Voice of the DBA

Tag: social

  • Social: Growing Up with the Dukes of Hazzard

    I grew up in the South. The capital of the Confederacy was a short drive from my house. We studied the Civil War.

    I watched the Dukes on TV, and enjoyed it. Many of my friends did and we laughed, joked, and wanted a car like that. We loved the horn, and when a friend’s Dad got a programmable horn that could play Dixie, we did it over and over.

    I thought many of the people thinking “the South will rise again” or embracing this as history were just showing some pride. I’ve visited the cemeteries of Confederate soldiers, even as an adult, with curiosity and understanding this is part of our history in the US.

    It is, but it’s also a racist icon and one that represents treason to me. We can study history and relegate the item to history, but I don’t think that we should display and celebrate that time. You may be proud that your ancestors stood up for that they believed in, but I’m not sure you should be proud of what they believed in.

    I used to tolerate and not think too deeply about people putting that flag anywhere. As I look at the world, which has both grown and regressed, and not grown, I can’t tolerate that symbol anymore.

    I had friends that embraced it. I also had people out there that physically threatened or assaulted me who proudly displayed it. I’ve had few physical encounters and some were not about race or skin color, but some were. In fact, all of the ones as an adult were.

    The Confederate flag in the US ought to be treated like the Nazi flag in Germany. It’s the symbol of traitors, of racism, and of losers of the Civil War. I can’t believe our military has tolerated this until 2020, but I’m glad they are removing it.

    I am, too.

  • Social: Stepping Back and Embracing a Difference of Thought

    I do think that we want to have diversity, for a number of reasons, but this means in many cases, embracing differences. My editorial today is on Gatekeepers, which is one way of avoiding differences and diversity and searching for reinforcement of a view, idea, process, etc.

    As the events of the last couple weeks have swept the globe in a completely different way from the COVID-19 pandemic, I find myself rethinking how I look at the world.

    I am a minority in the US, and have a skin color that differs from most of the people in charge of my country and many organizations. I have experienced some discrimination in my life and had some scary moments where I feared for my safety.

    However, I’m not black, I’m not a woman, and I’m not LGBTQ. I think overall, I’ve gotten off easy. I don’t quite fit in, and have felt uncomfortable more times than I’d like to admit, but I also get along most of the time and have enjoyed success in life.

    I have also avoided being controversial in my career.

    I’m changing some of that. I still think sex, politics, and religion are topics to avoid in most career situations, however, I don’t think these things fall into those areas:

    • Racism
    • Sexism/misogyny
    • human rights and fair treatment

    I may lose some friends and contacts, and I have lost some. If you are unwilling to consider other thoughts, if you don’t want to consider your view might be wrong, if you don’t want to try and understand of there is any inherent or systemic issue with the state of majorities and minority treatment in the US or your country, feel free to move on.

    I’ve been blessed and lucky, but I’m trying to rexamine my view and learn more. I’m confronting my privileges and those of others to try and understand what is a better way forward.

    I am doing a few things. I wrote about changing my naming in git. I put down a couple books I was reading and picked up White Fragility. I’ve read more, about what Mark Cuban, Sal Khan, Tim Scott, and more. I’m trying to learn more and better understand how I view the world around me.

    I am calling out hatred and poor behavior as I see it. Being conservative isn’t a problem. Trying to change the discussion from #BlackLivesMatter to #xxxLivesMatter is.

    Many organizations have taken strong stances against racism. I hope this is heartfelt and not just marketing. Time will tell. I’ll be watching.

  • Adding the Social Headline Topic

    The world is changing, and the activism is infectious. I’ve tried to be fairly apolitical and unoffensive for most of my career. I definitely have not always succeeded, but in general rules, I’ve avoided most controversial topics, tried to avoid profanity, and been polite in disagreement.

    I think those are good general rules, but I don’t think I can be silent about some of the difficult topics impacting the world today around #BlackLivesMatter, LGBTQ issues, treatment of women, and more. These are not political topics, in most cases, but just basic humanitarian issues.

    I’ve added the tag, social, and will prefix posts with “Social:” as I discuss and debate these items in my mind.

    If you are not interested, please ignore these posts.

    If you wish to comment, I will respond to serious questions, but will ignore and disengage from trolling.

    If you wish to make a joke  or use irony, sarcasm, or any other technique, please refrain. I see enough of this on Twitter, and honestly, most of you suck at it. You’re not funny, and it comes off poorly. I try to be careful here myself, because I’m not funny either. I might be able to make a joke, but as a public speaker for over a decade, I know it’s a rare occurrence.

    I am also looking to drop posts of this nature on Friday, trying to give them time to grow and mature in my mind.

  • Social: A Small Step to Address Poor Past Behavior

    Tl;Dr – This is about changing your main branch in git to main. However, please read and think about what I am saying here.

    When I started working with Version Control, the main branch was named trunk. I worked with code and we always branched away from trunk, which was our source of truth. I have no idea of the origin, though people seem to think this relates to trees. That makes sense.

    Then why master? No idea. The inventor of Git is Linus Torvalds. He’s been accused of poor behavior, though I don’t know I think he is racist. Git was supposedly chosen as it’s an unpleasant person in British slang. That makes sense.

    I followed him early on, and remember trying to get Linux 0.6 working on hardware. I was fascinated with his work, and I hope he chose “master” as the moniker for the main branch because of the verb definition rather than the noun. Who knows?

    In any case, technology is littered with the use of “master” in our terminology. Replication, especially, but HA tech and in many places where we distribute something from one machine to another. I would like to think this is idea of one with more/better knowledge (the master, in the Kung Fu sense), distributing that to others.

    However, there is the connotation of control.

    The IETF agrees and has draft terminology change recommendations. In line with that, I saw a note from Scott Hanselman on changing your git default branch, this after I saw a few people this weekend noting they were submitting PRs to make the change.

    I decided to do the same. I don’t know how to do this on GitHub without a local repo, so I’m following Scott’s process.

    git branch –m master main
    
git push –u origin main

    This moves all the code (all commits and history) to a branch called main. Then pushes this up and tracks it.

    Once it’s there, I need to go to the repo settings and change the default branch to main and delete master. This will cause some issues on laptops, but those are up to date, or they have minor unpushed demo changes that I can abandon. I’ll then pull down the new structure of the repo.

    Don’t do this haphazardly. Communicate with your team and ensure everyone is aware of the change. Then slowly work your way through the repos. It’s a chore but a small one. One I’ll be working my way through until I’m done.