The most important thing that happened this year

On a sunny day in August 2017, literally the smartest and most beautiful person I know and I embarked on a beautiful trail run on Mt. Tamalpais in Marin that ended on top of a mountain. Once we got to the summit, I asked her to marry me. She said yes!!!

The best books I read in 2017

Last year I measured my reading progress in number of books read. I don’t like that incentive structure, so this year I’ll share my top books with you.

• The two best fiction books I read were A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara and Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
• The two non-fiction books I liked the most were Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat and Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change by Ellen Pao.
• The best tech book I read in 2017 was The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier.

My first year as a Code2040 mentor

Code2040 is an organization dedicated to making tech fair for Black and Latinx workers when white people will no longer make up the majority of citizens in the U.S. by 2040.

I became involved with this program as a mentor this year and had the absolute privilege of being paired with an extremely smart guy by the name of Modou (whose career is already a rocket ship, so I’m still not sure how I can really be of help).

Even though the program was for summer 2017 and formally ended in August, we still meet weekly for interview prep.

Places traveled

Not abnormally, we were flying around to a lot of places this year. We started off the year with a trip to Whistler, Canada, a place with legendary skiing and even more legendary cute mountain dogs.

Next up was a family trip to Oahu, where I undertook the most vertically challenging run I’ve ever attempted.

In the meantime between traveling, work. Lots of work.

In May I traveled to New York then Maine for my 5th year college reunion.

Our biggest trip was in September–we traveled for a week in Japan and a week in Vietnam with our good friends David and Todd. We spent the first weekend at a ryokan on the Izu peninsula near Mt. Fuji and the rest of the week in Tokyo for a conference.

My primary goal for Vietnam was to sit on tiny stools and eat delicious noodles. We achieved that goal many times.

We also got to meet up with current and former coworkers of people in our group, and were treated to the most amazing home cooked Vietnamese meal.

Running

This was a great year for running. I PR’d my half marathon time at the Monterey Half (to 01:45:31).

I ran more miles this year than any other year in my life.

I trained hard during the months of October and November 2017 to chase down and try to defeat the 10K personal record time set by 2012 Jeff at the Dana Point Turkey Trot. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t do it. One of my 2018 goals is to slay that time.

One year at Google

In August my Noogler friends and I celebrated our 1 year Googleversary.

At work this year I designed and shipped my first machine learning system to production, and wrote a continuous integration pipeline for the web platform.

Setting goals for 2018

Goals should be ambitious and measurable. In the spirit of Google OKRs, my 2018 goals will be very ambitious with a score of 0.7 being an acceptable outcome.

1. Running: Run a sub 19:30 minute 5K (shave 1:13 off of current PR of 20:43).
2. Running: Beat my 10K PR time of 43:56 (7:04 pace).
3. Health: Maintain an average of 4 workouts per week.
4. Giving back in tech: devote at least 1 hour a week to mentoring or teaching. This can include running mock interviews, doing mentoring video chats, or creating blog posts or YouTube videos to teach concepts.

Thank you

Thank you for reading about my 2017. I hope you have a happy holidays and wish you all the best in 2018!

Work

The theme for this year of my life is probably “insane amounts of learning.” In the first half of 2016 I was at Braintree working on a new payments platform. In August I joined the Google Chrome team.

Community

In the tech community I had the privilege of engaging with more people about more things this year. Front-end Hyperpolyglot, a comparison table I made of component idioms in popular front-end frameworks, got featured in JavaScript Weekly. I mentored programmers at NodeSchool. I spoke at the SF Payments Engineers Meetup about the future of Web Payments. Of the tech-related things this year, the highlight was getting to be on the Building Better Browsers panel with Jen Fong-Adwent, Yan Zhu, and Jon Kuperman at ForwardJS.

Diversity

I said in my 2015 yearly review that in 2016 I wanted to start helping in any way I could to improve tech’s diversity problem. I spent November crawling millions of web archives to analyze gender representation in tech media. I found that the tech media reports on women about half as much as they are represented in the industry. I still feel like I’m not doing that much (and am afraid people think I’m just doing this for attention), so I hope to make a lot more progress in this direction and get more involved in 2017.

jeffcarp on Twitter

Hi friends, over the past few weeks I've been taking a look at gender representation in tech media: https://t.co/K9SBEBzwAi

Travel

The highlight of traveling this year was backpacking around Mt. Rainier with two of my friends from college.

The farthest I traveled this year was Poland for a college friend’s wedding. In March, my girlfriend Elva and I went to Hawaii to run in the Valley to the Sea Half Marathon.

