posted a follow up that features comics, a Twitter timeline, and a breakdown of the moral of the story.

However, the rest of the Internet is not so enlightened. Other communities online are often not as legitimate as the ones we developers and designers use. Music and teen sites, for instance, have lots of “OMG I LUV YOU!” comments that do not add to the body of human knowledge nor express an opinion worth weighing.

The original often weighs more than its comments, and most comments cannot be interpreted without reference to that which they commented upon or the other comments surrounding it. If someone made a comment that was perfectly understandable without the context of the original article and encompassing discussion, they’d have essentially written a new article worthy of publication, filled with blockquotes, references, and citations. But this comment type makes up perhaps .05% of online discussion threads. It is the place of an editor to decide what is an is not an article, not the machine interpreting markup. The machine can only interpret hierarchy, not worth.

“Words are cheap,” as old folks say, “‘cuz everybody’s got ‘em.” You ever stumble onto a user group thread in a Google search? A single, stand alone comment, no context for what is being commented on, and only a small, hard to follow chain of links to other messages in the thread to go on. Maybe if you grew up using user groups you can navigate this train of thought. But for the majority of Internet users (myself, mother, sister and niece included), this is a fragment of thought, and it’s not very useful.

Then there’s what I call the “messiness” factor. As a front-ender, I have a hate-hate relationship with nested elements–lists specifically. If you’ve styled or parsed lists within lists, you know it is a pain in the arse. And if someone, like a human being, forgets to close a tag, two lists become a one list with a child list. Imagine what happens on a page with many articles. If someone leaves out but one closing tag for one of the articles, suddenly all the articles following it are interpreted as comments! To me this doesn’t fit with HTML5′s flexible, forgiving nature. HTML5 moves away from XHTML’s “all tags must be closed or self-closing!” demands. In HTML5, it’s okay if you don’t close your <head>, heck you don’t even need a <head>! This way we maintain forward-compatibility and don’t break the legacy half of the Internet. But you have to include closing tags for articles (although not for head or body tags) lest you run the risk of them being significantly misinterpreted. That’s not foolproof. That’s punishment!

Am I saying we need a comment tag? Not necessarily. But I think interpreting nested articles as comments will only cause trouble down the line. I’m not opposed to a comment tag. I think people would use the heck out of it, and it would give browsers, search engines, and machines in general a very useful hook to better understand data relationships on the page. That’s my rant! What’s your beef?

I’m looking forward to working with the likes of Abe Crystal, Rick Cecil, Jackson Fox–it’s a sweet lineup and a small team. I’ll mostly be doing front-end development on Ruzuku, but this is also a great chance for me to see how a professional UX consultancy runs. I’m looking forward to putting my JavaSript and Ruby on Rails chops to the test.

What is “Ruzuku?”

Ruzuku is a tool that lets people build online courses, which they can then charge students to attend. We pride ourselves in having the best user experience of the online educational tools on the market and make it really easy for people to monetize their niche skills. If you’re interested in learning more, checkout our Ruzuku 101 course or drop me a line!

Smashing Boxes was great

My time at Smashing Boxes was invaluable. I met many great designers and developers and got my first exposure to agile workflow. Agency experience is experience in dog years: I learned a lot and did a lot in a short period of time, building other people’s dreams. Now I want to build just one dream.

Macbook Pro for sale!

With the change in jobs, I find myself in possession of a glorious 17″ Macbook Pro that need a new home. If you are interested, please do drop me a line!

The new RachelNabors.com

To celebrate these big life changes, I have overhauled RachelNabors.com to make it more of a personality/professional site. I will be shutting down ThePinkCrow.com and have already transferred all the content here. My reasoning is that when I started freelancing at the beginning of my career and the economic crisis four years ago, I didn’t have “a name.” My name was only recognized in comics, and I wasn’t sure how comics and web design would mix. I felt like I had to hide behind a business name.

But this past year I gave three talks five times, and each time I illustrated the talk in my own, quirky way. People in my professional circles had started recognizing me as “the cartoon girl.” So I figure that it is time to own my own name and my comic book heritage. My cartoons are as much a part of my personal brand and success as my code. You can find my comics and personal blog at RacheltheGreat.com and my work right here here at RachelNabors.com. (Designers, I totally see you resizing your browser window. You should try reading this on a Kindle! Pretty awesome, even with eInk!)

2012, here I come

I have some things planned for 2012, mostly writing and making new comics. I want to give some more talks, but for some reason I never find events until they’re almost upon me! If you know of some place I should be talking, do let me know (preferably more than a week beforehand!).

2011 was good to me. I hope 2012 will be good to us both. Put in the hours. Learn new things. Kick major ass!

