>> He sat in on the crowd-sourced process of writing of the application, contributing nothing except criticism to anything I wrote for hours.
That's the part of this post which really grabbed me. I went through the same sort of thing in a corporate environment not too long ago. I had suffered through discovering a massive security hole on an internal system, managing disclosure to just the right groups, writing the fix myself, and making sure it was 100% patched in production before talking about it. This went on for over a month.
When I did finally talk about it on an internal system, someone on the internal security team spotted it and said I should expand it a bit to add some recommendations about how others might avoid creating the same sort of hole in the future. I asked if they had any restrictions on content, length, or whatever, and they said that I could just keep doing what I had been doing.
I took that as a thumbs-up and started working on my new and improved writeup. This "version 2" had code snippets showing the actual problem, a walkthrough of how it happened in the first place, and details about how I managed reporting and containing it (including escalation to appropriate corporate security folks). I fired it off and waited.
Instead of a "thanks!" and an appearance in their next issue, someone else from the security team jumped on it and started raising issues with my prose. I was either "too chatty" or "too wordy" or similar, and basically, he had his own ideas for what a post should look like, and I didn't write like him, so he didn't like it. I told them they could "take it or leave it" as-is, and they wound up rejecting it.
I turned around and self-published it internally, using the same sort of chat-type channels my original writeup had used. A bunch of people spotted it and shared it around, and I got a bunch of comments. These were just ordinary engineers, not the special "security" ones who had turned me down. Yet, they managed to focus on the security and technical content of the piece, and actually found a bug in what I had written! I got some logic inverted somewhere, and they caught it, so I fixed it. The document improved as a direct result of sharing it with them.
Meanwhile, the so-called security guy was so fixated on my writing style that he had apparently failed to look at the actual technical content within.
It's that last point I want to emphasize here: some people get so fixated on the container that they completely miss the technical content (or ability) inside. That's just one way sexism rears its ugly head at times in my experience.
Original post: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/11/11/prose/