Well I finally have something to write about. I guess it takes some porn and a solid rift in the Ruby/Rails community to jostle me out of my mommy bubble. I’ve spent the last two days reading about Matt Aimonetti’s talk at GoGaRuCo and the reactions from Ruby developers and drama queens alike and I must say I’m underwhelmed at their reactions. It’s a good mix of the typical “Oh my god I’m a girl and I’m so offended, like, didn’t feminism cure us of this?” and, “Man, I’m a guy and that shit ain’t cool. I’m offended.”

I want to whine about two terms that are trolling around: “offended” and “professional”.

First of all, I have a hard time believing any man in that audience was offended at the sight of hot chicks. They might have been caught off guard, bemused, or confused at the boldness of the speaker, but they were not offended, not even chivalrously. And I’m sure most people there had a good chuckle at Matt’s attempt at humour. 

Was it “professional?” “Professional” is one of those words that is thrown around by people in big empty suits that are afraid of lawyers, and by people that want to be wearing big empty suits and wish they were in a position to fear lawyers.

When you pack up for a weekend at a fringy Ruby event you expect to be getting comfy with a raw, fringy crowd. You expect to hack in hotel lobbies, play Werewolf in the hallways, drink lots of scotch and Bawls, check to see if there are any hot dev chicks around and eat some tasty treats.

You don’t go to a Ruby conference wearing a big black suit, carrying a briefcase. You don’t go expecting to be bored to tears by a talk on J2EE. You don’t meet for drinks after presentations with potential business partners. No. No. No. You fucking hack, talk shit, play games and eat.

So big fucking deal if Matt Aimonetti showed you some chicks in thongs to make a somewhat amusing point. YES, Matt’s slides gave me major douche chills. It was odd and I didn’t quite like it. But I was not offended, nor did I care how professional/unprofessional it was. 

Also, I’m annoyed with all this banter about how Ruby & Rails will never be taken seriously if people put porn in their presentations. If anyone cared whether or not Rails would be taken seriously we would all be boycotting RailsConf Las Vegas. Anyone who goes to that sellout of a conference has no right reaming on Aimonetti for his porn. At least in his case, “the people voted for it.” 

I definitely think Matt was misguided. Where I think he went wrong was in assuming that the audience would get something valuable out of his talk after he distracted them with hot bodies. Generally hot chicks and processing data on an intellectual level don’t really go together that well.

Using hot chicks to grab the attention of your audience is just elementary. It’s the cheap and easy way to draw an analogy and get a laugh. In this case, I can see the correlation between the images and the message he was trying to deliver, but he could have been more clever by being less transparent. The whole thing seems more like a risky high school presentation (teehee!) than a thoughtful Ruby presentation.

Besides, porn is something we watch when we are alone; when we can convince ourselves that we’re normal, as we’re watching hot, wet, slippery bodies bump each other. Porn isn’t something we like to share with other people, strangers notably. 

But seriously, porn just doesn’t belong in a Ruby presentation. A Java presentation, maybe. They need something to invigorate and distract them from their tired reality. But Rubyists are already pretty damn happy people. We don’t need our presenter to try and make us feel good. Matz already has us covered. 

Matt might have had a better chance at wowing his audience and drawing them in had he used gaming references for flavor instead of bare skin. Know your audience, Matt! Hackers are geeks! Maybe then you’d have earned some geek cred, instead of creep cred. Ouch.

I’ve done a little reworking of his slides to show you how his presentation could have gone better:

I don’t think the Ruby community needs to submit to supporting PC rhetoric. Leave that to folks that wear the suits. Matt was misguided and a bit trigger happy, but what’s really wrong with his slides is his inability to connect with developers in a meaningful and fun way. We don’t like to share sexual experiences with our peers, especially on large projector screens. We like code and video games, maybe even a good ol’ game of Fluxx. It’s not a matter of offensiveness or professionalism, it comes down to not being a douche bag.