This month’s SC DUG featured Mauricio Orozco posing questions about getting started as a consultant to long-time members who have all done some work with Drupal as a consultant.
If you would like to join us please check out our upcoming events on Meetup for meeting times, locations, and remote connection information.
We frequently use these presentations to practice new presentations, try out heavily revised versions, and test out new ideas with a friendly audience. So if some of the content of these videos seems a bit rough please understand we are all learning all the time and we are open to constructive feedback. If you want to see a polished version checkout our group members’ talks at camps and cons.
If you are interested in giving a practice talk, leave me a comment here, contact me through Drupal.org, or find me on Drupal Slack. We’re excited to hear new voices and ideas. We want to support the community, and that means you.
Yesterday my wife, Dr. Elizabeth Georgian, and I attended a public memorial for Ruth Bader Ginsburg here in Aiken.
As the constitutional historian at USCA, Beth was asked to speak about Justice Ginsburg’s contributions to the law over the course of her life. Her full remarks are below, followed by pictures I took at the event.
May her memory be a blessing. The Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Rosh Hashanah. In the Jewish tradition, that makes her a person of great righteousness. May her memory be a blessing. What that means is not may we remember her to comfort ourselves, but may we remember her through our acts. May we continue her legacy, may we fight for those who are marginalized, may we fight for what is right and just, and may we defend her vision of gender equality, may we will into being her belief that “women belong in all places where decisions are being made.”
Women have been left out of the constitution, once by the framers’ failure to envision women as equal citizens and independent legal beings and then again by the thwarting of the ERA, but Ginsburg fought to make, in that centuries old document, a space for us.
After joining the faculty at Rutgers Law School, she began volunteering for the ACLU. Taking aim at laws ostensibly intended to protect women, she slowly began to reeducate the judiciary about the inherent oppression in such legislation, laws which turned “a pedestal into a cage.” She argued six cases before the Supreme Court between 1971 and 1978, winning five of them.
Reed vs Reed (1971) won women equal rights to administer estates, rejecting an Idaho law grounded in the belief that men were more familiar with the business world and thus better suited to the task. Her brief, a groundbreaking inventory of the law’s oppression of American women, became known as the “grandmother” brief and formed the basis for future challenges to women’s inequality.
In Frontiero v. Richardson (1973) she successfully argued for the right of women in the military to receive benefits for their spouses, just as men did, finding the fifth amendment’s due process clause required the equal treatment of men and women.
Ginsburg recognized that gender inequality hurt men as well as women, an argument she brought before the court in 1975, Wienberger v. Wiesenfeld, when she won the right for widowers, along with widows, to receive social security survivor benefits. More than a legal mind, she cared about those she fought for; after his wife’s death in childbirth, Stephen Wiesenfeld wanted the benefit to stay home and care for their infant son Jason; 23 years later she officiated at Jason’s wedding and 42 years later she presided over Stephen’s second wedding, this time at the Supreme Court. Along the way she presided at many weddings, including the same sex wedding of a former student, aligning with her unfailing support marriage equality, culminating in Obergefell v. Hodges, where she joined with the majority to find in the constitution the right to marriage equality. She presided over her grandson Paul’s ceremony and most recently that of a family friend, a few short weeks before her death.
In a seemingly more trivial case, Craig v. Boren (1976) a case she worked on but did not argue, Oklahoma boys won the right to buy light beer at the same age as girls. In reality, it was an incredibly significant case, one in which seven of the nine justices ruled that the by treating men and women differently, by letting girls drink at 18 but requiring boys to wait until 21, the law violated the fourteenth amendment—granting women significant protection. The case also raised the standard of review of gender discrimination from the lowest standard—rational basis—to intermediate scrutiny, a major, if incomplete step forward.
After joining the Supreme Court in 1993 as the second female justice, in 1996 Ginsburg penned her most significant majority ruling advancing women’s rights, United States v. Virginia, when the court ruled against the Virginia Military Institute’s male-only admissions policy, finding that even the proposed creation of a parallel female academy did not satisfy the fourteenth amendment’s equal protection clause. She wrote that “genuinely equal protection” leaves no room for “a law or official policy that denies to women simply because they are women equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in, and contribute to society based upon what they can do.”
