1 Title: Scattered Personal Reflections After a Tech Conference; Or, Smile More
4 Tags: discourse, software industry, anecdotal
7 > _There's a heart that must be free
9 > That burns with the need to know
11 > Why must we all conceal
12 > What we think, how we feel?
13 > Must there be a secret me I'm forced to hide?_
15 > —"Reflection", from _Mulan_
17 I took half a week of vacation from my dayjob recently to crash with a friend in another city and attend the conference associated with an open-source technology I've been pretty involved with lately! It was really fun and inspiring, getting to hear all the talks and putting faces to usernames! I thought I'd write a blog post about all the exciting technical things I learned.
19 This is not that post. By cowardice and convention, this is someone else's story on someone else's blog, about "Taylor Saotome-Westlake" visiting his friend "Jerrica" in "San Francisco" to attend the conference about this software called "[Blerp](https://xkcd.com/1692/)-d9aa89fd".
21 Again, the conference was great, and I had a lot of fun, but—I don't know. Some aspects of it induced me to feel a bit stressed and a little bit sad, even though that's entirely my own fault and entirely my own problem.
23 <a href="/images/blerp-d9aa89fd_pronoun_stickers.jpg"><img src="/images/blerp-d9aa89fd_pronoun_stickers.jpg" width="300" style="float: right;"></a>
25 It started with the pronoun stickers.
29 <br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>
32 Rod Vagg linked to Quillette
33 Opal guy said trans people are delusional
37 think I'm an asshole and are showing me the door https://xkcd.com/1357/
40 the Uber driver who picked me up from the airport was named Omar and was from Mexico
42 he did not know any nonbinary people