#queer your tech

Hello bits and bytes — today I’m going to chat with you about existential crisis. I love the internet. I love gadgets. I love science and new things and (mostly) I love the tech sector. We’re living in a fast-paced science fiction novel that we couldn’t have dreamed up even ten years ago. Things are changing so fast that we can almost hear the boom-crack of our movements breaking the sound barrier; there is so much noise.

And that’s what I love about it. It wasn’t until I worked in the tech sector that I began to take a certain pleasure at existing on the bleeding edge, but I have since. Being at the front of the pack means playing with fun new toys as soon as they come out; it means being a decider on what our new super powers are used for; but most importantly (at least to me), it means never being left behind. And left behind is something I often was as a nerdy kid in middle school. It sticks with you.

I’ve spent the last few weeks pacing around my apartment, oscillating between coffee and booze, and trying to overcome some major imposter syndrome after receiving some fantastic news: I’ve been accepted into the third cohort of the Ada Developers Academy, a tuition-free coding school for women. This program is an extreme commitment – you attend onsite training full-time for seven months, then dive into a five-month internship as a programmer. We start this May. So for the next year, I’ll be completely immersed in coding.

As a writer who’s been tangentially involved with tech via previous retail experiences, I’ve written and read a whole lot about the lack of women in STEM fields. I know that underwhelming representation figures have compelled the White House to put together a Women in STEM initiative and that Google sent aspiring female developers to Code School for free. Women made up just 21.4% of the U.S. programming workforce in 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Receiving an opportunity to lead change and queer my tech through my future involvement in programming is both thrilling and terrifying.

Hello webbie-queers! Thus continues our “So You Want to Make a Website” series, a series encouraging you (yes, you) to use the tools available to you on the web to take control of your own narrative/business/creative life/whatever. We’ve covered what you’re going to make, how you’re going to make it, a small digression in favor of learning to code and now, the domain name. Domain names are the addresses you type in the URL bar that will eventually take you to your website. There are about one million options for domain name ownership, so let’s just dive in.

GamerGate: A Quick (Emotional) Check-In

It’s something everyone knows about me: GamerGate makes me super nauseous. Like, actually physically nauseous. The day that Felicia Day got doxxed, I was nearly apoplectic. Thank goodness for people like Megan Praz, Audrey White and Laura Mandanas who have done amazing coverage in various styles, because I couldn’t do it. Taylor Hatmaker’s workon The Daily Dot has called GamerGate a…

The Faces of Emoji: A Diversity Update

  Emojis! We all have feelings about them! Some less that others! We can all agree, though, that the current emoji library is like the Western literary canon: completely lacking in racial diversity. Even Apple agrees. Earlier this week, the Unicode Consortium, the governing body behind standard emojis, announced that the upcoming release of Unicode 8.0 will include an option for variable skin…