I needed to write a social media post to promote a speaking event and I froze. I couldn’t authentically celebrate my small professional accomplishment on a platform where I had just read another post grieving lost progress. This is what came out.
It feels catastrophic to lose PDXWIT and Women Who Code, but we persist.
We go back to work; product has to ship.
We work in teams; no one does it alone.
We keep learning.
We share what we know and leave this practice a little better than we found it.
This year, I’ll speak to audiences in real and virtual spaces about Humanizing FinOps, Learning to Collaborate by Unlearning Anti-Patterns.
Is this tech talk a response to AI? Yes and no. Isn’t everything in 2024 some kind of response to it?
And… would there be a need to humanize any topic whether or not AI were in the air? Of course there would be.
I borrowed the term from “Humanizing Tech” - a podcast produced by volunteers of the now defunct Portland Women in Technology, PDXWIT. They renamed the podcast from “Breaking the Glass Ceiling” around the time that they were revising their mission. Perhaps the leaders at the time realized that the language of an older wave of feminism over-emphasized the identity of cisgender women, to the erasure of our non-binary and gender fluid members.
They put their trust in the community, recognized that harm had been done, and embraced change to be more inclusive.
To me humanizing is always a process of unlearning, of dismantling practices that diminish the humanity of
anyone. It is my way of speaking the unspoken complicity with casual dehumanization that we witness every day.
dehumanization
_n. any process or practice that has the effect of reducing human beings to the level of mechanisms or nonhuman animals, especially by denying them autonomy, individuality, and a sense of dignity. —dehumanize vb.__
The words we use are important enough for Github to change the name of their default primary branch to main from master in 2020, the year none of us can ever forget. In a name, one of the most impactful tools in devops perpetuated a casual dehumanization and they agreed to stop.
My talk will cover a practice we now call FinOps - and the way I practice is informed by what I learned I could no longer unsee about the world we practice in.
We can’t really talk about advancing careers or making progress, breaking barriers or ceilings of any material, if we haven’t recognized our own safety and privilege. It’s uncomfortable. It’s always a little bit risky. All this comes with growth.