A culture of vulnerability

I haven’t done much Python and web, together, in a while. I haven’t been to a Pycon in years, much less a Djangocon. If there is a ranked list of contributors to OSS projects over history, I staunchly occupy its last entry.

Most days, I am yet another guy in that faceless legion of people trying to write JavaScript that doesn’t suck.

There is a JavaScript community. Or really, a loose confederation of people publishing shit on NPM in a way that can only be interpreted as a postmodernist art piece. A lot of it is derivative noise, except when you run into a CSS transpiler ruleset which allows you to write CSS using using the Queen’s English. Because replacing !important with !please is actually quite civilized.

I’m not knocking any of that — but my home is still Python. I’m an expat pythonista. Most of my Twitter is still people from the Python community. So why do I feel that Python is home?

There’s a long list of ways in which the Python community goes out of its way to be welcoming to people who weren’t born with a keyboard in their hands. That alone is a pretty big thing, but it isn’t unique to Python anymore. It’s spreading nicely to many other communities. I can satisfy my zero-tolerance rule for assholery in more establishments now. This isn’t the primary reason why Python is home anymore.

Python is home because it’s a safe place to be wrong. I can go out on a limb and try things. I can come from a weird background, unsteeped in geek lore, ignorant of the technological stack du jour — and feel like the community is there to help me grow, not tell me how I don’t know the first fucking thing about x.

And shit, I’m a white heterosexual cisgender wealthy educated able male. If there is some additional dimension of privilege I’ve elided, it’s a safe bet that I’m on the privileged side of it. I have all the implicit cred I need to say whatever and be wrong without being a pariah. It’s remarkable that I could even worry what people might think if I say something stupid, and if I could be feeling that stress, what the fuck do you think some brown gay trans poor disabled girl from the ghetto is going to be feeling? The warm, welcoming embrace of a nurturing community? Fuck no.

Python makes people feel safe—safe enough to be wrong. It’s okay to have a lot of shit you don’t know, or know as well. It’s okay to lack an Ivy League computer science education. It’s okay to have come in through the career side-door. It’s okay to not be a machine that converts caffeine into code.

Obviously these are generalizations which won’t always hold true, but I love that we’ve reached the point that these generalizations exist. I don’t know if we’re the first community to peek above the second floor of Maslow’s Hierarchy, but it feels like it. We don’t treat it like an accomplishment because it feels gauche to talk about succeeding at basic decency like it is some kind of achievement. Thing is, we ought to talk about it more. This is an exportable success. If we don’t call it a success, we’re failing to reward the good behaviors that led here, and we’re failing to communicate this success to other communities for emulation.

A culture that encourages vulnerability actually encourages everybody. This is what makes Python feel like home to me, long after I’ve stopped writing it regularly.