[jessedhillon]

Imagine if someone described their experience as a software engineer like so:

> I often used to only sit and talk with the sales people, but then I took an introductory Ruby on Rails course. Now I feel very aligned with my fellow programmers, having worked on projects such as websites written in CSS, and frontend UIs written with the Java scripting language. Sometimes, my pull requests are rejected by certain fringe elements of the engineering team, but I can understand why, since I do not have a traditional background in CS yet am contributing just as much to their code base. But, in those cases I will usually go around, show my face, do some SQL queries and everything is back to normal.

It's about the equivalent.

[codyb]

You're right, I overplayed the nature of how much of a contributor I am to the community. I'm not on the block party planning committee for instance. But I spend tens of hours a week during the warmer months just sitting and hanging out with my neighbors. I try to learn a little Spanish which I really enjoy. And we have a lot of fun together.

The idea that I only talked with "sales people" prior to this is invalid though. I was actually the minority in my public school when I was growing up.

And yes, I do feel as if through sharing experiences with people I've learned how to "be aligned" with people as you say, although I wouldn't say that's a fair characteristic of how I perceive it.

I don't particularly feel aligned with any group of people, majority, or minority.

But I do recognize the value of shared experiences which give me a stronger cultural background, empathy, a grander perspective and worldview.

Of course, imagine if someone judged your entire life from 2 or 3 paragraphs on the internet without knowing said person, their background, experiences, personality, or anything about them?

Edit: And in this world - [0] - You're damn straight I'm proud to have such a multicultural group of friends, and experiences. And even though this post indicates otherwise, I don't particularly give two shits how anyone misconstrues my post which essentially was trying to say "We should come together, hang out with eachother, and understand and forgive". Because, apparently I'm assuming superiority by continuing to hang out with people after I heard they where going to take shit from my house. All I can say is, fuck that.

[0] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/25/three...