Improving diversity and inclusion at tech (and other) events

Over the years I’ve attended and organised various conferences, hackathons, and other events, and it’s been interesting to observe the ways in which each of them handle (or don’t handle) diversity.

This post is a collection of notes and pointers about the things I’ve noticed are some of the most important things to help increase diversity at events. When I say diversity, I’m largely referring to the diversity of the attendees at events. People from different walks of life, backgrounds, races, genders, abilities, etc.

Being inclusive at our events is important. If our events only have homogeneous attendees, the things they focus on will only be relevant to those attendees, and not useful to anybody else. As it turns out, not everybody is a neurotypical able-bodied heterosexual middle-class cisgender white male. Those of us who do fit or approximate this description often aren’t aware or appreciative of the issues experienced by anybody different from ourselves.

So, in no particular order, how do we improve diversity? This is by no means an exhaustive list, and there will be things I’ve missed, and perhaps some mistakes. Please check out the references section for more information. There’s also a summary at the end. (EDIT: The summary is also available as a lightning talk.)

Race

Be sensitive to and aware of non-white attendees. Ensure you call out racism in your code of conduct, and that you consider how you can be inclusive of and do outreach to various races and indigenous communities.

Accessibility

Have accessible venues. This means ensuring that all the important areas of your venue, including common areas, theatres, bathrooms and stages (speakers can have disabilities, too, and may have lots to say about them!) are wheelchair accessible.

If you think you may have people with visual or hearing disabilities at your events, consider a sign-language interpreter, or having a hearing-aid loop, so that these people can be involved in presentations too, and encourage presenters to be cognisant of this when making their slides (not assuming everybody can see what their slides say, for example).

Additionally, speakers should be mindful of using ableist language, or abusing terms like “OCD” to mean “fussy,” for example. Ensure your website is accessible for people with screen readers etc.

Dietary requirements

Ask for people’s dietary requirements upon registration for your event. You could have a set of check-boxes for things like vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, lactose free, FODMAP, etc. but regardless of whether or not you do this, you should include a dietary requirements free text field for people to explain the nuances of their situation; don’t assume they’ll fit into your boxes; people are complex.

Gender

There are more than 2 genders, and we want to be inclusive of them all. That means that beyond making our events more accessible to women, we should also be inclusive of trans, non-binary, and gender-non-conforming folks. This should include, wherever possible, gender neutral bathrooms.

If your event will have name badges, and you want to give attendees input into what goes onto their name badge, then instead of permitting a “Twitter handle” text box, have a “free badge text; use for Twitter handle, pronoun, GitHub profile, or whatever you like” field. The mention of pronoun here demonstrates to attendees that you acknowledge people’s pronouns may not match how they look (a femme presenting person may not use she/her/hers pronouns), and improves inclusion.

If you need to ask for gender ensure you allow a free-text field to specify their gender. Again, they may not fit in your boxes. Ask, though, why you are asking for gender? Identifying diversity (e.g. how many non-men do we have at this event) is a valid reason. An argument people have made in the past is that a free text field could result in: man, male, boy, masculine, guy, woman, girl, lady, female, trans man, trans woman, unspecified, etc. This is obviously a bit tricky to aggregate for statistics, so one option is to offer an auto-complete text field that auto-completes to “female” when the user starts typing “f” or other words, for example. This encourages users towards labels that make statistical aggregation easy for you, but lets them break out of your boxes if they wish, and type what they like.

Additionally, “unisex T-shirts” are not unisex. Unisex shirts are not designed properly to fit people with breasts or differently shaped chests. If you’re offering T-shirts, offer women’s cut shirts as well as unisex/men’s cut shirts. This may also mean thinking carefully about the design you print on your shirts to ensure the design looks good on people with larger chests, and that the design isn’t distorted etc. Consider subtle and unintentional use of gendered language, such as words like “guys.”

Names

Not everybody has a first name and a last name. Some have mononyms, other cultures display the family name first. When asking for people’s names on your registration form, have a single field for somebody’s full name. Don’t split it up. Ever. If you want a short or informal name (what we westerners may usually use a first name for), have an additional field for “informal form of address”, and explain this may be used for address in newsletters etc., so people have a context through which they can decide how to be addressed.

Socio-economics

Not everybody will be able to afford to come to your event. People from low socio-economic backgrounds may want to come, and have useful and interesting input and perspectives. We can’t afford to exclude these people. Offer grants or sponsorships to people who can’t afford to attend but wish to.

Childcare and youth programs

Some potential attendees will have children. Offer childcare or youth programs. Childcare is not hard to do, and demonstrates your desire to make your events family-friendly.