But it was her dissents that brought her fame, and that phrase “I dissent”, along with her affectionate nickname, “the notorious RBG,” came to represent to her admirers persistence in the face of injustice and the dogged belief that standing up for what was right mattered even if the face of seeming defeat. She forcefully dissented in cases threatening women’s access to contraception, called out the men on the court for using “flimsy and transparent justifications” to restrict a woman’s right to choose, and criticized the assaults on democracy made in Citizens United along with the court’s destruction of the Voting Rights Act.
She was never afraid to draw on her personal experiences to argue for equality and fair treatment, pointing out to the men on the court in a case centered on the strip search student, “they have never been a 13-year old girl. It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I don’t think my colleagues, some of them, understand that.”
As a young woman, she faced open discrimination in the workplace, losing a job for the crime of being pregnant with her first child with the love of her life, her husband Marty. After the Supreme Court ruled that pregnancy discrimination was not a form of gender discrimination, denying women protection, a few years later she helped draft the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which still protects pregnant women today from workplace discrimination.
In Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company (2007), the Supreme Court ruled that, notwithstanding that Lilly Ledbetter was paid less than her male counterparts for 19 long years, she had missed the narrow window to file suit and thus was entitled to no legal remedy. Ginsburg issued her scathing dissent from the bench, accusing her male counterparts of failing “to comprehend…the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination” and demanded Congress act. Two years later they did, passing the Lilly Ledbettter Fair Pay Act of 2009; a framed copy hung on her office wall until her death.
Ginsburg accomplished so much, finding women and our rights in the fifth and fourteenth amendments, making space for us in a reluctant constitution, raising the bar for gender discrimination, and broadening the definition of equal protection.
But the work remains to be done. The battle for the Equal Rights Amendment, which as she pointed out, every constitution in the world written since 1950 has contained in some form, is ongoing. The Supreme Court still has not embraced a strict standard of scrutiny for sex and gender-based discrimination, the higher standard required to justify racially and religiously disparate laws. And today, the reproductive rights of women, both those free and unfree are under a greater assault than ever before. Ginsburg urged us to “do something outside ourselves, something that makes life a little better for people less fortunate than you,” let us continue the fight in her honor. May her memory be a blessing.
Local folks singer offered a few songs old and one written for the occasion.
Beth being interviewed by the Aiken Standard before making her remarks.
A USCA student and local pastor sharing a few words.
A variety of signs were brought by people attending.
Many people took a few minutes to share their thoughts and feelings.
A local TV reporter interviewing the organizer from the local League of Women voters.
Another local pastor talking with members of the community.
Beth, offering her remarks.
Several people came with collars inspired by those worn by Ginsburg
Students from USCA trying to keep their candles alight in the wind of the evening.
Another local pastor shared about the importance of RBG to the LBGTQI community.
A variety of RBG inspired t-shirts were on display.
Lessie Price, from Aiken City Counsel offered her thoughts and encouraged everyone to vote.
All present wanted to make sure that RBG was honored in the present and future.
There was much recognition of the work left to be done by those of us here to carry it forward.
A student from USCA offered her thoughts about the impact of RBG on her life and those around her.
There were reminders about the causes, and the style, Ginsberg believed were important.
This month I gave a talk at SCDUG on encouraging creating testing plans for teams that have been resistant for any number of reasons. This talk is meant to help people argue for the value of testing, and help you create a testing plan that will save more resources that it costs. This was an initial draft of that talk that I’ll be giving a revised and improved version of at Drupal Camp Atlanta in September.
If you would like to join us please check out our up coming events on Meetup for meeting times, locations, and remote connection information.
We frequently use these presentations to practice new presentations, try out heavily revised versions, and test out new ideas with a friendly audience. So if some of the content of these videos seems a bit rough please understand we are all learning all the time and we are open to constructive feedback. If you want to see a polished version checkout our group members’ talks at camps and cons.
If you are interested in giving a practice talk, leave me a comment here, contact me through Drupal.org, or find me on Drupal Slack. We’re excited to hear new voices and ideas. We want to support the community, and that means you.
