Well said! I wish more people would think the same way.
I'm a long-time (10 years+), digital nomad. My younger daughter (currently 6) grew up mostly in Southeast Asia, but also in Europe and to a certain extent, all over the place (we have been traveling a lot (duh)).
It's interesting to observe that she has absolutely no concept of minority labels - for her, a Thai Muslim, a Balinese Hindu, an African-American classmate in Europe or an Arab (presumably Muslim) neighbor from Mauritania living in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, etc. are all just... people. Regardless of their sex, sexual orientation, religion, etc.
You could say 'she is a child, she will be spoiled over time' - I'm doing everything in my power to prevent the latter from happening, and don't agree with the former: she has the concept of sexes, skin colors, and differences in general (it's obvious from her questions that she does realize there ARE differences) - she just does not view them as differences in the sense we do (minority/majority, typical/weird, out-of-place, extreme, etc.).
To her, it just does not make sense to put people into boxes, tell them apart based on whatever criteria, etc.
!! HOWEVER !!
If she is met with the constant emphasis on how certain groups are different from the mainstream, she might develop the notion that there is a need for those boxes after all...
The irony of the situation is that the people that have the biggest power to steer her into this direction the most are coming from those minority groups!!!
It's way easier to shield her from the majority attacks (say, a Nazi remark from a white guy directed toward a black dude, or a guy saying shit like 'all Muslims are terrorists' etc.) by asserting 'never mind; they are assholes.'
However, if a member of a minority group is pouncing on the fact that he/she IS a member of a minority group and how everyone should realize this and do x/y/z then... how I am going to explain that to her in order to forego the creation of a minority label/box?
Humans have become very good at building in/out social groups. We even did it when we lived in small villages of homogenous skin colors. I admire what you're trying to do, but pretending that human nature is different than it has been for thousands of years is likely to leave you disappointed.
It's an uphill battle, I know... but one we have to wage to our best abilities.
I'm also trying to avoid being an asshole, but I somehow manage to fail at it almost every day :) That doesn't mean I will stop trying tomorrow, though.
It would be foolish to believe the segregation/xenophobia etc will ever stop - it would be still nice if at least the people being attacked would stop the self-sabotage by emphasizing, rather than leaving behind, their minority status.
Oh, I'm neither the author nor do I necessary agree with all the conclusions, just ran into this article on twitter and wanted to see what HN thinks grabs popcorn style and all ;)
Sound like the 2017 version of "Rails doesn't scale" - obviously you can make EVERYTHING scale.
Plus, saying 'never' in a programming context is never a good idea...
Bangkok is (used to be??) perhaps my favourite city in the world.
Is Kuala Lumpur more hygienic? You bet. Is there more 'order'? For sure.
Guess what! Kuala Lumpur is not in my top 10. Maybe not even top 20.
If I want order and hygiene, I go to Singapore, which is tied for the top spot on my favourite city list.
Bangkok is so charming because... it's Bangkok. Change that drastically (for example by imposing 'order and hygiene') and you get something like a watered down Kuala Lumpur.
I stayed in both for extended periods of time many many times and Bangkok was love at first sight, though it get tiring after some time, KL not that much, but as for your hygiene comment I think they are pretty much on par, it's just that BKK is significantly bigger city so it might look a bit dirtier but in reality KL for its size is also pretty dirty despite being richer
though I would take nowadays Georgetown over both of them and maybe dare even to say I would prefer Kanchanaburi over Bangkok, their night market next to train station is amazing, went there for every dinner always when visiting, somehow I got tired of these bigger Asian cities and can enjoy the small as well (this coming from someone who lived in 20mil Beijing for years, so KL is pretty much village like most of European capitals by population)
I agree. Bangkok is also one of my favorite places in the world. Because of the chaos, the heat, the street food and... Oh pretty much everything about it...
> That's a pretty good deal, in my humble opinion.
Dude, I wish some Europen CONFERENCES offered the same (and for 100s of €s, not for free). I'm not kidding - even big ones are shit compared to what you are talking about (they might have more booze, food, or other material stuff (as I said, there's a hefty entrance fee, so what) but I could only dream about networking like you described above.
You guys in the US are seriously spoiled compared to Europeans...
We have the same kinds of conferences in the US. (I'm not going to name names, though.)
The fact is that you can pay a lot of money to do just about anything, but running conferences (and meetups, to an extent) is, for some organizers, a business.
They're trying to create and capture value out of mostly thin air.
But as a community, we can create a lot of value for ourselves. It may not pay a lot of salaries, but we can create an awesome experience with each other.
We just have to get organized ourselves.
The same organizers of the groups I help co-organize run PyGotham, NYC's Python convention.
We are a bunch of unpaid volunteers for the most part, but we create an awesome conference year after year.
It takes a lot of our free time, and we do it on shoe-strings and through the kindness of corporations and non-profits. But we get it done. You can do it in Europe too.
