thirdbIT

I am supposed to be at Ruby East right now, but, coincidentally, just like the other, more well-known Amy in the Rails world, I’m not there.

I had hoped to go to learn some new Ruby and Rails tricks, and to meet some people I’ve only met online, like Gregory Brown, and generally schmooze. Several-day conferences are not feasible for nursing moms (at least, not for this nursing mom, although I’m sure there are some moms somewhere who’ve done it), so there was no hope of going to RailsConf in May, or to RubyConf in November. I thought a one-day conference not too far away might be do-able.

I am sure that some people could have managed it; for me, it turned out to be logistically impossible. The four-year-old was going to stay at his grandparents’ house for two nights; they would have had to take him to preschool this morning, to which he is still adjusting, and to French class on Saturday morning. Max and I and the baby were to drive six hours to the outskirts of Philly yesterday afternoon, spend the night, and then I was to go to the conference, armed with a breast pump, and Max was to entertain Aya tooling around Philly all day, giving her bottles of milk I’d already pumped and frozen. Then he’d pick me up, we’d both go to Ales and Rails with Aya, and drive 6 hours home on Saturday.

Wednesday night came and I was out till 10 pm at the Ruby and Rails course I am helping to teach at Harvard Extension School. Aya had gone on a bottle-feeding strike and was hungry. I was tired; the course is great, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it, but being out at night is not my favorite thing in the whole wide world. There had been no packing of anyone’s things; I did not have much of a milk reserve in the freezer, and what I had I didn’t know if Aya would take, Ari has needed extra attention lately to help him with his preschool transition, and Max and I both hate, hate, hate long drives. So we called the whole thing off.

I keep thinking there should have been some way I could have managed it anyway. If it had been more crucial I’m sure I could have. We all would have survived. But in the end the schmooze and learning opportunity was not enough for me to make the extra push to get there. There will be other conferences in other years when my kids are older.

Every so often the Ruby community wonders where all the women are: why aren’t more women coming to conferences and user group meetings? And lots of reasons get tossed around, some (though definitely a minority) of them incredibly offensive and people argue about how many women are really out there in the community, and some people point out that most women, even those working full-time jobs outside their homes, are still the primary caregiver in their households. This means that getting to evening and out-of-town events outside of work, things that are a little bit more optional, is going to be harder for them. I’m not even working outside of my home full-time right now, and I would definitely say that Max and I are in the rare and enviable position of actually sharing childcare pretty much equally (though the balance has been different in the past, and will doubtless be again sometime). Still, I’m the one with the mammary glands, so there are some commitments I just can’t (and don’t want to) get out of. I am lucky not to have had to go to court, like this woman in my town did, to meet those commitments.

So there are women in the community (the Ruby and Rails course, for example, appears to be about 20% women, though course numbers haven’t stabilized yet because of Harvard’s complicated add/drop policies), but they’re not necessarily visible at community events. Like the Ruby East conference, at which I am not, currently, visible.

One reason Max is not so sure that we should ever go into business ourselves is that it obviously requires sales (”You had your own corporation back in the day, sweetie,” I say to him. “Yeah, but I didn’t have to sell myself much.” says Max. Or, as another friend of ours says, you can just barnacle yourself to some other business that takes care of the sales and farms work out to you.)

People who are good at sales seem to be from some alternate universe, and the idea of having to spend a lot of time selling ourselves is just ick. We resent the idea that not only are we forced to work for a living (and do all the stuff that actually accomplishing stuff at work entails, not to mention sitting through ugly slideshows with fancy and useless ‘effects’, eating Trader Joe’s cookies that someone left by the water cooler just because they’re there, and waiting for three days for the helpdesk to finish setting up a login that you know takes exactly two minutes of effort to accomplish) — not only are we forced to work for a living, but in our free time we must work on working. See my thoughts on the meaning of “career” (is it cheating if I add a link to something later, when I’ve actually written it?) We have a bunch of other stuff we’d like to do besides sell ourselves. For example, here I am, writing this blog entry for our “professional presence” blog, which, as noted previously, everyone says we have to have these days. But we have an unprofessional blog too (no, I’m not telling you where it is, go find it yourself if you’re so damn nosy. Or just click here to read all the deep dark secrets about us that you’d discover on it. ) And maybe I’d rather be spending this time working on the other blog, or studying my French verbs, or weeding my garden, or playing with my kids. But noooo, we have to have a brand.

How will we come up with a brand when we resent and distrust the whole notion of brands?

Why should I even be writing about this? Because I’m sure we’re not the only shy marketing-averse techie people who are hung up on the whole “creating a brand” thing everyone’s always telling us to do, and are thus holding ourselves back from being able to make money in the simplest, most pleasant, most efficient way possible.

First we have to get past all these marketing types telling us we need to have a brand. Brands are fine for those people, obviously, from some other universe, but why should we have to have one? We don’t want to do marketing. We just want to interview our users to see what their ridiculous desires (uh, I mean requirements) are, draw some screen mockups and non-UML-compliant app diagrams, write some code, configure some stuff, make some useful docs, and be done. (See how sneaky I am: Reqs. Code. Docs. Done.)

Once again, Amy Hoy comes to the rescue. (She gave me my first Ruby pep-talk, on the first day I started learning Ruby, oh, a month ago. Not that she knows me or anything.) Amy Hoy tells me all about pimpin’:

Oh blech, I can hear you thinking, an article on marketing. But wait a moment. Among geeky types, the word “marketing” has an evil reputation, I know. But pimpin’ ain’t marketing.

Pimpin’ goes oh-so-much further.

The act of marketing products is often taken to mean creating desire where there isn’t any, creating dissatisfaction in the viewer/reader/whatever, manufacturing needs and generally trying to create a false image of a product that will convince a viewer he just haaaas to have that thing. Archetypes: misleading beauty ads, “lifestyle” soda ads, and Ronco.

Now, I disagree with the above definition, but that’s the reputation the word has and I’m going to just let that one lie.

The act of pimpin’ products, on the other hand, never involves any kind of questionable tactics. Pimpin’ means putting your product’s best foot forward. Accen-tuate the pos-it-ive. It means not shirking from self-promotion, and shouting your product’s position, features and benefits loud and clear. It means making the acquisition (download, purchase, whatever) process as simple as possible. It also means having a very non-murky message. Archetype: any time when you can get in, download the product/information you want, and get out in under 60 seconds.

And, unlike marketing, pimpin’ has no “g” in it. You have to know that’s a point in its favor.

Of course, we don’t have an actual product to sell. Just us. But we need to sell Us, or at least one or the other of Us. So the advice applies. We need to have a brand, and we need to pimp it. There’s no use complaining about how we don’t wanna, cuz we have to. Even if we never go into business for ourselves full-time, people don’t stay in jobs anymore like they used to (so we hear). We’re gonna have to keep finding other jobs, and keep coming up with new ways to get people to pay us.

So there it is. We must have a brand. Ideally, of course, we end up with too much business to keep up with, and we don’t spend much of our time selling ourselves. People just email us to ask if they can hire us. But if we want that to happen, they have to find us, they have to read us, they have to know us, and they have to know what’s great about us. And they won’t find us, read us, know us, and know what’s great about us unless we tell them.

As long as we’ve got bills to pay, and as long as we don’t want simply to be cogs in a corporate machine, over-working ourselves in our cubicles, we’ve got a brand to build. Or rather, some pimpin’ to do. Sorry Max, but that’s just the way it is, and it doesn’t have to be as painful as all that. We know we’re awesome, and we just have to be able to tell a good story to everyone else about why that is.