this article really takes the fun out of funduk
Our Culture of Exclusion (or, why I'm not at JSConf this year)
71–80 of 93 posts
Re: Our Culture of Exclusion (or, why I'm not at JSConf this year)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think why he doesn't drink should have any bearing on it. He feels excluded from the culture, and it doesn't matter whether that's because he's religious, an alcoholic, etc. Similarly, one shouldn't have to pretend to be drinking to enjoy a night in the pub (note, I'm a non-drinker who feels perfectly at home in the pub).
I agree - this is largely my own curiosity (nosiness). It's clear that the OP had a very strong objection. This kind of passion doesn't generally emerge from nowhere, so I was curious about what was really driving him. (And I reiterate - if he chooses not to drink, he is of course answerable to no one. His body, his choice.) At the same time, it's fruitful to fish where the fish are. If a person wants to have convers…
> I also agree that one need not be pretending to drink or ashamed of not drinking. Not at all. I use my fake-drink for convenience, to stave off the Nth person asking me why I don't have a beer in my hand or whatever.
yet:
> I agree - this is largely my own curiosity (nosiness).
It seems every single person asks non-drinkers why they don't drink. For me, who doesn't really have a reason, it's just a bit boring. But I imagine if I had a real, or perhaps a painful reason, I wouldn't like to be reminded every time I went to the pub.
Re: Our Culture of Exclusion (or, why I'm not at JSConf this year)
#73The OP seems to have a real chip on his shoulder about drinking. About half of what the OP said was him putting words in people's mouths (see: "Y U NO DRINK" for an example). This is coming from someone who is also a non-drinker, and who is from a culture in which drinking is almost the only social activity (I'm from Ireland). That actually puts him in the same company as the brogrammers, who think that drinking is s…
When I go to tech meetups in Dublin, the chatting bit tends to happen in a pub afterwards.
Just curious, as a non-drinker do you enjoy attending events like PubStandards? I generally can't maintain a good geeky conversation in those environments from the noise, and leave with a sore throat from raising my voice.
Re: Our Culture of Exclusion (or, why I'm not at JSConf this year)
#74I don't go to too many conferences but I have been to a couple of hackathons and meet ups in NYC. Before I became a programmer I worked in a lot of nightclubs. And maybe its just a matter of scale from what I've seen before but I don't see drinking being that big in the programming community. I'm a non drinker and even when I worked in the clubs I never felt pressured to drink.There have been plenty of times when I'm the only one drinking Pepsi while everyone else has a rum and coke.
If you have an issue with people getting sloppy drunk at conferences, I can see that being a problem. But if you're just talking about moderate drinking after the conferences or work to unwind then just go, don't drink, and have fun. I doubt very many people will be judging you.
Re: Our Culture of Exclusion (or, why I'm not at JSConf this year)
#75The OP seems to have a real chip on his shoulder about drinking. About half of what the OP said was him putting words in people's mouths (see: "Y U NO DRINK" for an example). This is coming from someone who is also a non-drinker, and who is from a culture in which drinking is almost the only social activity (I'm from Ireland). That actually puts him in the same company as the brogrammers, who think that drinking is s…
When I go to tech meetups in Dublin, the chatting bit tends to happen in a pub afterwards. Just curious, as a non-drinker do you enjoy attending events like PubStandards? I generally can't maintain a good geeky conversation in those environments from the noise, and leave with a sore throat from raising my voice.
Yeah, I do. I've been to PubStandards a few times, and went to FunConf, which was basically drinking on a bus to Kilkenny, lunch, then drinking on the way back. The sore throat is annoying, but its the same as going to any party, club, or loud pub.
Re: Our Culture of Exclusion (or, why I'm not at JSConf this year)
#76Beer is lame. There should be more of an emphasis on weed and psychedelics. Hey, it worked for Carl Sagan!
Re: Our Culture of Exclusion (or, why I'm not at JSConf this year)
#77Even those of us who are almost professional conference goers get tired of this stuff eventually. I know I far prefer having a couple of awesome programmers over my house for a great conversation. Just did that this morning, actually, when the folks behind FluidInfo came over. No beers were consumed.
What Ryan should do is focus on hackathons and other, smaller, places where code actually gets written, shared, and discussed. There are plenty of those every week. At least there are in places like San Francisco. Every week or so there's a Node.js hackathon in our office at Rackspace. Generally folks have a choice of whether to stick around for beers after a long day, and even when the beers came out, at about 6 p.m. during dinner, it wasn't anything like a SXSW drinking fest.
Some other feedback:
1. Conferences are awful places to have real, deep, conversations. Why? There's an opportunity cost to spending any time with any specific person. Heck, you can be talking to someone very interesting, like Bram Cohen, who wrote Bittorrent and then Eric Ries walks by and you lose interest in Bram all of a sudden. It's far better to see if you can get Bram together at your house, or in a hackathon, where there's only 40 other programmers than hang out at some party with 200 other cool people you want to meet.
2. When you're in a noisy situation, like at a party (even one without alcohol, they do happen, but rarely) it's just not a great place to have a conversation. I remember being at one Techcrunch party and I couldn't even talk to the developers there. Why? I couldn't hear them and they were two feet away. So, I started drinking and smiling. Horrid for actually discussing anything important. I stopped going to those too, my time is better spent sitting down with someone in a quiet place and actually learning something.
Parties, to me, are only about one thing now: collecting business cards and making plans for meeting later on. That's what I did at SXSW. I had breakfast with the guy who runs Al Jazeera and it was magical. That's what made the parties worth it.
Re: Our Culture of Exclusion (or, why I'm not at JSConf this year)
#78I don't get it. Do people give you shit for not drinking when you go to events? I've never had any problem when I decide I don't feel like drinking that day. You say you don't want to tell people what to do, but you want them to stop drinking?
In some situations, not following the behavior of the crowd has an effect. I've been at parties where people were passing round a bong or whatever and declined and it definitely separates you from the group for better or worse.
I'm old and stubborn enough now to know that if I don't want to do something, being outside of the crowd is no big deal. But it's still something that occurs, and some people are particularly sensitive to the effects of going against the flow or find it very difficult to do that.
Re: Our Culture of Exclusion (or, why I'm not at JSConf this year)
#79Re: Brogrammers I don't think that drinking has anything to do with the brogrammer trend. Drinking was around before the brogrammer trend and it's going to be around after. The author states that drinking might be the cause of the brogrammer trend but the offers nothing to support that claim and does not elaborate further. Nobody is discussing drinking as a cause of this because it's not.
You're right. The drinking was always epic at OSCON in the early 2000s -- a conf that has historically been full of the purest OSS nerds, least brogrammer types. And let's not even get started on PERL events. Free as in beer, you know.
FOSDEM - beer event :-D
Re: Our Culture of Exclusion (or, why I'm not at JSConf this year)
#80I put my thoughts on the post and folks reaction to it from twitter on my blog at http://kewlniss.com/
Summary: As with everything, moderation is the key. Anything to excess is bad – including coding non stop and constantly thinking about work. That is excess and it isn’t healthy and I constantly do it.