A slightly different debate, but as a digital nomad (who also happens to be a programmer) I can totally relate.
Most of the meetings/conferences I went to ended with too much boozing and laughing about silly stuff and not nearly enough networking/exchanging ideas/helping each other to my liking. This was funny when I was in my late 20s, but I have different goals now.
Particularly, about the 'helping each other' part - I have the feeling that everyone is pushing their own agenda most of the time, and there is very little sincere interest in works of others - let alone helping/advising each other. More like 'let's get the compulsory presentation part down, do some quick networking... done? Let's get drunk'.
Maybe I'm visiting the wrong kind of meetings though. I'm guessing there's also a big difference between meetups in the US (never been to one, hence guessing) and in Europe (or elsewhere).
In Boston, I'm going to use Python as an exapmle, we have a regular Python Meetups [1], in addition to a Python Project Night [2], it sounds like you're looking for something like the later, which involves a bunch of people of various skills, hacking on projects, with some experts of the community circulating around the room, etc.
I haven't been in a long time, but they were great.
Yup, exactly - thanks for helping me figure it out (euphemism for 'phew, I'm not stupid for disliking all those meetups').
Alas, to my knowledge, nothing even remotely similar like that exists here (or at the places where I lived in Southeast Asia), simply because there are not enough people who would participate, let alone organize/run such a meeting.
Thinking about it, though, it makes sense: Working 100% remotely/being a digital nomad means moving AWAY from places like NY/SF/Boston/Seattle etc. (where the action happens) because they are crazy expensive; This, however, also means moving away from hubs where Python Project Nights are possible due to the sheer number of Python guys.
To have the cake and eat it too, the digital nomad hubs should have enough x (x=Pythonistas, Rubyists, whatever) to able to organize such meetings/hackathons etc. However, once that would happen, prices would skyrocket, and you would have to move again...
I don't want to derail this discussion to a digital nomad problem, so tl;dr: seems like my global location, rather than my attitude or bad choice of meetings is the culprit; To put it other way: living at tucked away islands might be romantic, but it also means no quality meetings... :(
If you want "helping each other" style meetups, you need to look for ones that are office-hours style, where they have tables and conference rooms and people sitting next to each other trying to help each other.
If you have organizers that want to make a regular commitment to running them (and basically being the on-hand experts) then you should be able to get space from firms that would like to host Python programmers (and we do have members get hired out of our group by our hosts sometimes, but that is certainly not a guarantee).
If your area can economically support these things, but they aren't there, then you just need a catalyst to get them started. I would think a lot of areas in Europe should be able to start these kinds of things.
I'm currently in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria for a longer period. I have moved here because LPdGC was dubbed as a digital nomad heaven, said to be the 'Chiang Mai of Europe' etc. It has an incredible amount of Co-working spaces relative to it's size etc. so one would think it's a perfect place for things you are describing above.
tl;dr: it's not.
Snippet from an email conversation with a local guy (author of GrapheneDB):
"Nomads apart, this is a small city, and while there are some active developer meetups, it's hard to get enough momentum, people willing to do talks, etc.
I did run a Rails/Ruby meetup years ago, but it ended up being mostly people from our team + some curious guys.
Eventually, I ended up not wanting to push it any further and focusing more on the business side of things."
So even though a lot of parameters are OK, the size of the city (400k in this case) seems to be enough to hamper things...
I'm a long-time (10 years+), digital nomad. My younger daughter (currently 6) grew up mostly in Southeast Asia, but also in Europe and to a certain extent, all over the place (we have been traveling a lot (duh)).
It's interesting to observe that she has absolutely no concept of minority labels - for her, a Thai Muslim, a Balinese Hindu, an African-American classmate in Europe or an Arab (presumably Muslim) neighbor from Mauritania living in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, etc. are all just... people. Regardless of their sex, sexual orientation, religion, etc.
You could say 'she is a child, she will be spoiled over time' - I'm doing everything in my power to prevent the latter from happening, and don't agree with the former: she has the concept of sexes, skin colors, and differences in general (it's obvious from her questions that she does realize there ARE differences) - she just does not view them as differences in the sense we do (minority/majority, typical/weird, out-of-place, extreme, etc.).
To her, it just does not make sense to put people into boxes, tell them apart based on whatever criteria, etc.
!! HOWEVER !!
If she is met with the constant emphasis on how certain groups are different from the mainstream, she might develop the notion that there is a need for those boxes after all...
The irony of the situation is that the people that have the biggest power to steer her into this direction the most are coming from those minority groups!!!
It's way easier to shield her from the majority attacks (say, a Nazi remark from a white guy directed toward a black dude, or a guy saying shit like 'all Muslims are terrorists' etc.) by asserting 'never mind; they are assholes.'
However, if a member of a minority group is pouncing on the fact that he/she IS a member of a minority group and how everyone should realize this and do x/y/z then... how I am going to explain that to her in order to forego the creation of a minority label/box?