Open-sourced identity

This is a post about Pride Month 🌈.

Do you remember when you first started writing code? You surely came across well-established patterns, groupings of tools that had clear labels. Procedural logic, OOP, LAMP, MERN, MVC, FP… There are infinite variations, so your journey may not look like mine. Perhaps you identified as a MERN developer, a Rails developer, a JS developer, a Minecraft modder. You learned, and incorporated what you learned into how you thought about yourself.

The scope of projects you worked on expanded, and you started needing to glue together tools to get the behaviors you wanted, the performance you needed. You dove deeper into your chosen stack, moved off your one-size-fits-all framework, and ripped apart your monolith into smaller, fit-to-purpose pieces. You read a blog post that expands your understanding, a conference speaker teaches you how to make use of a new pattern, a peer shows you a new technique.

Your expertise grew, and you realized that the labels you felt so comfortable with no longer adequately describe who you are. You rewrote a class using functional patterns, and found it a clearer expression of your intent. You tried a different language, and found it better able to capture the vision in your mind.

I could rattle off a litany of examples of seismic shifts where new ideas shook what we believed to be true; Rails' influence on Ruby, Docker's influence on executables, CoffeeScript's influence on JavaScript, Electron's influence on desktop apps, Kubernete's influence on systems architecture, React's influence on web development, the Serverless pattern's influence on http request handling. The only constant is change.

Queer humans experience this for other parts of their identity. When we were young, the rules for many of us were simple. Boys like girls, and vice-versa. A mommy meets a daddy and if they love each other enough, baby comes!

We grow older, and a boy finds they can't stop staring at how another boy moves. A girl touches her friend and starts burning inside. A young woman finds that dresses make her preferred activities more difficult, that her breasts feel malignant. We learned labels for these feelings: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender — LGBT.

These labels are hard-won knowledge dating back decades, centuries, millenia. Regardless of your moral opinion on the matter, there are indisputable references to queer identity in literature, media, culture, religion, spirituality, dating back thousands of years. Its presence is inarguable.

Even with this cultural legacy, some of us have learned through our lives that these labels too are insufficient. Like open-source, we take what was known and build on it. New labels are created and spread through word of mouth, through writing and videos, through intimiate conversations with our friends and partners. An academic publishes survey results; a TikTok creator's video resonates; a psychologist writes a bestselling book. As advancements in open source inform our profession, evolving language around queer identity informs our self image; indistinct visions gain clarity.

Some may be exposed to these concepts early and encouraged to try on different labels, to discard what doesn't fit. Some take decades to realize that they can explore these labels for themselves. Understanding may come in a flash: a comment made by a peer exposes a gulf in experience; a moment of vulnerability is met with confusion and fear; a dream reveals what our conscious mind has suppressed. We discover a difference between our experience and others', and that we need more words to describe how.

Some are surrounded by friends and families who know that this is a normal human experience, and encourage them to define themselves as clearly as they can. Others live in spaces that believe those rules we learned as children are fixed, immutable, right, moral — that deviations from those rules are unhealthy, dangerous, and hateful; a rejection of goodness.

Some know their truth and choose to wear a mask to remain accepted; some have buried their truth so deeply that they believe that their mask is all that they are.

Sooner or later, though, the mask chafes. It grows uncomfortable, rubs raw. The best of us learn how to find where the boundary between their mask and their truth is. Some double down on their mask, rejecting their truth so they can pretend it's not there. It is.

June is recognized as Pride Month for those of us who have found our truths, or are working to find them. I'm proud of who I am, and that has not always been true. I'll leave you with the most beautiful description I know of why we have Pride, from Laurie Voss, cofounder of npm:

Laurie Voss (@seldo) June 23, 2018

Psst. Hey, you. You've got these confusing thoughts sometimes. You've never acted on them. You're not even sure they're real, or serious enough to be worth doing anything about. You're not ready to give yourself a label yet, or even sure what label it would be.

Happy Pride.

You think nobody knows. You're not even sure you know. You've never told anybody.

We see you. We can tell. We knew before you did. But we know you're not ready. When you are, we'll be here. Until then, we love you, and stay safe. Pride is for you; it's especially for you.

Pride is for you.

You're the reason for the bright colors and loud music and glitter.

You don't have to join in. Be however you want to be. But because you're far away right now. We need you to be sure you can see us, and hear us.

We need to be sure you know you're not alone.

Happy Pride.