April was pretty decent. I got to attend two very good conferences and I got to speak at them.

TXJS, Austin, USA

Austin! One of my favourite cities (mostly because I love tacos). Was very pleased to be asked to return to this conference after I spoke there last year. The day was remarkable, if only because it's one of the first conferences in a very long time where I actually watched all of the talks (although Rebecca, being on before me, may have only had half of my attention). Really a very well curated day, and I felt very lucky to be in the line-up.

Alex was not overly prescriptive in what I should talk about, but suggested he liked the content of last year and would like a little more on that. So, I decided to pick an aspect about that that I felt was important to us at GDS and fundamental to the success of our Design Principles.

For me, it's been our honesty and simple language. The words that we've used to talk about user needs, technical aspects of the site and the ethos have been plain and no-nonsense. I think this is hugely down to the strength of a team that has the confidence to cut through bullshit and say what it really means - Russell and Sarah are particularly brilliant at this, and have had huge parts to play in getting this cult of simple down in writing.

The tech scene is sort of rife with nonsense words. Buzzwords and clichés and the new name for the next big thing, which is actually the new name for the same old sensible thing - but with better marketing and a twitter hashtag. Ugh. I want a lot less of that in our world.

So, I picked on a few of these and showed a few examples from how we're dealing with them at GDS. I believe the video for that talk is out now, but the slides are here.

Front-Trends, Warsaw, Poland

I attended this conference last year - definitely a favourite for its surprisingly sunny weather and for being one of the most friendly events I had been to in 2012. So, I was really glad to get to come back and share our Design Principles with the crowd.

It was very similar to the talk I gave at TXJS last year, except we've done a whole lot more at GDS since June of last year - we released v1.0 of gov.uk, and a bunch of other stuff like the performance platform, Inside Government (and the 24 departments) and foreign travel advice, to name a few. I showcased some of these things, and then went through the design principles with the lovely, receptive, Polish audience and it seemed to go over rather well. The slides for this version of the talk are here.

Three days are a lot for a conference, but it was really high quality through-out and the breadth of subjects was really great. I wouldn't recommend putting the party on the second night again, however - that last morning was something of a challenge. :)

I've had a fair few people ask about the Jawbone Up I've been wearing since November (the second version, not the recalled first one - although, as you'll read, perhaps this one should have been too). Here's how I've found it.

The good

The Up band's size is really good and it's comfy and it doesn't look ridiculous.

I like the sleep tracking, although I feel like it's not terribly accurate - if I wake and don't move around much, it doesn't record it as a waking period - but it's accurate enough to collect the information I'm interested in.

I have been a bad sleeper for a long time, but having actual data about the length of time I've been asleep and awake has helped reduce my anxiety about a bad night's sleep (it always feels like a lifetime when you're awake in the middle of the night and don't want to be - but turns out it isn't), which in turn has helped improve how well I go to sleep generally, I think.

I also like the smart-alarm - before I'd put off looking at the clock to see the time, but the gentle nudge that, yes, it is about time I got up is really useful, and again, anxiety reducing.

The steps tracking seems fine. I've never bothered to calibrate it, since I don't do much exercise except walking - but it seems to match the distances I do regularly around the city. It's fun - I'm not competing, so it's mostly just interesting. I hear from others that it basically can't cope with running or cycling, though.

The bad

Unfortunately, the second band stopped working a couple of months later. The smart-alarm feature became temperamental and often wouldn't go off at all, and the button on the end of the band had become dislodged and no longer clicked. This time, the band was out in the UK, and they sent me another one immediately.

I've been wearing the third one for about a week and I honestly expect it'll break soon, too, sadly. Edd, who originally picked up my first band for me while he was in New York, had his first and second bands break too (the second after only 2 weeks) - so the statistical data I have available to me is not very favourable and a quick look through the forums will find most people in similar situations.

The other stuff

Otherwise, these are things I wish it had:

• A visible metre or something on the band. I have to sync it with my phone to find out how I'm doing. It doesn't even tell me the time. I feel like it's not providing me with much in return for the space it's taking up on my wrist.
• There's no web view - the only way to share the data is through facebook (meh) or if your friend is also an Up user (which is basically no one). I'd like to be able to let my husband see my sleep data - then he'll know that I'm just grumpy because I'm tired. He can sneak a look at it on my phone, I guess, but it would just be nice to have a public view somewhere on the web.
• The food and mood logging is boring and pointless. It may be that the new app integration gives this value, but it was onerous and I gave up after a week. The insights offered to you only ever related to steps and sleep, so no matter how much food and mood you logged, it was for your own entertainment only. These features appear to be rather tacked-on.
• Some people complain about the lack of wireless sync as a deal-breaker (you sync it via the mic jack). This personally doesn't greatly bother me (longer battery life is a reasonable trade), but given that I have to take it off my arm to find out anything about it, as mentioned above, then I think it would have been preferential in this case to sync wirelessly.

I'm mostly just hoping this band will hold out long enough for the delivery of the Fitbit Flex I just pre-ordered.

Update: My 3rd band has the same smart alarm fault. Sigh.

