Some months ago, attendees of the Handmade Seattle conference expressed their grievances with the conference in regards to its pivoting to include talks with mentions of social justice awareness and a slightly more diverse panel of speakers, at the cost of the usual guy-packs-bytes-in-the-right-sequence talks. Which I have nothing against as someone who tend to give talks of that exact flavor.

In any case, the conference organizer apologized for the poor selection of speakers which did not correspond to the expectations of ticket holders, promising to resolve the issue in the following year, and in passing, that free and open source software developers would no longer be welcomed as speakers.

I happened to be present in the chatroom when the apology letter went out and merely questioned whether the choice was really about the lack of low-level talks, and not something else. It did not take long for bigots of all sorts to come out and lament the good old days of the conference and soon the chatroom was ablaze with some pretty vile things against trans people, this went on for hours without intervention, the usual.

What I did not expect, was that after the conference organizer ghosted me for months, they finally broke radio silence to slam me for speaking out and partially blamed me for the unraveling of the conference organization, and decided against covering the agreed upon travel stipend. I have since requested for the talk videos to be removed.

"So why is software so terrible?
We made it terrible."
— The Handmade Manifesto

https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/now.html