Today is Pride in London. Many tech firms have been festooned in rainbow bunting for the last week, and some app developers have even changed their apps’ icons to suggest solidarity with LGBTQ+ people. It’s important to remember that Pride is, fundamentally, a protest. This year marks 50 years since the Stonewall Riots, when the queer community in New York City rose up against the police’s violent oppression—an uprising led by drag queens and queer people of colour.

I’ve written an article for a book! Machines, Code, People is a compilation of articles written by people at Zuhlke, and I’ve contributed a short article: “If you like it then you shouldn’t put some code in it.” It discusses the tendency for us to think we can solve everything with code. You can read the whole book online, or you can buy a dead-tree version of Machines, Code, People at Amazon Germany.

I mostly write Swift in Xcode these days. I can’t say I miss Java. I do, however, miss IntelliJ IDEA, and specifically, the little CamelHumps option: This changes the behaviour when using the arrow keys to navigate between words (⌥+→, ⌥+← on MacOS) so that it respects CamelCase—i.e. it treats the word CamelCase as two words, rather than one. This certainly made it easier for me when it came to renaming variables with long names:

A recurring theme in the two conferences I’ve attended in the last fortnight (Agile Manchester and BeyondTech) has been psychological safety, people’s perception of being in a safe place to take risks: to bring up new ideas, to raise concerns, to admit your own mistakes. Amy Edmondson found that it was the most important feature of effective teams, findings corroborated by Google’s Project Aristotle. A key point of Gitte Klitgaard’s excellent talk Psychological safety: overprotection or not?

I attended the inaugural BeyondTech conference in London this week. It was great! I found out about the conference from a colleague, and I’m really glad they pointed it out to me. My particular highlights were: Sapphire Mason-Brown’s Just Add Diversity—why a diverse tech industry isn’t enough. Particularly alarming to me were the statistics from the survey of people leaving the tech industry: a quarter of people of colour experienced stereotyping; 1 in 10 women had received unwanted sexual attention; 20% of LGBTQ folk had been bullied.

New year, new website? Not really. I haven’t updated my old website, rothwell.im, since 2015, when I (still at university) got cross about the Government’s scheme advertising fibre broadband. Four years ago! That’s before the Brexit referendum was even a twinkle in David Cameron’s eye. This website, as you may guess from the .dev TLD, will mainly be talking about software development. Since the last time I blogged, I’ve been in a new job (almost four years, now!