Newbies

Going to a new event can be scary. Include details on your event’s website that are easy to find and explain what to expect for your event, possibly offering a contact of whom additional questions can be asked. Once at your event, ensure that newbies are overtly welcomed, and that contempt culture is discouraged.

Code of Conduct

Have a code of conduct. There are plenty of great CoCs available (some of which I’ve mentioned in below in the references) off which you could base yours. It should include consequences for breaches, and details for who to contact if people feel unsafe or need to report an incident.

Summary

Additional references and further reading

See Carina C. Zona’s talk called “Schemas for the real world” for information on how to ask for information from users without squeezing them into boxes into which they don’t feel they fit. Check out the Django Community Code of Conduct, the Hopper Fund’s guide to improving conference diversity, the Geek Feminism anti-harassment policy, and the anti-harassment policy developed by the Ada Initiative.

Regarding inclusive language, the Australian National LGBTI Health Alliance has an excellent guide to inclusive sex and gender diverse language. Feel free to extrapolate the guidelines for size, ability, education and ethnicity. The Australian Network on Disabilities also has a guide to inclusive language you might want to look at.

 

The risk and reward of difficult conversations with friends

tl;dr at the end.

Sometimes, when I express a mindset that I’ve adopted, people are intrigued by it and find it a useful way of framing certain thoughts. When that happens enough times, I figure it’s time to document the mindset for wider dissemination; this is one of those.

A while ago, I was considering my relationship with a close friend. I realised I was interested in exploring a non-platonic (romantic, intimate, or sexual) relationship with them. I wasn’t hung up on this idea; I basically wanted to float it and see what they thought, and I was happy to leave things as they were if the other person wasn’t interested.

I hear stories sometimes of people who have tried to suggest changes (some may call them “escalations”, though I don’t like that mindset) like this to a relationship, and are concerned that just the mere suggestion of these changes could destroy the relationship. What if the friend doesn’t think of you the same after you suggest, say, that you’re interested in them romantically? What if this knowledge means they’re not comfortable continuing your existing platonic relationship, because they might think they’re teasing teasing you by staying around but denying you the relationship change you suggested, because your feelings are unrequited? What if they are offended or insulted by your suggestion, for some reason? Perhaps you suggest a sexual relationship and they think you’re just desperate for sex and trying to use them to get it?

Here’s the big question: do you really want to continue a relationship (be it friendship or otherwise) with somebody who would react like this to a calmly raised suggestion, when you have stated that it is a suggestion and nothing more, and that you’re happy with things as they are? If you can’t be completely honest with this person and have them be anything other than grateful for your honesty and vulnerability, what’s the point? Wouldn’t you rather know that’s the case than brush it under the carpet and never find out because you didn’t make the suggestion?

So here I am, a while ago, wrestling with these thoughts about a friend: I am interested in exploring romance, intimacy, or sex with them, but I don’t want this admission to be reacted to negatively and damage our existing friendship. I thought it through, and I came out with three distinct possible outcomes:

  1. My friend will be keen to explore these other things with me and we see where it goes.
  2. My friend will respectfully tell me that they’re happy with our relationship as it is, and be grateful for my vulnerability in making this suggestion.
  3. My friend will not be able to cope with this new information, no matter how calmly I try to discuss it with them and how hard I try to explain that it’s no big deal if they want to keep things as they are. As a result, they cut off contact. In this case, they are not the friend I thought they were, and this is a really unfortunate discovery, but it’s best discovered now than left hidden.

I realised that all three of these outcomes are acceptable to me. If (3) occurs, that’s a shame, but that’s life, and the fact is that I’ve known this person for years, so the likelihood of this outcome is very small. If we hadn’t been friends for long, and I made this suggestion, then (a) there’s less at stake; I have invested less in the relationship, and (b), I still would be grateful to learn that the friend would react this way sooner rather than later, and we can either work through that now, or go our separate ways.

I set out and wrote a big lengthy message, discussing my thought process and dancing around the message’s point. I wanted to do this in text because I can better and more articulately express my thoughts without feeling rushed, and once the message is sent, I can convince myself that there is nothing I can do until they respond, so there’s no point in dwelling on it or fretting. Hope for the best, express for the worst, but don’t waste your energy stressing about it. The message exceeded 400 words, but, halfway down, I asked, basically, if this person was interested in going on a date with me.

Then I waited patiently for a response. I’ll do you the courtesy that my friend did for me, which was to get unambiguously to the point early in the message so as not to keep me in suspense: they were happy with our relationship as it was, and weren’t interested in anything romantic. They also expressed that they appreciated my honesty.

And that was that. We’re still great friends; perhaps better, because I know I can feel safe having these hard conversations, and assume they’ll react empathetically and within my best interests.