As I mentioned, I wrote for the Pastry Box Project for all of 2012.

Now, it's hopefully going to be printed in dead tree form with the royalties going to the Red Cross. That's kind of nice, as are many of the fancier offerings at the higher tiers (hand press? illustrations? all sorts!).

So, if you're a fan of paper and of the folks that wrote last year, the details are all available here.

It's being crowd sourced, so it'll only be as successful as your interest allows. That's how the internet works now, or something.

Writing a follow-up seems necessary at this point, because my last post garnered more attention than I had anticipated, and the comments on it were much more, well, ridiculous than I think I can give justice to (thanks, hacker news!).

I thought I'd take the time to clarify a few points and respond generally.

The first thing I'd like to say is how shocked I was at two things:

1. Respondents simply didn't appear to have read the post before commenting - infuriating, many are programmers being dicks (as if we needed more evidence of sexism and racism etc.).
2. Respondents appear to still believe we live in a meritocracy, free from discrimination with complete equal opportunity.

Comments from people who aren't living under rocks mostly took issue with the idea that I was letting conferences off the hook. That was my own poor writing skills, and I added a note to the end of the last post to clarify slightly. In short: Conferences can make changes that have the potential to improve diversity in our circles, but it's not the only place we can and should be putting pressure. And, in fact, if we can work on other ways to improve diversity we can help conferences achieve a more diverse voice.

Finally, .NET magazine asked my opinion on a couple of questions, and I responded. The article in it's completeness, unfortunately, created a platform for a ridiculous parody site that I believe not only denies the issues at hand but conflates and confuses matters even more. I apologise for that fact, as I was not aware of it before publish. Update: .NET have removed the link to the parody site I refer to, due to it's offensive nature.

My full responses for .NET are below, as I think they explain some more detail on my overall thoughts on diversity, but before that - if you can just take one thing away from this know that I believe: Equal opportunity matters more than anything else and we don't have it, which has resulted in a lack of diversity. We can fix that.

Q&A with Craig Grannell of .NET

Craig: Why did you feel the need to write the piece?

As I intimated at the start of the article, there have been various outbreaks of finger pointing at conferences over the last few months about lack of diversity, and I guess I was just getting bored of it.

I felt that conferences were being blamed somehow for creating a lack of diversity within our industry, which appeared to me as unfair considering that there simply are, relatively speaking, very few women within our industry (particularly in development circles) who are also at the level to be able to provide a relevant, expert opinion and then also have the relevant speaking experience (or even the desire to speak at all).

I simply wanted to add a differing view to the discussion that perhaps we should see the lack of diversity in conference line-ups as symptoms of much deeper issues, and as well as demanding the conferences fairly represent our interests and experts, we should also start looking at other ways to create and encourage diversity and develop a better representation of the world at large. That maybe it's time to start treating the lung cancer, instead of just the cough?

Craig: Do you think positive discrimination would in the long run do more harm than good to non-white men. If conferences started doing quotas, would that negatively impact on women in the industry, say?

It's difficult to say - I think if it was widely believed that positive discrimination was happening everywhere, as a given, it would cause us to eventually ask a lot of questions like "is that person on stage because they are the very best person to explain this to me, or are they fulfilling a quota?" (particularly if a talk goes badly, which can happen from time to time for a variety of reasons). No body wants to be the token member of a line-up (I certainly don't, and would turn down any opportunity that I thought that was the case). After everything is said and done, the only people we want to see on stage, regardless of what group they may represent, should be there on merit, and have the ability to give a good talk, inspire and educate, even if that comes at the cost of not fulfilling a desired quota sometimes.

As it stands, I don't think we're seeing positive discrimination in that obviously negative guise, rather it's something more akin to "I have two well placed, equally viable, experts, but one of these would help me to better represent a group of people I feel is underrepresented - so lets go with that one!", which seems quite reasonable to me. I think it's also really helpful when conferences make it very clear how they selected their speakers. Was it blind proposals? Did you hand select? How many submissions did you get? The more we understand about the process of finding speakers, the more we can make our own mind up about how well curated a set of talks is as audience members.

Long term, I think we should be aiming to not have to even consider whether one person should be chosen over another to help fulfil quotas or present more people of one type of group. Ideally, we'd like to be selecting from a pool of people that are already better representing the wealth and diversity of opinion in the world as a whole, so that it simply becomes a discussion of "which of these talks will have the most value?".

Craig: Should more developers rather than sharing with peers get involved with local schools, to encourage more girls to become designers and developers in the industry?

I don't think it's an either/or scenario. More developers from more walks of life should be speaking and sharing their views, opinions and experiences. Yes, please, more of that. It would also be great if more developers wanted to go back to school, as one example, and encourage the next generation of potential web creators. We have a lot of resources, expertise and generally really nice people in our community and we could put our collective abilities together to make some really lasting changes. We're already seeing such efforts popping up, such as various coding for kids movements.

Craig: Is there also a need to encourage more women in the industry to share their experiences and insight more often?

