I heard that Medium was the place to talk shit about Stack Overflow itsnotmyfault Follow Apr 27, 2018 · 5 min read

To piggyback off the other thread, https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/8f62fw/stackoverflow_declares_itself_not_welcoming/ which discusses a Stack Overflow blogpost https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/, I’d like to show a little bit of the buildup to this particular piece. That article is written by Jay Hanlon, EVP of Culture and Experience at Stack Overflow. We’ll come back to him at the bottom.

April 19, 2018: April Wensel, Founder of Compassionate Coding, publishes https://medium.com/@Aprilw/suffering-on-stack-overflow-c46414a34a52

TL;DR: This document becomes highly influential among the Stack Overflow higherups.

The twitter post of it has a pretty insubstantial number of likes/retweets/replies for how powerful it has become: https://twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/986940598887374848 http://archive.is/qhCgR

At the bottom of that medium post, there are three names mentioned as updates, so let’s see those too. Joe Friend, Joel Spolsky, and Jay Hanlon.

April 19, 2018 Joe Friend, Product manager of Stack Overflow, posts https://medium.com/@jfriend/stack-overflows-inclusion-problem-c9b297eb2404, which specifically thanks Wensel for her post, saying “Now is a time for action.” Also, on twitter he thanks April for the medium post: https://twitter.com/jfriend/status/987083490280718336 http://archive.is/NPCEP

That post Also thanks Kim Crayton, CEO (Chief Encouragement Officer) for Underrepresented and Marginalized in Tech | #BusinessForSocialChange | @Biz4SocialCHG | @TheSpectrumCode for her post https://medium.com/@KimCrayton1/because-my-why-is-stronger-than-your-excuses-part-1-15063ce8f92d (Also April 19, 2018) She seems to be using the Twitter Hashtag #causeascene for this type of activism. https://twitter.com/KimCrayton1/status/987414686823014400 http://archive.is/umCmu she talks about Joe Friend’s post. If you’d like to some of her brilliant thoughts: https://twitter.com/KimCrayton1/status/987308691861983232 http://archive.is/P6gkk or https://twitter.com/KimCrayton1/status/982704370453221377 http://archive.is/WT9A0

Joel Spolsky, CEO of Stack Overflow, has his blogpost listed https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/23/strange-and-maddening-rules/

also retweets a longtime employee https://twitter.com/balpha/status/984839394829000706 http://archive.is/1zxrX

The mean tweet Wensel is mentioning is most likely this: https://twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/982697412077633536 http://archive.is/CUAPS April 7, 2018. It could be other things, here’s search results: http://archive.is/8zrss @spolsky%20from:aprilwensel&src=typd”>https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=@spolsky%20from:aprilwensel&src=typd

Jay Hanlon, EVP of Culture and Experience at Stack Overflow, is mentioned in reference to the official stack overflow blog that was the main topic of the other thread’s OP. Also listed on the first line of this post. Hanlon, just after making that official post, publicly thanked Wensel: https://twitter.com/JayHanlon/status/989589926458032128 http://archive.is/tQOaV. He tweeted on April 12 https://twitter.com/JayHanlon/status/984592538437865477 http://archive.is/9JvTo Potentially related to the “mean tweet” from Wensel and Crayton on April 7th.

Not mentioned: CTO of Stack Overflow, David Fullerton, April 12, https://twitter.com/df07/status/984547376986763265 http://archive.is/EqYsS Interesting because of https://medium.com/@dfullerton07/cto-of-stack-overflow-here-27d84691d9a3 and https://medium.com/dunder-data/10-000-stack-overflow-toxicity-challenge-75951a739993

Potentially related: XKCD’s comic lines up suspiciously in the timeline (April 21, 2018) https://xkcd.com/1984/

Wensel has also written “It’s Time to Retire ‘RTFM’” http://archive.is/7jlMH https://medium.com/compassionate-coding/its-time-to-retire-rtfm-31acdfef654f