So seriously, if you have you have high stakes conversation you want to have with a friend, just do it! The worst that can happen is they’ll show their true colours and not react well to the conversation, in which case that is valuable information that you have learned about each other; perhaps they could do with some research on communications, or, depending on the severity of their response, some therapy; there’s no shame in that.

Take the plunge!

tl;dr: If you’re worried about having a hard but respectful conversation with a friend because you’re concerned it’ll jeopardise/end the friendship, ask yourself if you really want to be friends with somebody who won’t give you the benefit of the doubt and respond compassionately and empathetically regardless of the outcome? What have you got to lose?

Commute delays, frustration, and empathy

“Keep the doorstep clear, please,” The tram driver intones over the PA for what must be the tenth time during my commute. The doorstep remains crowded, along the rest of the tram. Standing, back against the window, occupying as little space as I can, I crank up my music and try to relax.

My day started well: I woke relatively well rested with plenty of time to shower and breakfast before leaving home. Walking to the bus while texting a friend, I’m pleased to observe that the sun has decided to briefly grace me with its presence.

The bus is almost 10 minutes late. I could’ve walked to the tram instead, and maybe I’d have just caught the one I watched sail past as I disembarked my bus. How could I have known?

On a route with a usual frequency of 8 minutes, that tram was the last one for over 30 minutes. There had been a route disruption and the network was still catching up.

I catch the tram because, despite the extra 10 minute travel time, I can sit down and maybe get some productive work or recreational reading done, whereas the train is often so packed I can’t hold my phone in front of my face.

I should have caught the train, I tell myself as I await the tram. How could I have known? Well I could have checked the live public transport app that told me there were delays. But I didn’t; can’t change that now.

The sun has gone behind the clouds. My mood takes a hit. I’m frustrated. I’m going to be late. This isn’t a problem; I will still get my work done, and maybe I can get a head start once the tram arrives.

The tram arrives. It’s a single-section Z-Class vehicle, rather than this route’s more regular dual-section B-Class vehicles. It’s packed, or near enough to that there are no seats. I consider awaiting the next one, but it’s another 7 minutes away, and I’m already late. I board the tram.

I’m jostling for space, trying to maintain balance as the tram accelerates and decelerates by turns. There will be seats after people disembark at the train station. Wrong. By the time we reached the station, more had boarded, and I couldn’t move. The pressure eased off with the station passengers’ departure, but still no seats. I shuffle from the aisle to the available space against the window, where I’m out of the way and reasonably well supported.

So much for the sun: it has started raining. Another hit to my mood. This is Melbourne, and I’m prepared with my umbrella to handle the practical aspects of inclement weather, but my brain has other ideas.

I hate everything. The current weather, my fellow passengers, the public transport provider, the tram driver and their insistent announcements about clearing the doorstep. I should’ve followed my instincts and worked from home like I was considering before getting out of bed. This is not how to set a positive tone for my day.

I stop.

I take a deep breath.

I consider the commuters around me. They didn’t ask for this. They’re just trying to get to work, same as me. Some of them may not work somewhere as flexible as I do, where being a little late isn’t a huge deal. They’re doing the best they can.

I consider the public transport control centre. Who knows what sort of disruptions they had to deal with today while I was still eating my breakfast? They’re probably frustrated, trying to get back on schedule, willing physics to bend the rules so they can get their trams where they’re needed in a timely manner. They’re doing the best they can.

I consider the tram driver. They’re just doing their job. Surely they have safety precautions to which they must adhere. They’ve possibly received instructions from stressed control centre folks, and are trying to make up time that they’ve lost. They’re dealing with trams that are packed far earlier in their journey than usual, and commuters standing in awkward places because there’s nowhere else to go. They’re doing the best they can.

We’re all doing the best we can, with the information we had available at the time. The world is deliberately trying to make our lives difficult.

Today will be OK. My office is warm and dry, with plenty of natural light, sun or no. My to-do list is manageable. I have things to look forward to.

Standing on the tram, I extract my phone from my pocket, and I begin to write.

“You’re awesome!” and giving good compliments

Tl;dr at the bottom.

I live in a social echo chamber in which giving compliments is quite common. Often in society we don’t know how to give or accept compliments and without feeling silly or embarrassed.

I receive quite a few compliments, and still struggle to receive them (showing gratitude but not shrugging them off due to embarrassment), but I try to give them fairly liberally. Recently, I received an unprompted compliment from somebody, reminding me that I was awesome. I really appreciate people taking time out of their day to say these things, and I expressed gratitude for it at the time, but I found myself thinking about it later, and I realised that I’d wanted to ask “what made you say this?” but had refrained from doing so because I don’t want to sound ungrateful or expect people to take more time to explain themselves.

