 All right, good morning everybody. Hi, welcome to AlterCoff. My name is Sumina Harihareshwara and on Twitter you might know me as atbrainwayne, atbrainwayne, that's B-R, no I don't, I'm not gonna do that SEO bullshit. And I am on Twitter because that's where you put jokes that are too long for a laptop sticker. As a comedian I have made a study of this, basically the joke length is vanity license plate, Wi-Fi network name, laptop sticker tweet, Instagram of text so it's completely inaccessible to people who use green readers. I don't know if any of you noticed yesterday that around 8 a.m. here, I believe Twitter changed its UI so that all instances of the Confederate flag changed to a rainbow flag, evidently. I of course am pretty happy about the new ruling about the legality of gay marriage all across the U.S., not just this state by state piecemeal thing. There's a few people who are not so happy about it, web app and database programmers. Yeah, I gotta change some of those constraints now. I think it's a good trade. I heard about the gay marriage ruling from Twitter, as I'm sure many of you did. I think it would be unfair to say that I'm addicted to Twitter or addicted to email. I'm addicted to connectivity, to being able to pay attention to anything except where I am in the present moment. I practice the opposite of mindfulness, aided and abetted by Wi-Fi and 3G. There's a part of me that wants to check my email like right now, while I'm talking to you. I was flying through Las Vegas somewhat recently. I had a layover at McCarran Airport and just as I got off of the plane at the end of the jetway, there was a slot machine. Just like, okay, welcome to Vegas, here you go. You've been jonesing for this, right? And I just thought those poor sods, addicted to gambling, just so habituated to kind of like the dopamine, ooh, free Wi-Fi. There's, the connection of Wi-Fi and airports and airplanes has been strengthened even more now because you can get Wi-Fi on a plane because you're going through the cloud. You can get Wi-Fi on a plane but no food because that's how Maslow's hierarchy of needs works now. I guess we learn to consume connectivity. We are all made of light. Madonna was right. Lamarck was also right. But more seriously, folks, unfortunately, I'm gonna have to talk about what I have to do to get that sweet, sweet Wi-Fi on a plane which is to go through airport security which means that I have to wear a special outfit because, you know, brown. You know, it starts with a shirt, bright like a turquoise or a hot pink, maybe red, white, and blue would be good. Something real tight across the chest, opposite of a burka, is what I'm going for. Something maybe in a teal with glitter spelling out porn or slut across my chest would probably be best. The pants, khakis, you know, no one ever, I guess, hijacked a plane in dockers. Those shoes that are easy to slip on and off carry my US passport, speak with an American accent and be kissing a white guy. That's what I wear to the airport. Airport security also includes people trying to pronounce my name. Always a joy. So yes, TSA agent, I know you want to show me respect by pronouncing my name correctly. I want to move the line along. You and I will never see each other again. We don't need to put you through the Coursera class, the audacity like online class of how to pronounce Sumina Harihareshwara. We don't need the off with the cookies and the tokens and the, no, no, no, just like let me through. This is also a problem at parties. People seem to want to learn my name at parties. So many parties I've wanted to just be vicky the whole night. And then right after the name is the job thing, right? I don't have a job. This is evidently just does not compute for some people because the basic party introduction transaction is name, name, to whom do you sell your labor? How do you draw wages? I must know this now. I had, there was this one guy, I'm sure he meant, well, he said, so who do you work for? Said, I said, well, I'm working on my own projects right now. This is a euphemism and we all know it. But he said, oh, so you're contracting? Well, maybe if watching every prime suspect is contracting. When I do have a job, when I do have a job, I work in the software industry because I'm pedantic and bad with people. That's where you do that. And recently in the software industry, we've been rolling out this new development methodology called Agile. I see some nods, but for those of you who don't know much about Agile, it's a bit like polyamory in that if someone tells you they're doing it, you still don't know what they're doing. The basic thesis of both poly and Agile is that instead of having set roles and a monolithic narrative driving towards some predefined and specified end point, instead, it's a bit more improv. You know, we're all weird people. Our needs change, our desires change. You don't know on day one what you'll want on day 500 either in your software or in your bed. So clear your calendars now. There's gonna be a lot of meetings. And this goes not just if you decide you wanna do it, but if anyone you thought you were working with or loving decides to do it. Cause you will be pulled onto that train whether you like it or not. The change is not just one person. As I mentioned, I work in the software industry and I'm pedantic and bad with people. So I'm also very into open source software. Open source software is a way of making, making a sharing software so that you, the end user have more ability to look at it and reuse it and change it because there are incomprehensible licenses that keep you free. The legal, because nothing goes better with code than lawyers. And you know, there's a lot of these that are kind of hard to read and understand. So I've been making up my own recently such as the Army Reserve open source license. The idea is that you get the software for free but one week and a month and two weeks a year please help us do code review. There's the grandma license, here's some software but would it kill you to send a thank you note? And the coffee shop wifi license which is that you can use this for free but if you sit around too long using it without contributing back someone will start resentfully mopping next to you. As a member and if I may leader of some open source communities I have been instrumental in bringing codes of conduct to some of them. It's nice to have an easy laugh, applause line in a bit. There are some people who don't much care for codes of conduct such as harassy or clueless white