Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Listen All Of Y'all It's a Self-Sabotage
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2011 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
We learn from surprises, failures, jokes, and disorientations. I recently had a surprise that taught me about my own competence. In response, I wrote a new Geek Feminism post: "On competence, confidence, pernicious socialization, recursion, and tricking yourself".
Then there was the guy who was interviewing me to work at his startup. As we walked, he offhandedly mentioned his current project at his day job: a PHP web app needed to be able to turn user markup into HTML. "And you've already checked whether MediaWiki has something you can grab, right?" I asked. He stopped in his tracks. No, he had not thought of that.I need to stop assuming that everyone else knows more about the tech than I do.
I also made a RECURSION DINOSAUR graphic, Sarah.
Comments
Patashoqua
20 Jan 2011, 21:02 p.m.
Avram
http://agrumer.livejournal.com/
20 Jan 2011, 23:38 p.m.
Doesn't the R at the end of "Recursion Dinosaur" stand for "Recursion Dinosaur"?
Fafner
21 Jan 2011, 8:12 a.m.
So damn good.
Sarah
22 Jan 2011, 13:31 p.m.
That post was so interesting and well-written! It was also easy to analogize to my own professional experience outside the tech field. (Plus, recursion dinosaur!)
I read this and was impressed and moved by it before I even noticed the byline/photo!