Other random tweets: https://twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/986666758219096064 http://archive.is/Q3CVJ

https://twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/986382029456461825 http://archive.is/hqThq

https://twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/989248835682619392 http://archive.is/FIPBJ

https://twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/988543028385099778 http://archive.is/azs4y

Seems like she got someone at SO to delete a post: https://twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/986347403069480960 http://archive.is/VmKL8 https://twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/986352623363145728 http://archive.is/NLoCV the post http://archive.is/bAU2y

Just for fun: Wensel shows that she is an unashamed member of the pineapple pizza master race #PizzaGate https://twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/987166408957030403 http://archive.is/8uuA1

April 26, 2018

Apparently, she admires the courage of people trying to spread her message on reddit and Hacker News: https://twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/989549744857870336 http://archive.li/tzQzF

Final sidenote:

I got fucking post-sniped: http://archive.is/a01uo http://archive.is/HWYYB

Edit: forgot to mention that sempai noticed me: https://twitter.com/itsnotmyfault01/status/988221758896517121 I also forgot to mention that my personal view is that the only thing that worries me about this entire situation is this paragraph:

> Let’s do something about comments. Condescension and sarcasm have been reluctantly tolerated in comments for too long. We’ll research possible feature changes, but let’s start by working with the community and our community managers to start flagging and deleting unkind comments now.

If the SO post did not have that, I wouldn’t have a problem with the official response. I think it’s perfectly fine to move toward a goal of reduced hostility to newcomers, but mass flagging and deleting seems like a somewhat worrying solution to the problem.

Edits from Reddit: https://twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/982892354523709440 http://archive.is/RsIML I keep finding more and more great stuff.

https://twitter.com/KimCrayton1/status/982968785232678912 http://archive.is/D2Brn

Also an additional comment as I move through interviews and podcasts. https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/8fc7bk/i_heard_that_medium_was_the_place_to_talk_shit/dy2nh02/?context=10000

The thing that really cooks my noodle is that I really can’t tell what exactly she does. Many of the youtube videos of her interviews (https://compassionatecoding.com/media/) have only 100 or so views. After graduating she had a bunch of short stints (around one year each) at various tech companies (including some game companies). She seems to have some volunteer work with a few other orgs like “Black Girls Code”, but I can’t tell what kind of work that was.

43 contributions in the last year on github (most of her code is probably proprietary, looking at her employment history. Plus, the last few years have not been focused on programming).

I’m making my way through some of the audio interviews she has on her website and on twitter (There’s dozens across the various websites. She really makes the rounds to a lot of these niche podcasts.). Right now I’m listening to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz1ph6HMc6M Things I’ve learned: Compassionate Coding is a for-profit company. They consider asking “why didn’t you JUST __” to be an especially harmful behavior among coders. They laugh about how useful Linked In stalking is (mostly the host, not April Wensel as much). She does not approve of devs paying users to review/rate their product.

I’m only just getting to the part where they describe what work Compassionate coding does: https://youtu.be/Wz1ph6HMc6M?t=1098 Long story short, she comes in, learns about behaviors of the problematic individuals at a certain company, gives a short lecture, and then encourages you to fire the person. Apparently this is a successful niche in Silicon Valley.

https://youtu.be/Wz1ph6HMc6M?t=1723 Apparently there’s a lot of kids in adult bodies in tech.

https://youtu.be/Wz1ph6HMc6M?t=1968 Don’t follow what thought leaders are saying, or what the crowd is doing. Good to keep in mind.

Edit: I’m not a software engineer, so I have no idea what “Angular” is, but now I’m listening to an Angular talk by her: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJnVhkEx8Cs It’s pretty good.

Moving on to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sFL20ffCyw. She got into tech bc she had fun with old terminals and wanted to become a gamedev. She is no longer very interested in gamedevving, despite working on games for Sony among others. Also, sempai noticed me again. http://archive.is/lJ2RE Offers an explanation of how her recent work has been so influential… all the way to the top of Stack Overflow: https://twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/989940325635379200

She moved around to so many different companies because of toxic environments: https://youtu.be/-sFL20ffCyw?t=1151