In a touching, deeply personal talk Julia traverses her career in open source with her life experience, examining the tensions between agency and control to visibility and safety. From feelings of powerlessness to the challenge of charting a path in the technology industry, this talk combines vulnerability with hard earned lessons about the forks we all carry.

Transcript

I remember getting that email during a very difficult time in my life, and just being overwhelmed with the concept that there could be space for something like that, to openly talk about challenges that were affecting me personally, and I’m profoundly grateful, because it gave voice and visibility to something that I felt extremely alone in, so thank you for — and to the RedMonk crew, for making a conference where we can come together and talk about the hard things, both in life and technology.

  This is going to be a pretty personal talk again for me, so I do hope you’ll stick with me. We’re going to talk about the forks we carry.

  So you may remember me from previous Monktoberfests and the open source world where I made you do weird things like sing or cry or the worst possible is think. I’m really sorry about that.

  By day, I work at AWS open source, but I do have to do the disclaimer of this is not an AWS talk. In my spare time, I don’t have any spare time, so that part’s moot.

  A couple of content warnings: As I said, this is going to be a personal talk. Probably more transparent than I have been in any talk, so if you do need to step out at any time, I won’t take it personally. Please, please, please prioritize your own wellbeing.

  Specifically, I’ll be referencing things like stalking — oh, this is not advancing at all, is it? Oh, that’s fun. OK.

  So some content warnings: I’ll be talking about stalking, threats to life, and the intersection of all of that with health.

  So we’re talking about forks.

  When we talk about carrying a fork — yeah, this is my first time using this platform. There are challenges.

  So a fork in open source typically falls in one of three categories, a contributing fork, making a copy of a repository in order to make changes and contribute back upstream.

  A hard fork is often a big deal and typically is a political, financial, disagreement. While amicable forks happen. They’re kind of rare.

  When we talk about carrying a fork, we’re talking about a third category that I failed to mention: This is when you make a copy of a repository and use it to make changes, but you never intend to contribute those changes back upstream.

  There are a variety of reasons that people choose to carry a fork. But it’s expensive, because you are diverging from the original repository to make your own changes. But you’re still probably going to want to bring changes from upstream into that fork.

  That said, we can often conflate these carried forks with hard forks, because the challenges with both are similar, and you know what? I’m going to exert some poetic license for the purposes of this talk so we’re going to conflate them because it suits me.

  It’s generally not a best practice to carry a fork. You’re usually trying to solve something with technology that is fundamentally not a technological problem.

  And carrying a fork signs you up for what I like to call “forever labor,” because that sounds slightly more palatable than technical debt, and this is what carrying a fork does, carrying a fork signs you up for forever labor and if you have children or decide to have children in the future, it might sign them up to take it on as well.

  Not seriously, but in a sense, yes, because it is your open source successors who have to deal with the forever labor of maintaining these forks.

  So the TL;DR is that forks are expensive and that is a really heavy legacy to impart both on yourself and on others.

  So how did we get here?

  You know I can’t let a talk go by without talking about the origins and history. We started with software being freely and openly developed amongst academics, researchers, hobbyists, until the 1974 national commission on new technological uses of copyrighted works, affectionately known as CONTU, because that’s not awkward. The subsequent 198Apple v. Franklin extended to not just source code and for a variety of reasons that led to a collaboration of users rights when it came to modifying and customizing your software, the early roots of what we now know as the open source software movement began.

  So what’s the larger pattern here?

  If we look back and we think about those early days of software there’s push for rights, push for collaboration, pulling it back, expansion and retraction, freedom versus restriction. And what this really boils down to is agency versus control.

  We can see each of these inflection points as its own fork. We decide as a collective or individually that there is something going on that we do not agree with.

  And we decide to go our own way, cue some Fleetwood Mac. We exercise our agency. OK, I disagree with your distributing my source code: Fork. I disagree with not being able to collaborate openly and freely: Fork.

  But I do want to take a moment to disambiguate agency from control, because people often conflate them.

  When I talk about agency, either as a collective or an individual, sometimes I’m talking about the ability to make informed choices, and this most often is about your personal agency. Control, on the other hand, is impulse or imperative to make decisions, informed or not, for others.

  When we talk about controlling ourselves, we’re often really talking about taking hold of our personal agency.

  Can when we were talking about control in the general sense, uncharitably we’re talking about imposing our will on others, and when I think about open source, I keep coming back to agency as well as visibility and integrity in my work and in general as a human.

  It has crystallized over the years that is something that is very, very, very important to me.

  In my first Monktoberfest talk, I talked about pain, compassion, and how to embed understanding in our systems, cultures and teams.

  Now, unfortunately for me, my health has not been on the up and up, and as such, I’ve had a lot of time to think.

  I would like to introduce you to my kitchen floor. I have become extremely well acquainted with my kitchen floor. Because I have this lovely experience where I’m walking and my torso decides to keep going and my legs decide that they are on strike.

  So this leads to me like falling face-first on the kitchen floor and I’m stuck there for maybe an hour, maybe two, maybe until somebody finds me there. Sometimes my legs start working again. Sometimes they’re out for the day. It’s very inconsiderate, I just want to lodge a complaint with whoever’s managing this. I tried to file an issue, but didn’t go anywhere.

  It makes every day a lovely gamble. It does, however, give me a lot of time to think. I never seem to fall with my phone.

  So I’m there. My dog, by the way, who is a dog, let’s say, has decided that this happens frequently enough that she does not think it’s worthwhile to check on me anymore. She’s like, oh, the human’s on the floor, whatever. She’s going to go bark at something.