Earlier today I push my Electron Simple Starter to Github. It has dependencies only to Electron, Electron Debug, and ESlint (but no specific settings, you can add those yourself). All the basic pieces are in place to encourage good security practices. It will run without warnings or errors, and puts in place all plumbing you need for their current inter-process communication, default overrides, and process sandboxing to help you write a secure app.
Off and on I’ve been playing at writing simple programs in JavaScript using Electron. As a long-time web developer the idea of writing a web app that can be compiled to an native application across a web swath of major operating systems has massive appeal.
But when I started to write Electron apps to scratch various itches, I was quickly annoyed at the number of security warnings I got when following the project tutorials. The PHP community used to ignore bad security in tutorials to the detriment of web, so it bugs me to see that behavior crop up in other places. With my most recent side project – a Salesforce API exploration tool – I finally decided I was overdue in figuring out how to resolve all the warnings the basic quick start from the main project triggers. Using a combination of this secure electron project template and the main project’s security tutorial I finally got there.
Then I wanted to scratch a different itch, which hasn’t really gone anywhere, cause all the work to get started in a secure way felt like a mountain to climb again. The secure electron template is too opinionated for me to use directly for a small toy project, and ElectronForce has all kinds of other code already in place, so I spun my wheels for awhile. Then I finally bit the bullet and extracted the bits I needed for the next project. Once I realized I had a fairly clean baseline, I figured I would probably want it again soon (I create projects frequently to explore an idea or scratch an itch) so I created a new project template that sets the baseline and is fairly unopinionated. My goal is to have something I can grab to start writing a simple application quickly.
While I’ve made some effort to secure this project baseline, security is always the project developer’s responsibility – you are still responsible for your project’s security. Please feel free to use my template, but understand that you still have to follow best practices to keep your app secure and those will change over time. The Electron project will inevitably evolve and change their security system again, and I will not promise to keep up. Also this is a template, not a library, when some future Electron adds features I didn’t use, you’ll need to update your project.
If some specific piece of this template confuses you, please feel free to ask either here or on Github. I can try to explain as best I am able, and maybe you’ll inspire another post sometime in the future to cover it in depth.
Mauricio Orozco from the SC Commission for Minority Affairs gave a talk about the state of Drupal within the SC State government. In recent years Drupal has grown from a tool used on a small number of projects to the platform of choice for all new agency sites. He spoke about the state’s initiative to move more to Drupal, South Carolina Interactive and their role in supporting government projects, which agencies are moving toward Drupal, and how this is benefiting residents of South Carolina.
If you would like to join us please check out our up coming events on MeetUp for meeting times, locations, and remote connection information.
We frequently use these presentations to practice new presentations, try out heavily revised versions, and test out new ideas with a friendly audience. So if some of the content of these videos seems a bit rough please understand we are all learning all the time and we are open to constructive feedback. If you want to see a polished version checkout our group members’ talks at camps and cons.
If you are interested in giving a practice talk, leave me a comment here, contact me through Drupal.org, or find me on Drupal Slack. We’re excited to hear new voices and ideas. We want to support the community, and that means you.
Over the last few weeks the US has been moved to action about policing and racial justice in response to the murder of George Floyd. As someone who is deeply concerned about these issues I always struggle to find words I feel do the topic justice; they seem too important to stay silent, too critical to speak about poorly, and too complex for me to write about well. For my limitations in what follows, I’m sorry.
As a society we are still working to understand that the violence and murders by police we see played out regularly in the new is not just the fault of the individual officers or their by-stander colleagues, but also the fault of our society as a whole. This has not happened in a vacuum. Our communities have voted too often for people and policies that brought us here instead of doing something better.
But all those are things you can read about in detail from more skilled writers than me. And if you haven’t you should.
I want to talk here more about the fact that we all know we cannot trust the police to handle complex situations, in particular protests. It is why we all set our expectations that it is simply someone else’s job to maintain calm when large crowds are involved with police.
