Donglegate

"Donglegate" may have been one of the biggest talking points of Pycon, a convention for developers of the computer programming language Python.  Two guys sitting behind Adria Richards were making sexual jokes about "forking" and "dongles", a play on technical computer terminology.  The jokes were possibly a little bit inappropriate in normal circumstances but this was a convention where the vast majority were there representing the companies they worked for.

So this is the part where you would think that Adria would have been fed up hearing these jokes and either telling these guys to stop and possibly escalating it to a staff member of Pycon?  Nope, she went straight to twitter to publicly shame these two individuals, you'd think this would be a small simple case to resolve, Pycon apparently spoke to the two in private and decided to give the guys a warning, which most people would have seen as fair enough, as these guys later were on better behaviour.

Being social media this blew up massively once it was heard that one of the guys pictured was fired by his company Playhaven, quoting that his jokes were inappropriate for an employee of an organisation to make and Adria was celebrating this victory, or so she thought.

This absolutely pissed off the tech community and also a lot of people, the jokes while inappropriate were told to his work colleague, while others could possibly overhear, it was more a cast of boys being boys and just having a chat.  This sent the internet into a massive rage, a lot of death, rape and torture threats were sent to Adria's twitter as she defended her position on how great it was for her and a proud step for feminism.

There is definitely a feminism issue there but that's a completely another story and has been covered well by feminist blogs if you wish to have a view point on this.  From a social media point of view, this was getting further out of control, people got past Adria the person and Adria the Sendgrid employee, people were worried about the message this was sending, Sendgrid was saying nothing and to their credit it was smart for the time being was smart for them not to get involved.  People started boycotting Sendgrid and even trying to DDOS the site down.

Eventually Sendgrid realised they had no choice, they were employing someone that people saw at the devil, someone who will try to take you down if you make the slightest step out of line in public, this was not the sort of image they wanted to send out and Adria was fired, she wasn't happy but the internet celebrated as they finally got revenge for the original fallen employee.

All this over a mere dongle joke being overheard.