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Happy Halloween, Cuties! 👻

The best day of the entire year is here: Halloween. I can smell the plastic wrapped Starbursts and Skittles. The slight smell of undetermined chemicals as I open my Halloween costume package. The promise of incredulous bar crawls and a possible candy coma all on a Monday night... how can you not love it?!

Updates

• I got my first Patron on Patreon off of last week's issue! I was extremely excited, and it spurred me to reorganize the Patron Tiers and also bring back something kind of fun... You should join them though because I've decided to post new Git Cute Podcast episodes monthly my Patreon. You can pledge here to be the first to hear the new episodes!

• The slated first module release of Conquer System Design is slated for Thanksgiving 2022. Is it much later than the initial date of August 2022? Absolutely, but I also needed to seriously readjust my goals, and that is of no one else's fault but my own. The goal within the next 30 days is to have the new website up and running to showcase the first module, but also to show different payment options for the course. I have been fully transparent in the process of interviewing and content creation while trying to come to a place with my mental health where I felt comfortable. Thank y'all for being patient with me during the preorder phase.

• I have an interview with a company that I find interesting coming up. Let's hope I can show them my value.

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So, Elon Finally Bought Twitter...

I used to have a lot of thoughts about this when it was first talked about on Twitter earlier in the year. Now that the day is here, the only people that I feel bad for are the people that are working at Twitter and have suddenly had the value of their RSUs reduced to 0%. A lot of rely on the extra money from our RSUs for making large life purchases, taking care of family, or just to make ends meet. This Verge article by Nilay Patel says brilliantly what I am thinking. As far as staying on Twitter, I will still be there, shit posting to the tens of thousands of you that follow me.

Links that made me happy

• Second Twilio Breach in June

• The sale is over, but I wanted you to know these cute yummy keycaps existed

• Meta's stock is currently worth $98.90

• RIHANNA IS BACK!

Why Using "Black-on-Black" is Perpetuating Communal Harm

We all know of Black Twitter, and because of Pariss Athena, we all should be aware of #blacktechtwitter - a niche subset of Black technologists tackling everything from racism in the workplace to would you rather...? topics. If you don't follow a lot of Black technologists, chances are you are not in the know, but let's talk about one topic in an otherwise blissfully slow topic week.

Earlier on Friday, a Black technologist with 50k+ Twitter followers made a Tweet regarding two topics that don't mesh in or out of context : Ashanti's sexual assault and abusive relationship with Irv Gotti and "black-on-black workplace trauma." While the trauma that we can have from members of our own community, the use of "black-on-black" is problematic and is more divisive and takes away from the importance of the experiences of those that are in the corporate workplace.

You may be confused as to why "black-on-black" is seen as inherently anti-Black, and I will break it down for you.

Black-on-black is a phrase that was perpetuated by racism, especially in the context of black-on-black crime since the late 1800s, most famously by a white Fredrick Ludwig Hoffman. While he did not outright use the phrase, he alluded to "the basic idea that Black people have a special crime problem." From Hoffman's ancedote about Black Americans spurred hundreds of years of statistical and logical fallacies that are still conservative talking points about Black people to this day.

While looking at these statistics, it is important to note that if you live in a neighborhood or city with people that share the same race idenity as you, you have a vastly larger chance of a violent crime being committed against you by your same race. You are parroting anti-Black talking points without understanding the damage that you are doing to yourself and to the Black image at large.

There is also a section of Black people that believe that there is an inherent comradery amongst each other in workplaces based on our race alone. To that, I paraphrase what another Black woman in the Twitter Space in question pointed out, that not every Black person is going to have the same experience as you based on their locale. If we can say that to defend using black-on-black when describing harmful workplace scenarios, we can argue the adverse that our skincolor does not immediately dictate a closeness or kinship. All skinfolks are not kinfolk.

Instead of unknowingly following the steps of Black conservatives that use black-on-black crime to spur disodence within the forseen monoethnicity of Blackness in America, let's be mindful of how we discuss the struggles of corporate politics amongst our own communities.

Sources: Here, here, and here, also a lot of books and lived experiences by me.

Java Facts

It's my favorite part of the newsletter: Java facts!

Y'all may hate Java, but there's one thing that can be said, that we Java developers get *paid.* As of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2021, Java is still the 5th most used language. When you your dinosaur systems are written in Java, someone needs to come in to refactor and maintain them, no? 😏

Also thanks to Angelique, Scott, Sean, and Emmy for being Patreon Patrons! 💖

Have an amazing week, y'all! Don't forget to celebrate the spooky!

xx Josie