On Engendering Strong Reactions, Merbist's statement about the presentation furor

http://merbist.com/2009/04/28/on-engendering-strong-reactions/

by knowtheory • 17 years ago

10 11 17 years ago

Oh man. Looks like he missed, or didn't understand, Giles' excellent comment. Witness:

My view is that offending someone is walking up to them and saying: “You suck, your code sucks and your partner’s code sucks!”. That is not what I did in my talk.

Failing so hard it's almost painful to watch.

marcusbooster• 17 years ago

Seriously. I was giving him the benefit of the doubt, just a lame joke that went on too long. Now I see it's the organizers fault for having him talk, and my fault for "choosing to take offense". If this guy had any p.r. savvy he'd just issue a simple apology and move on; instead he's stoking the fire more.

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

Now, let's not be too harsh. This is vastly improved over the initial response -- he's trying to apologize, for sure this time, and only a few bits of the apology are overly defensive.

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

As an outsider to ruby/rails, this whole issue is crazy. Don't waste your time paying attention to it.

pwk• 17 years ago

As a user of ruby/rails, this whole issue is crazy. Don't waste your time paying attention to it.

jcapote• 17 years ago

It's like scala vs ruby all over again...

grandalf2• 17 years ago

I was at gogaruco and at the time of Matt's talk I happened to be sitting next to a woman.

It was clear to me from the title of the talk (and the cover slide, which was published in advance) that the talk was going to rely on some sort of porn analogy.

In my opinion, Matt's talk was quite unsubtle and way overdid the analogy, to the point where I was looking around the auditorium wondering if the women present would be offended. I was quite surprised that none appeared to look offended, disgusted, etc., and that none got up and left in the middle.

I kept thinking, sheesh I would guess that anyone who knows Matt probably finds this funny and harmless... but at the same time it struck me as a few steps over the line... especially since his point could have been made with far more subtlety.

I think _why's comment says it all: Be sure to make it look like when you zoom out it's just two bagels.

The whole apology thing is great, but I think the ideal response would have been "Ok, I see that putting hard core porn in the middle of a slide show is likely to offend some people"... To me that is quite obvious.

edit: I should note that I'm not the least bit offended by most porn, but think it's best experienced either alone or in the company of people who have opted in.

gojomo• 17 years ago

I understand a few slides were removed from the version on the web... but did the version as presented include 'hard core porn', graphic depiction of actual sex acts?

grandalf2• 17 years ago

The pictures were mostly of scantily clad women. I think one involved oral sex.

He flipped through the images rather quickly, so it wasn't exactly clear what was going on in them, which actually made them seem a bit more risqué than they probably were.

My judgment that the talk was over the line comes from how I felt quite certain that women in the audience would be uncomfortable.

donaq• 17 years ago

Huh. I almost find this piece more offensive than the presentation itself. Why can't he just say "I was wrong" and be done with it?

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

"Why can't someone I disagree with just admit that they aren't right!"

On Engendering Strong Reactions, Merbist's statement about the presentation furor

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