So naturally I was a bit bewildered. What’s so bad about UXers? The reasoning went that good web design should naturally equate a good user experience, and that the user experience as a whole consists of more than what happens when you press x, y, or z. While it is great that we all feel responsible for the user’s experience, I feel this approach is flawed in two ways:

1. This argument assumes that UXers work within a very limited scope that does not encompass the entire system. While it is true that some specialists, like Information Architects, User Interface Designers, User Researchers, do limit the scope of their work, these people usually only live in larger design and development ecosystems which can afford specialists (DBA’s, copywriters, and others included). Many user experience designers/engineers draw on all these job descriptions to offer a broad range of skills in a more affordable package.
2. It also assumes that designers should take full responsibility for the wireframing, testing, user research, interviews, and information architecture that UXers customarily take upon themselves. By these standards, 98% of all current web designers are inadequate. So what should we do with them? Retrain them? Give them new job titles? Tell them to get out of the swimming pool and go back to print? I know plenty of fantastic, stunningly talented web designers who have no competency or interest in the sorts of tasks UXers perform. I personally cannot imagine telling them they are unqualified to do their job.

Perhaps, the user experience as a whole should be decided upon by the web site’s team. But it’s hard to imagine an entire team creating and testing wireframes, interviewing and researching users, hashing out the IA–I’m sure it can be done, especially on small projects. But as soon as you start looking at anything with more than 10 users or with any app-like qualities, you need someone to own this stuff or it will go to pot.

Designers, especially green ones, aren’t usually designing for users–they design for themselves or for the clients. The clients aren’t thinking about users. They’re thinking about their goals, budgets, and themselves. Developers just want to make the thing work so they can get on with it! There is no one representing the user in this model. And even if magically all parties had a consensus about what was best for the users and diligently tried to make that happen, they would still make a lot of newb mistakes that a seasoned UXer would sidestep.

Design is the hand. Development is the head. Between the head and the hand, there must be the heart, the advocate for the user. That’s what “UX” is about. It’s not a buzzword to be tossed around lightly, although many do. It’s a calling. It’s a fight. It’s an obligation. By all means, if you’re a designer or developer who wants to learn more and start with a users-first attitude, bully for you. But remember that there’s a lot more to it than good intentions and a few articles on UX Booth.

Right now I am the only woman at the startup I work for. I work with seven guys. They have Nerf guns. They have guy habits. Sometimes, they get on my nerves. I own that. But I know there are things about me that rub them the wrong way, like how I like to turn the lights on in the morning (as opposed to working in perpetual twilight–my eyes aren’t that good). But you know what? It doesn’t matter! Because we are there to get shit done! And guess what? I’ve worked with all female crews, and women can rub each other the wrong way just fine.

A startup is like a family. Nobody in a family gets along with everybody 100% of the time. What keeps a family together is how you work through your differences and hold tight when faced with big challenges (like looming deadlines). You have to be honest with each other, and acknowledge when you’ve messed up or the shit is hitting the fan or yes, that menu would totally work better horizontally and I’ll fix it right away. There is no room for pride, only love and acceptance.

And no family is just one gender. A gender homogenous startup could be likened to the lost boys of Neverland or, well, aside from My Little Ponies I can’t think of an all female Utopia that’s out of whack right now. Sure, it looks like paradise, but admittedly something is missing. Penelope said women distract men from work. Um, hello? Men distract each other just fine! (I’ve had to interrupt a few Nerf firefights to remind people to focus!)

I attend many all-male events, like JavaScript and Ruby meetups. I felt awkward about it at first, but someone (a man) told me, “We need more women at these events. Keeps us men civil.” Now I don’t feel so weird. And I’d like to think that one woman opens the door for others who may feel more shy. It’s true, mixed genders keep things balanced and keep things moving. It’s way too easy for humans to fall into “complacency mode” without another faction forcing them to their feet, to try harder, to walk the straight and narrow, and to persevere when shit goes down. That’s a family, that’s a startup.

I’ll be giving a workshop on extending WordPress as a CMS at function pink() in Raleigh on August 31st.

“In the past few years, WordPress has risen to dominate the blogging arena. But it’s not just for blogging anymore! Since version 2.8, all sorts of goodies have been added to WordPress’s core that let you expand its functionality from mere blogging software to robust CMS. Things that once required a slew of plugins can now be done with a few edits to your functions.php file.

In this talk, you will learn how to make a child theme and extend it with custom post and content types, custom taxonomies, menus, post images, and more. Once you learn these simple techniques, you can start configuring themes to do almost anything, from dynamic image sliders to art galleries. Before you consider another CMS, before you install a complicated plugin, check out what a little WordPress dev can do for you!”

September 17-18th 2011, NC Dev Con: ”Comics and Design: How to tell stories with pictures and words.”

Every site has a story. It’s our job to help translate that story into words and pictures, to hold the attention of  visitors and lead them to the “happy ending,” be that clicking “buy” or filling out a contact form. I used to make comics for a living, and I find that the skills I learned making comics help me tell better stories with my web designs. I’m thrilled to be talking about it at NC Dev Con! I hope I’ll see you there!