Why put this much energy into trying to save one member of a community?

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

It is frustrating that there are so many good people trying to get into tech, and not being able to, while considerable allowance if given to some other people. For an old reference from 15 years ago, see this bit about Dave Winer.

A more recent example: John De Goes and the FP community

This post is a collection of links about John De Goes that show some clear patterns of behavior:

De Goes defending white supremacists and misogynists.

De Goes attacking critics and accusing them (especially women) of lying.

De Goes engaging in targeted harassment, either directly (@druconfessions) or indirectly (e.g. via ClarkHat, a LambdaConf sponsor).

Despite all of the information in this post being publicly available and widely known, De Goes is frequently invited to Scala conferences to speak. The following are a few of his conference appearances in 2019:

Scala Exchange

Scale by the Bay

Scala World

Scalar

BeeScala

ScalaUA

Scala.io

Lambda World

I know that the Scala Exchange organizers are aware of the information in this post, because I shared much of it with them when I declined a keynote invitation in February. I also know of other cases of people in the Scala community declining invitations from conferences on this list and providing similar reasons. The organizers of these conferences aren’t choosing to give De Goes a platform because they don’t know about his history of abuse, accusing women of lying, etc.—they just don’t care.

Post external references

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    https://meta.plasm.us/posts/2019/09/01/jdg-and-the-fp-community/
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