The most basic sign of this lack of trust is that no one doubts the importance of the long-standing understanding among families raising children of color that they must teach very young kids how to de-escalate with police because they cannot trust officers not to shoot a child playing alone in the park. If that’s not something you’ve known was happening for a long time, I recommend Clint Smith’s letter to his then-future son, and more broadly his recent interview on TED Radio Hour. If you are a person of color, a woman, or mentally ill it’s long been clear that society expects you to protect yourself against police officers.
Beyond those seemly obvious, but still debated reasons, we have all long shown we don’t trust police in how we talk about protests. Until the videos of police violence from protests caused a shift in how we talk about these events in the last few weeks we had a very standard story around any riot, protest, or civil unrest which assumed police could not handle angry expressions of the first amendment.
The story starts with a nonviolent march or gathering, and then degrades into a violent riot because of a few bad people in the crowd. The police are be cast as innocent bystanders until the violence broke out, then they became heroes working to regain control for the rest of us. We see these stories on the news and wring our hands about a good message being marred by violence – too bad they didn’t learn Dr. King’s message.
If you have been to a large protest you probably know in your gut that’s not how it works in real life. In practice throughout the day the police are making decisions about how to interact with the crowd. Often this starts with little or no containment during the initial events, then the police start to restrict the group’s movement. They use increasingly aggressive tactics to try to control the physical direction of protesters putting pressure on the crowd they say they want to keep calm. Sometimes they say this is to enforce a permit, sometimes they claim to be protecting businesses, and sometimes they don’t give any reason. When things finally turn angry and violent, the police have made themselves the front line and often starting the actual fighting. There is no actual reason to make this shift in most cases, just things like a sense that protests after dark are more dangerous and the cost of policing.
An anti-Trump march in Philadelphia in 2017, well after their permit expired and out of bounds for the march, but being guided by police not confronted for another hour or two.
We have long criticized marchers for damaging small businesses, burning their own neighborhoods, while ignoring that police and politicians tried to control where protests were held and used force to keep people in their neighborhoods.
Reporters, politicians, and police would ignore all the research of large crowd dynamics, and blame the crowd for doing what large groups of angry people do when pressed – fight back.
In the US we started to assume it was the protester’s job to stay nonviolent in the face of extreme police response during the 1960’s and 1970’s when the civil rights and antiwar movements showed it was possible. It is also important to remember that while there were amazing peaceful protests in that period, there were also large riots, rebellions, and general civil unrest. We remember the great example set an inspired few, not the larger contexts of events that unfolded.
The protesters at this event invited the police into the shade and offered them water and fresh fruit. It was meant to help keep the officers calm on a hot day, because we could not trust them to remain calm without our help.
Just because we want large protests expressing anger at our government to be nonviolent that does not mean we can reasonably expect every group to manage the needed level of organization and training to make that possible. We have a paid, trained, group of people we already expect to show up for these events – why don’t we assume they are going to help make sure these events are empowering expressions of our first amendment rights? Why do we assume that the unpaid citizens exercising their rights need to be able to handle situations that police cannot?
Currently our police are badly trained at de-escalation, even though it’s been shown to keep them safer. That training will cost money, but we could cover that by cutting funding of unneeded weapons like armored personnel carriers. I know some people who can run that kind of training – trust me they would do a lot of training for the annual maintenance budget on one of those things.
Yes, being a police officer is hard. I agree with the many officers complaining that we expect them to do all kinds of things they shouldn’t be asked to do because yes they need better solutions around them. And of course they should expect they will come home safely at the end of their shifts. But just because a job is hard, and can be dangerous, does not make it okay to do the job badly – in fact that seems like an argument to do the job well.
The flaws in our system are not the fault of individual officers – no one officer can reform the system (although any one of four police officers could have saved George Floyd’s life by stopping his murder). No one mayor, police chief, nor any one person has the power to make the kind of change we need to make our communities safer for everyone in them. Everyone is responsible for their own personal behavior, but dismissing gross misconduct including murders as the acts of a few “bad apples” instead of recognizing that they are part of a system that our society built is an injustice in itself.