Running

Speaking of running, 2016 was the second most productive year I’ve had in terms of mileage, almost beating out 2012. I use a tool called rcrd to keep track of how much I run, workout, drink, etc.

Looking at how much I drank, 2016 was fortunately not the most productive year.

Books

My goal for 2016 was to beat 2015 and read more than 9 books. I made that goal with 18 books in 2016. However, I think looking only at total number of books read incentivizes the wrong behavior, so for 2017 my goal is to read enough books to have 3 strong recommendations: a fiction, a non-fiction, and a technical book. Here are my recommendations from 2016:

• Fiction: virtually the only fiction I read this year was the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, which was amazing.
• Non-fiction: Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
• Technical: Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy

Failures

My biggest regret of 2016 was not volunteering more time or donating more to help with the election. This year was a wake up call for me and I’m sure a lot of other people. I will not make this mistake again.

However, potentially my biggest failure is that I did not fail more. This tells me I need to take more risks in 2017.

If you got this far, thank you for reading bout my 2016. I’d love to hear about yours, and I hope you have a happy new year!

However, so far nobody has taken a broad look at how tech media is representing our industry to the outside world with respect to gender diversity.

One of journalism’s main goals is to report an unbiased view of reality. In an ideal world, tech journalism would mirror the gender diversity of the tech industry fairly equally — e.g. if the tech industry were 50/50 male/female, tech journalism would write articles about both equally — however, this is not the case today. Gender representation in tech journalism skews even more male than representation in the industry itself.

I want to make it clear that I’m not trying to pick on tech media. Tech journalism is responsible for a lot of good in our industry. For the 4 years I was out in the middle of the woods in Maine in college I read tech media voraciously — it was my only means of keeping up with the industry I loved and wanted to join one day. I want to ensure 100% of people can feel as connected as I did.

Pronoun distribution

I took every article that top tech news websites have published up to October 2016 and analyzed the number of male vs. female gender pronouns (he, him, his vs. she, her, hers). This will give us a rough look at how frequently each gender is talked about. One downside of this approach is that it doesn’t accurately reflect the reality of the gender spectrum today — however, I think it’s a good start. After analyzing 3.9 million pages, here are my findings.

To start off with some background information, here are the latest gender diversity stats for the biggest tech companies:

Average percentage of women: 34%.

Now for the pronouns. The top 6 tech media sites ranked according to Alexa are TechCrunch, PCMag, Techradar, Wired, PCWorld, and Ars Technica. Here is the distribution of gender pronouns across all articles per publication:

Average percentage of women: 17%.

Engadget, Gizmodo, Mashable, and The Next Web are also popular tech media sites — let’s take a look at them:

Average percentage of women: 20.1%.

From here you might wonder how this distribution compares to non-tech media like The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal:

Average percentage of women: 31.5%.

And how about more female-oriented media like Elle or Vogue?

Average percentage of women: 60%.

The average female pronoun distribution on all tech media sites shown here is 18.2%. Tech media sites skew 15.8% more male than the number of women in the industry, 13.3% more male than The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and 41.8% more male than the female-oriented media sites Elle and Vogue.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure

Here’s why I think measuring and improving this bias is important:

• Tech media has a vast reach. When women STEM majors look through the lens of tech media, what they see will frame their career choices.
• Gender bias in tech media deprives women of role models.
• It reinforces bias. It leads us to think that women are more rare than they actually are.

The goal tech media should have is to at least mirror the diversity of the industry, and best-case scenario take the responsibility to push the needle in the positive direction. But we can’t improve what we don’t measure. Going forward in 2017 I will release a quarterly report to look at these numbers across the above publications. Sign up to get updates when they’re released.

Thank you to Jonathan Kalin, Elva Fan, and Jill Carpenter for their ideas and feedback, and thanks to the folks at Common Crawl for providing the dataset.

As engineers we hold the lone wolf in high regard, the hoodie-wearing coder hacking away in the corner at a genius project. But large projects that deliver a ton of value are made by teams of engineers, not lone wolves.

You are already an engineering manager. Right now, you’re managing one person: yourself. If you don’t develop engineering leadership skills, the most impact you can have is the number of hours in your day. But by learning and exhibiting the qualities of a good engineering leader, you will be able to achieve things greater than you could have ever accomplished alone.

Make sure to realize that what you did was a huge infraction. Unforgivable. Your friends or coworkers will always remember that thing you did and your character is now permanently besmirched.

Don’t make an effort to apologize or clean up the damage you caused, because your friends will no longer accept you.

Seeing your friends reminds you of the damage you caused. Distance yourself further from these people.

Seek out an entirely new group of people. People who weren’t there for your unforgivable behavior.

Do something rude.