Again, more experiences shared is better no matter who you are or where you came from. If a group of people currently feel that they have no way or voice in the industry, then yes, we should be positively encouraging their participation, and perhaps that means creating new platforms for more people to find those opportunities to share their expertise

We've barely started the new year, and already there's been a spat about a conference and their lack of diversity. Rather unfortunately, they picked 22 white, young, men and only one woman (so far) to be on their invited experts panels at a developer conference. Hey, it happens, and pretty much no one would do that out of malice, and I really don't think boycotts are helping anyone, nor is hoping the event implodes due to twitter bullies.

Conferences are not the problem, they are just showing the symptoms of a severe lack of diversity, generally, throughout the industry. We can cover up the warts all we like with bolstered numbers of minority groups on stage, but we should probably be working out how to tackle the actual issue of why so few of them enter the industry, as novices/newbies/entry-levels/graduates etc., in the first place who would later become the experts we seek out to speak.

I turned up some stats from A List Apart's 2011 web survey and was unsurprised to find that of the respondents that identify as developers (the largest group of respondents by a significant amount), only 9.1% of them were women. For me, seeing a fair and representative distribution of the community at large is actually acceptable (YMMV), so I don't intend to give conferences a hard time if they don't wish to positively discriminate (such as this note I was happy to read from the PHP conf organisers, and I am also a fan of JSConf's blind submission process) and get more than that 1 in 10 for dev conferences (and, overall, nearer 1/5 for topics beyond pure development, going by the same survey results).

The argument that having role-models is important is often cited, and that having larger-than-representative numbers as speakers could help that, and I see the point at a certain level - but no kid at school, before selecting their academic interest (should they have one), is watching web dev conference videos for fun and dreaming about becoming a badass specification author. Don't kid yourselves, there are no actual rockstars or ninjas in our industry.

Role-models are helpful to those already starting out, or who have made the decision to be interested in tech and the web, giving the extra push to want to explore more and speak later, but they're already in at that point, we just have to keep them sold, but there aren't very many of them. Sure, have role-models, but remember that if it's speaking about performance issues in Ruby, or some such fun, you're already preaching to the converted.

We need to get more in, in the first place. Start 'em early, reap the rewards in the future. I don't expect to see the numbers of speakers of minority groups to go up suddenly overnight - this will take time, as most good things do.

Conferences are simply showing up the diversity problem in a particularly acute way - we will never fix it by pretending the industry is more evenly distributed than it actually is, and later blaming organisers for it. They're working with unfair numbers. Hell, if any conference these days thinks they'll slide by without some twitter fallout for "under representing", they're either brave or stupid. We're developing a very sensitive (or egg-shell-treading) conference circle, I imagine, that is more than aware that it has a quota to meet and events that allow proposals are in particular trying very hard to accurately represent the state of affairs, and often attempting to go beyond that by reaching out to those they'd like to see speak or better represented. Good work, our industry. It doesn't always work out, but the overall trend is what's important.

I think at this point we should start asking questions as to why we feel the need to poke hard at conferences, why are we positively discriminating, and what should we really be fixing for lasting change. Why are our starting numbers so low?

You want to increase numbers? Go back to your universities and high schools and ask why they're not encouraging more women into their classes and onwards to our profession. What are they doing to excite children to take maths, computer science, design, IT, etc. for long enough that they make it into the industry? How are they challenging stereotypes of what is an acceptable profession for any group of people, often defined by teachers and parents at the very earliest years?

If we're talking about women at an age and experience level to be able to be an invited expert on a panel - we're already too late to improve the numbers (this is not to say there are none, but there are going to be statistically fewer by some margin as it stands).

My mathematics lonely heart post: Seeking jovial, talented statistician to teach the ability to crunch grizzly numbers about diversity in the web industry to curmudgeonly developer. Apply within.

Some disclosures/clarifications

1. One of the panelists at Edge conf is my other half, Alex. He has had no say in this minor rant, and his participation has no affect on my opinion.
2. I am talking pretty much solely of diversity of people in web tech, where most of us work. E.g. excluding science and eng: they've got their own history, issues and role models (however, where's our version of the dreamy Prof. Brian Cox on TV, eh? Now there's a keyboard-playing, rockstar, role-model).
3. This is not a discussion about sexism amongst professional peers, which, sadly, is still a part of every day live throughout most industries for many people. This is about the fair representation of our community today and why those distributions are as they are, although we may wish to suggest that sexism/stereotyping at early age is a root cause of our industry's lack of diverse numbers later. If you think diversity is not an issue, you need to crawl out from under your rock.
4. For those that still don't understand: I am NOT pro-positive discrimination. I appreciate why it happens and how it has helped and why it continues to be necessary in some scenarios, but I am asking the question: Would we rather not have it ever, and can we not find a way to fix the underlying diversity issues that perpetuate it's need?
5. I apologise for unfairly suggesting that conferences shouldn't do their part - they absolutely should, and I think we're doing better than ever before (see previous link to JSConf for a nice example). They have an excellent opportunity to show the best and most diverse representatives from our industry. They should always strive for that, and they do often achieve this and we should be confident in letting them know, pro-actively and with good manners, when they're not representing our interests and experts.
6. I am not anti-diversity. Seriously? Did you read this post?