The system is well past needing simple reforms being debated in Washington and many state legislatures. Maybe if we’d really reformed things after the police riots of the 1960’s, when departments were smaller and officers less protected from consequences, we could have used incremental measures. Now we need drastic sweeping changes. We need to understand that Camden, NJ’s choice to disband and rebuild their department was a first step that shows you’re serious but doesn’t mean you’ve made enough progress. After you totally reboot you still have to be ready to totally rebuild.
We are going forwards, we don’t have a choice, the question is where will that take us?
This month’s SC DUG meeting featured Will Jackson from Kanopi Studios talking about his virtual background and office.
Before everyone was learning to use Zoom virtual backgrounds, Will had built out a full 3D room for his background, including family pictures and other fun details. He talked about what he built and may inspire you to try some more personalized than swaying palm tree and night skies.
If you would like to join us please check out our up coming events on MeetUp for meeting times, locations, and remote connection information.
We frequently use these presentations to practice new presentations, try out heavily revised versions, and test out new ideas with a friendly audience. So if some of the content of these videos seems a bit rough please understand we are all learning all the time and we are open to constructive feedback. If you want to see a polished version checkout our group members’ talks at camps and cons.
If you are interested in giving a practice talk, leave me a comment here, contact me through Drupal.org, or find me on Drupal Slack. We’re excited to hear new voices and ideas. We want to support the community, and that means you.
Back when we were allowed to go out and about, my wife and I spent a few days in New York City so she could attend a conference. We explored a few of the art museum and I got some time to just hang around Central Park and take pictures. I had started to post this gallery a while back, but got distracted by life and didn’t finish. So as a reminder that there is a larger world out there, and we’ll get to go back to exploring it one day I figured I’d finally get this finished.
The first day we just wondered a bit, including taking the Station Island Ferry across and back to get a few classic pictures.
Statue of Liberty from the Station Island Ferry, where we bumped into the sister of a good friend.
Ellis Island from the Station Island Ferry.
The memorial to the Irish Famine, which is a small Irish Hill side moved to Manhattan.
Ice skating at Rockefeller Center just before the tree came down.
People capturing their memories of the 9/11 memorial.
9/11 Memorial flowers
9/11 Memorial Flower
A friend let us use her membership to the Met. So we spent a long day walking the exhibits. Since you can get better pictures of more or less all their art than most people are likely to take in the galleries (and no small number of people were taking pictures of whole works) I focused on the faces within larger works.
We explored Central Park together and separately. I love getting a few hours to just stroll through a place with my camera. Trying to take a mix of classic pictures and few that are less common.
This month’s SC DUG was a round table discussion on working remotely during the Covid-19 lock down. We had actually planned this topic before the crisis emerged in full, but found ourselves having to pivot our talking points a fair bit.
The discussion centered on things that people are dealing with, even those of us who work remotely on a regular basis. A few resources were shared by people on the call, including Pantheon’s Donut Slack Bot.
If you would like to join us please check out our up coming events on MeetUp for meeting times, locations, and remote connection information.
Don’t expect to get a good routine down in the current conditions.
About three years ago I wrote up some of my thinking on what you need to succeed in remote work and I still stand by most of that advice. But right now many of those suggestions may need to be goals you are working towards.
A few days ago my friend Johanna, who like me routinely works from home, learned she’ll be working from home while she and her partner try their hand at homeschooling and offered this tweet:
whelp our schools just called it
so yeah, we'll be working full-time & homeschooling for at least the next 2 weeks
that's gonna be real relaxing
Note, people new to WFH
*this is not normally what WFH is like, it is better than this*
She’s both absolutely right (and smart, so if you’re on Twitter you should follow her), but also a little wrong. This is not what work from home normally is like, but this is what work from home is like in this moment.
Right now a huge number of people are suddenly working remote for the first time. Some of you probably wanted to this for a long time and are suddenly getting the chance, and some didn’t really want a remote job but now are forced to try it.
While some companies already have the tools and habits in place to make remote work successful, most probably don’t. What’s more, many people are now also doing childcare/homeschooling at the same time. So let’s be clear this is a terrible way to start working remotely. But here we are, so let’s talk about ways to use enough duct tape to make it work.
