It definitely sounds like she is either in the early stages of a lawsuit or in the process of bringing one against SendGrid. With her argument being that 'conference spaces are work places' and that she was fired because she reported something that happened while at work.
This statement seems very pruned compared to her previous writing and blog posts.
Although I'm kind of happy that this fiasco has shed some light on sexism in technology, I'm glad to see that it has stopped snowballing into a circus.
The conference spaces are work places is an interesting angle, but would it hold in her favor? Had she informed pycon sans tweets and blog posts I think it'd be an easy win in her favor, but unfortunately that's not really all she did.
Consider a workplace scenario:
Employee A is unhappy about coworker B. Instead of discretely talking to management about it, Employee A publicly shames B. B is fired. There's a big hoopla about it outside the company. Employer fires A stating that A can no longer perform their job due to the way A handled B.
I would hope that a wrongful termination suit fails for the reasons you mentioned, that doesn't mean it will though. I also don't think the conference spaces are work places comment holds any water. If tickets to the conference are open to the public then it is a public event. If your employer purchases your ticket to a public event you may still be bound by workplace conduct rules but should also have no expectation that other attendees will.
I don't think that she has grounds for suing SendGrid. It's pretty clear that she was fired for cause. Her job was to be a "developer evangelist" and she was probably paid by SendGrid to be at the conference, representing them in an official capacity. Going out of her way to alienate the very developers that it's her job to sell to indicates very poor judgement about how her actions might affect her employer's reputation.
If there's a lawsuit brewing, it's also possible that she's the one being sued by the developer who got fired due to her actions.
I was just thinking that her language indicates a lawsuit at hand, but I wasn't thinking that she was the one who might bring a lawsuit against SendGrid, though that's obviously been a possibility. Certainly, SendGrid's timing of the dismissal has been criticized:
1. They didn't dismiss her until several days after the incident and at a time when SendGrid was being attacked by a DDoS, an attack that Richards may argue was a misogynistic retaliation.
2. Several days, especially when at least a couple of those days were during a company-wide emergency, is a pretty short time to decide on a public dismissal of an employee. What are the chances that some things were not properly lawyered or that email communications were less than flattering on SendGrid's part during this hectic time?
So, she could try suing SendGrid for some type of wrongful termination and try for punitive damages. SendGrid could sue her for the actual (and potential) losses she caused them by her actions. Again, the only winners in this whole thing is going to be the lawyers.
Wow, never thought there would be a day where my favorite college philosophy time-sink graced the pages of my favorite work time-sink. Mind, blown.
Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a peer-reviewed, academia level resource. Basically a classroom accepted Philosophy Wikipedia. I wonder if there are similar academic resources for other subjects?
Detailed articles on Turing and the Turing Machine.
The hours whiled away on plato.stanford.edu shouldn't count toward a man's life. :)
Something I'm not grokking:
In the exposition the list of examples presented as typical of Computer Science – "certainly not just programming" – is this one at the end of the list:
"... the design of embedded systems ..."
Huh?
Why doesn't that fit? There is no further direct discussion on the page that could apply (that I found). Is it a modern perspective that the embedded world and the high-end world are becoming so blurred as to be identical (such as Linux on both)? Is it simply Moore's law in action reducing the cost of embedded solutions to the point that embedded design is no longer something special?
The other examples, "the construction and optimisation of compilers, interpreters, theorem provers and type inference systems," clearly hit meta-activity more than "just programming."
In a word/acronym, RTOS. Its forest of O(1) algos and insane low latency reliable guaranteed response.
The joy of (hardware related) spinlocks and related contention control algos that non-embedded systems would resolve with the reset button and/or blaming the operator.
Mergers of a lot of classical engineering control theory and computer science (although not limited solely to embedded).
I don't think anyone in industry writes mathematically provably correct software except embedded aerospace.
As much as it pains me to say it, on a multidecade basis, exception handling and testing seems to be retreating to life-critical embedded work, even if in the rest of the biz those topics get a lot of PR.
I think they're writing about "real" embedded like the space shuttle autopilot as opposed to "its just a PC w/ PC app, but not typical PC hardware and outside a cubicle" like an asterisk appliance or a linux based small NAS appliance.
Agreed! The Stanford Encyclopedia is really awesome - helped so much with my undergrad philosophy degree. Somehow it manages to be topical and in-depth at the same time.
We also have some really cool case studies in the works with more "high profile" startups in Toronto. That being said, we're still a very early-stage company.
We serve about 150k req/sec from the CDN. That (obviously) isn't included in the 70k number from the article. The 70k is only what we are serving from the origin.
Still cannot believe they didn't foresee the PR shitstorm they would create by faking the original pictures. Especially since the actual camera is pretty damn decent.
That's the thing. If the camera is anything near what they were claiming, they didn't need to fake the pictures. The reason you fake pictures (or setup unrealistic test conditions) is to make your product look better than it actually is.
But the decided to, reportedly because the software wasn't ready. Not only was the camera actually that good, but they faked it to make a paper launch, where they didn't even announce a release date.
"If the camera is anything near what they were claiming, they didn't need to fake the pictures"
They need, at the end of the day, it is a phone stabilization. Nothing compared with a real $200 video camera from Sony yet.
The Iphone technology in the works could be better than that, don't forget that this camera is just a prototype in the lab. In fact they are telling the competition when their puck is going to be.
Supposedly, `There is no such thing as bad publicity' [1]. In case of Nokia's recent phones, I agree wholeheartedly -- we wouldn't have heard of Lumia 920 on HN if it wasn't for the faked ad and resulting chatter in the blogosphere.
Don't think it's quite forgotten. Showed up on my netflix a few weeks ago. It's a great biopic of the nacent computer industry in the 70s-80s. It gives a lot of credit to the pioneering venture capitalists of that time.
There's also an issue with the media talking about Kickstarter products like they already exist.
In the case of Lifx, article titles like "Australian re-invents the lightbulb" mislead the public and perpetuate the belief that people are purchasing actual products and not merely funding idea that may come into fruition.
