A Dongle Joke That Spiraled Way Out Of Control

In an age of blogs, tweets, Hacker News, Reddit and Anonymous, an off-the-cuff joke can spin wildly out of control. At least it appears that’s what happened with PyCon this week when a sexual joke led to some very public firings, a virulent debate about women in technology, another virulent debate about public shaming, and now, a DDOS attack. So here’s what happened: 1) While sitting in the 10th row of a Python programming conference, a developer who used to work for mobile monetization startup Playhaven apparently made a joke about ?big? dongles and “forking someone’s repo.” 2) Adria Richards, a developer evangelist sitting in front of them, called them out on Twitter and in a blog post for making the conference environment unwelcoming toward women. PyCon then escorted them out to the hallway. Not cool. Jokes about forking repo's in a sexual way and "big" dongles. Right behind me #pycon http://t.co/Hv1bkeOsYP— Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013 “Women in technology need consistant [sic] messaging from birth through retirement they are welcome, competent and valued in the industry,” she explained in a blog post. 3) Shortly afterward, Playhaven said it had fired the developer. CEO Andy Yang explained, “As a company that is dedicated to gender equality and values honorable behavior, we conducted a thorough investigation. The result of this investigation led to the unfortunate outcome of having to let this employee go.” He added that the employee wasn’t Alex Reid, who is the guy looking straight at the camera in Richards’ tweeted photo. Reid still works for Playhaven. 4) The unnamed fired employee showed up on Hacker News by the name of “mr-hank” and apologized for the joke. I really did not mean to offend anyone and I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position. However, there is another side to this story. While I did make a big dongle joke about a fictional piece hardware that identified as male, no sexual jokes were made about forking. My friends and I had decided forking someone’s repo is a new form of flattery (the highest form being implementation) and we were excited about one of the presenters projects; a friend said “I would fork that guys repo” The sexual context was applied by Adria, and not us. My second comment is this,

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