Your Boss
Lots of people probably have bosses that are deeply uncomfortable with this whole thing. They may have fought allowing remote work for long time because they worry about monitoring remote work and have no experience with remote management–those fears are likely still there and will put them off their game. Managers who are uncertain about basic working conditions can make bad choices that make a bad situation worse – like trying to monitor everyone on video conference all day. I’ve worked remote for bosses that didn’t trust me if they couldn’t see me, it’s hard and makes it hard to be successful. Long-term if they don’t learn to adjust you should probably find someone better to work for, but in the short run that’s probably not an option (and hopefully they will adjust) so let’s talk about strategies you can use to get through.
Check in early in the day so they know you’re up and running.
This should be something informal like a quick email to verify a meeting or other detail, a chat message just greeting them warmly, or something similar. Basically give them a sense that you are around and active before they ping you to find out if you remembered to wake up. You don’t want to sound needy or like you’re asking their permission to do work, as that can encourage micromanagement instincts.
Check in again at the end of the day, letting them know you’re leaving.
Again this should be something informal and simple that gives them, and you, a sense of closure to your work day. This helps avoid them feeling like you just disappeared while they adjust to the routine.
Leave a documented work trail with timestamps.
Think emails, notes from meetings, hours tracking and billing systems, Word documents with update timestamps, version control systems, and other things that you can point to that will remind them you really were working even though they didn’t see you (and if things get ugly something you can show others to prove you were working).
Start early or work late a few times early on.
Again this is about helping them see that you really are working hard even though they can’t see you. You still need to maintain work/life balance so don’t do this every day, or even most days, just enough that they are able to notice the effort in a crisis.
Suggest new or better tools to help support the sudden remote culture.
They probably know things aren’t working super well, and a chance to blame tools may be welcome. So research and suggest tools that make things better. Try to spot the things that have them uneasy about the situation and offer tools that might help with those challenges.
Your Tools
On the topic of tools, if your team just went fully remote you probably are lacking some tools to do all the things a great remote team has in place. You aren’t going to fix that overnight, but don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good here – a tool that your team uses is better than the perfect tool that no one adopts.
So if you need to pick a chat client try the low hanging fruit first. You’re a Microsoft shop with 365 setup? Use Teams. You a Google apps shop? Use Hangouts. Salesforce? Chatter. Use Zoom a lot? Well their chat is terrible so use Slack (everyone else should probably default to Slack too). Some of those tools are far better than others but each has a niche they serve very well, and maybe your team will switch one day but get started now and worry about using it really well later.
Your Family
Don’t sweat the kids and pets interrupting. My current team was nearly 100% remote before all this started. We’re professional, have a strong team work ethic, and work hard to make sure our clients see that. And you know what, people’s kids and pets get in the way sometimes. Rarely does it matter for more than a minute or two. Right now, we’re running into a lot more of that than is normal. So are our clients. It’s going to be just fine.
Normally we try to limit interruptions, but honestly pets and kids are welcome cute distraction more often than not. My dogs wander my office and often end up on camera. My boss’s cat frequently strolls across his desk during check ins. Other people’s children come in and wave to all the people on their parent’s computer screen. Sure there are times we need to focus and someone’s dog really really needs to bark at that cat outside the window. Or a child needs their parent’s attention the very minute we’re trying to solve a hard problem. It’s just part of how things flow, and within my team we understand it as a part of work from home since it gives us all more time with the people that matter most to us all (hint: not our colleagues). Family, in whatever form they come, are part of what makes us who we are and allows us to see each other as a more complete person.
Yes, in this moment when kids are suddenly off from school with few places having formed any reasonable plan for education continuity, even for experienced teams we are expecting it will be disruptive. The entire American workforce is going to have to learn to deal with either their kids, or their colleagues kids, suddenly being around. Do your best to maintain focus and professionalism, but expect cracks, and let those imperfections help you get to know your colleagues better.
The next few weeks or months will be a lot of remote work duct taping even for experienced teams. You, your team, and your families, will learn to get better at this over time. Embrace that you’re learning, expect mistakes, and just plain do the best you can at the moment.