  But I think I use this time to think. A lot usually about agency.

  I think about what’s important to me in that moment, in that day, and the next day, next year.

  It took me far longer than I care to admit, and I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person on occasion, but it did take me quite some time to realize that maybe — maybe — I focus so much on agency because in that moment I’ve lost some. I still get to choose what to think about. I have some of that agency, but I’ve lost the agency that I so value over my own body. And it’s a betrayal, not just of myself, but my hopes, my dreams, my plans for what I want to do that day and the future, and because — I don’t know if any of you have experienced this, when you fall flat on your face, kind of like with no stopping, no bracing, there’s usually some sort of secondary injury that happens. Maybe you hit your head, maybe you break your nose, I don’t know, that one hasn’t happened to me thankfully yet. But it really messes up my week, so I think about the topic of agency about why I work so hard to preserve it for others.

  In a lot of ways what drew me to open source in the first place was that explicit statement of agency embedded within the culture, this idea and ideal that transparency was the norm, honesty was expected and empowerment  — not just agency but empowerment — was extended to everyone. And if I reflect back on what first drew me to open source, and what has kept me here all these years, it has been the sense of safety that I have gotten by participating in open source, and in the ideals and the ethos lived in this community.

  And this concept of safety that agency imparts really goes back to a very early time for me.

  I had a very odd, unfortunate experience of being responsible for keeping my family safe from somebody who’d threatened to basically murder all of them.

  And unfortunately, it also coincided with a lack of agency to do anything about it. I don’t know about your families, but three-year-olds are rarely empowered to do anything. The message that I got as a three-year-old is that we don’t talk about this stuff.

  You must keep it secret. And pretend like it never happened.

  So I had these two conflicting priorities of don’t talk about it, but also if you don’t keep it in mind, maybe your family dies? I don’t know.

  So secrecy became this dominant theme in my life. I had a secret I couldn’t share, but at the same time that weight was heavy. Don’t gaslight your kids!  Like, it’s just generally not a good thing to do. But this led me to feel super unsafe and my first reaction to feeling unsafe is to hide. This thing that happened in my life caused divergence in my priorities and perspective. I stayed hidden for decades, unconsciously, because being visible was unsafe.

  I forked my life in response to a threat that followed me not just across years, but oceans, and I’ve been carrying that pretty weighty fork ever since.

  When we argue against forks in open source, one of the things we say is that it’s better to get involved in the upstream repository, because even if you carry a fork, even if you decide to shoulder that cost, you’re still letting somebody else drive your roadmap.

  You’re letting somebody else make large decisions for you, and wouldn’t it be better to get involved so that you have a voice, have agency?

  It doesn’t give you control, because we don’t do that in open source, but it gives you agency.

  But remaining hidden, I gave agency over my roadmap to someone else. I didn’t become an opera singer, that you know about. I didn’t go back to Hong Kong. I didn’t take this or that opportunity because of the exposure it would have opened me up to.

  There are times in your life where you become aware of the forks that you are carrying, and the same was true for me.

  I realized that I was flying under the radar, playing it safe, making sure that I was so unknown that I would never rise to the level of notice again.

  I looked forward to getting married, not because I wanted to fall in love, but because I thought that would be the easiest way to change my name to something a little bit less unique.

  When you grow up carrying a fork, you don’t necessarily know it’s there. You may never become aware of it, but when and if you do, you get a choice. You can let somebody or something else run your life, or you can make decisions. You can exert your own agency, and that’s what I did. I realized that entering this world of open source, yes, it did make me more visible, unless you can’t see me, in which case, two birds, one stone!

  It did make me more at risk. That was not the last death threat I got. It was not even the second-to-last death threat I’ve gotten, but I regained a sense of agency, a sense of safety, and the sense of community gave me far more than hiding ever did.

  Forks are not universally bad. In general, forks in both technology and life happen because of an unmet need. We may couch it differently to justify it and when we’re trying to communicate it to others, but that’s what’s at the heart of the matter.

  We carry forks because we needed agency that upstream did not allow us.

  So when we think about the forks that we’re carrying, we really should ask ourselves, what forks are we carrying, consciously or unconsciously?

  What forks are you personally carrying?

  Are we conscious of the ones that we’re carrying, or are we just shouldering the weight?

  Did we have agency over that decision to fork in the first place? And do we have agency over it now?

  Ooh, I went too far. Awesome. OK. So I do encourage all of us to examine our forks. Technological, life, cutlery, whatever. An unconscious forks takes away our opportunities, our openness by saying “we’ve always done it this way.”

  Do we continue to carry them because we agree with what they represent or because we don’t know how to set them down?

  By becoming conscious of the forks that we are carrying, we can reclaim the agency that we might have lost along the way.

  As I wrestle with my own future, I go back to my values — how can I best live them? How do I invest my energy and my time? Are there forks that I’m carrying that I can set down? What new forks do I need at this point? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but I imagine I will have plenty of time with the kitchen floor to contemplate them.

  At the end of the day, we don’t create technology, art, policy, communities, conference talks, for their own sake. We do it to express ourselves, to make sense of the world, to communicate, and to be understood.

  With every fork, we make choices about ourselves and what we value. With every fork we choose what and who to carry with us, and to leave behind.

  Sometimes those choices are hard and sometimes there’s no clear right one to make.

  The forks we carry will be heavy no matter what. We owe it to ourselves and to each other that carry forks that bring us closer to where we want to go, closer to who we want to be, closer to who we want to be with.

  We’ll always carry forks.

  Make some good ones!   Thank you.

  [applause]