men. One of them said of my work, well the open source world is not looking for codes of conduct and she is seeking to thrust them upon unwillingly. That phrasing not my favorite maybe proves the point. I am very, very fortunate. I have not really had to deal with that much harassment because of my job in open source which is kind of like having only a little bit of rat shit in your fajita. Doesn't really ruin it, right? And when it comes to online harassment I also have faced honestly very little harassment from the usual suspects. I'm not really into video games. I run Linux, the knowing laughter of Linux users who have Tetris and like eight variants of it. It's still good, it's still good. When it comes to in-person harassment I do have a little bit more experience. Like you know that thing where you're walking down the street, sorry, this joke is for the visibly marginalized people in the room and all the rest of you can sort of think about how much you like comic books. But you know that moment where you're walking down the street and someone says something shitty at you but you can't quite make out what it is because bigots don't enunciate. So you have to imagine what they meant to say which might have been other or lack of accountability or maybe homosocial bonding, huh? There was a moment recently, a friend of mine, a gender queer white person and I who both work in tech were walking down the street in Brooklyn and as we walked past a group of youths on the sidewalk just after we passed them we both felt some pebbles hit us in the back of the head which was frightening and distressing. On the other hand there was a part of me that's like it's not rocks, it's like literally a microaggression. You know it's such a cute word, pebble, it's a smart watch, it's a children's cereal. It's the hand on the knee of things thrown at you. It's the not all men of things thrown at you. And so I basically just tried to convince myself it wasn't a big deal. I looked at my friend, did that just happen? They said yeah. And then we walked off to our highly paid tech jobs because intersectionality. In case you have your Alterkov bingo card, I believe intersectionality is the free space for the bingo card of things said by well-meaning cis straight allies. I attempt to be intersectional in my attention to social justice issues which means yesterday was really hard on Twitter. Cause what note do you strike, right? Okay great, we got gay marriage, love wins, hashtag. But hold on, I mean we're still really concerned and upset about the Charleston murders, Black Lives Matter, hashtag. Hold on, hold on, I also gotta be concerned about trans rights and enda and queer youth. Where's the I win hashtag? Or the you now believe I am a decent person hashtag that will convince you so I don't have to do any more work? Being intersectional in my media consumption is something I also try to do which means a kind of carbon credit kind of balancing. There's a lot of regrettable mass media in my past history, I mean heck when I was a kid I read those Star Trek branded novels. The ones that technically are shelved in the sci-fi section of the library although they are so formulaic, it's like Sweet Valley Starfleet Academy. They got those portraits that are like these uncanny valley pictures of Picard and Riker on them. Yeah, yeah and I mean I thought right that I was like oh you know I'm so superior to those people reading fantasy. You know like dragons, telepaths, get real. Faster than light, travel, sign me up. Hard sci-fi, realistic right, the physics, yeah. These days I've switched a little bit from reading sci-fi to reading romance because sometimes I like to read stories about women. When you read romance novels you're reading something where I am potentially part of the imagined audience for that book. It's not like in sci-fi where the author's peering out from behind the book flap. What are you doing here? I've been reading you know Courtney Milan, Mary Robinette Cole, none of that 50 shades of gray stuff. You know none of that billionaire prince charming fantasy that's just inherently classist about how someone rich is gonna come save you know cause that's the problem with those books right? It's not about kinky sex, it's the classism. Check my social justice credit. It's the classism. Recently I picked up a romance novel that I thought was gonna be really exciting because here it was a historical romance set in the 1850s in a free black community in the upper Midwest where the hero and the heroine were both conductors on the underground railroad and I was just like this is fantastic, it'll be fluff but I'll learn stuff, black lives matter, great. Then the author's prose style was the first thing to start bothering me because it was the kind of info dumpy narrative where you really see the author's research like Carol closed the door, shook loose her tresses and considered a paragraph two, subsection A of the Fugitive Slave Act, which begins, you're learning something, you're learning something, right? And so then the next thing that started bothering me was that I could not get invested in the relationship because this guy was acting like a creepy boyfriend. It was he would come over to her house uninvited, he'd sneak into her room, he kept giving her gifts that she did not want, she said don't talk to me, he would talk to her anyway. This guy was an asshole and I feel bad saying that about a black man in 1850s Michigan but he was an asshole. So I started kind of speed reading for the info dumps because then at least I'm learning something. And then I mean he tricks her into marrying him, what? And then he's getting her to come to his house, it's a fancy house, they're servants, they're pampering her when she does not necessarily even wanna be pampered and I realized this is a billionaire romance. It's the 1850s so it's a thousand-air romance but it's a billionaire romance. And I looked at how much of the book was left and I thought I can read about the Fugitive Slave Act on Wikipedia. So if any of you have recommendations for romance novels starring diverse protagonists, I would very much appreciate your recommendations. You could come up to me during the break here at Altercalf or you could tweet at me as at Brainwain. You will not find me on Facebook though because I'm not on Facebook. In that I am sort of like a digital vegan, I guess. In that I don't get invited to things. But you all did invite me to Altercalf and for that I am very grateful. Thank you very much, you've been a great audience.