To be completely clear, telling people you appreciate them, or that they’re awesome, is a great start, especially in this society where recognising people’s flaws is common, but recognise their achievements is rare. The trouble with this, is that telling everybody that they’re “awesome” or similar has the potential to devalue the term through overuse. “Awesome” is an unqualified judgement that can be nice, but ultimately not very useful. I am consequently endeavouring to take things a step further when giving compliments.

Recently I read Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B Rosenberg. In it, the author notes that gratitude is less useful than its justification:

The Three Components of Appreciation NVC clearly distinguishes three components in the expression of appreciation:

  1. the actions that have contributed to our well-being
  2. the particular needs of ours that have been fulfilled
  3. the pleasureful [sic] feelings engendered by the fulfillment [sic] of those needs

(That whole chapter on “Receiving Appreciation,” and indeed the entire book, is a fascinating read.)

So rather than a judgement of “you’re awesome,” perhaps instead one could say “I really appreciate this particular perspective you have on that topic; it’s great to have somebody to bond with over this opinion; it makes me happy.”

This approach both gives the recipient of the complement a better understanding of what they’re doing well so they can do more of it, and as a result, in my case at least, helps me to receive and appreciate the compliment more easily, because I feel I deserve it more.

I am not saying I expect anybody giving me a compliment to go to this effort. In certain situations, I might ask for clarification, but I appreciate that people are busy, and despite them taking the time to compliment me out of the blue, they may not have time to elaborate. All I’m saying is that I will endeavour to be more specific with my own compliments in future, and occasionally might respectfully request the same of others, when I deem it appropriate.

A respectful request might be phrased like this: “I appreciate you saying that nice thing, but would you mind taking the time to elaborate on why you think that? It would be far more valuable to me if you could give examples as to what I said or did, why it was valuable to you, and how it made you feel, so that I can (a) appreciate you’re compliment more fully, and (b) use it as an opportunity for growth, to do more of the things that prompted the compliment.” I realise this is very verbose, and depending on your relationship with the individual, it could be abbreviated as time goes on, but I think the above is one of the clearest ways to make this request without sounding self-indulgent or unappreciative.

Tl;dr: give more compliments; we don’t do this enough! In doing so, try to be specific as to what you’re complimenting, and why it’s worthwhile to you. This helps avoid judgements (which when used regularly can have diminished value). This can help the recipient receive the compliment more authentically.

On being offended

“Offence is taken, not given.”

There’s a school of thought that says that you can’t control whether or not somebody will take offence to your words or actions. In this world of “political correctness,” or, as I often prefer to call it, “not being an arsehole,” there are those that think language policing is going too far: that people should be less sensitive, get a thicker skin, and just deal with it.

Examples such as “women should just accept that when I say ‘guys’ I intend it to be gender neutral.” “When I say something is ‘gay’ I don’t mean to imply that gay people are bad.”

The flipside of this argument is that “intent is not magic.” Regardless of what you intend, you may hurt somebody’s feelings.

My question is: where does one draw the line? I, personally, am of the opinion that if making a small change to my language will have a smaller chance of me hurting or alienating a person or community, then I’ll take it as an opportunity for self-improvement, and just make the change. I occasionally find myself in discussions, though with those who think that they should not be responsible for others’ feelings, or who will change some of their language, but reach a point where they deem they’ve done “enough” to be inclusive. I want to be receptive to these perspectives, but also have a reasonable counter-argument.

So I ask you, internet: what is your stance on being empathetic to those who don’t want to put in additional effort to make some people more comfortable or included (on the basis that “you can’t please everybody”), while trying to explain that in general, it’s really not that hard?

Edit (2017-10-23): I just came across this cartoon I’d shared on Facebook a year ago about offence.

“Guys” isn’t gender neutral

I wrote this post because when I was looking recently, I couldn’t find a good article that communicated this point. Presumably my search-fu wasn’t working that day, because I’ve just found several, which I’ve referenced below.

The word “guys” isn’t gender neutral.

I don’t know many people who use “guy” singular, to refer to somebody who doesn’t identify as male. Yes. I know that progressive, descriptive dictionaries like Merriam-Webster state that both “guy” and “guys” are gender neutral, while Oxford still states that the singular form is male.

Yes, I know that many people treat it as gender neutral, even people who don’t identify as male. I am aware of plenty of women who will say “guys” when referring to a mixed-gender group. Some might even use it to refer to a group of all non-male people.

I invite you to consider this, though. Just because some, maybe even many, people who don’t identify as men consider “guys” to be gender neutral, that doesn’t mean everyone does. What if one person in that target group being referred to as “guys” does consider it to be a gendered term, and as a result, feels othered by your language? What if your language, to that individual (and there may be many of them in any given group), tells them “I assume that this is a male-dominated group and anybody else is an anomaly who isn’t important enough to be recognised or addressed?” There’s a good chance that person isn’t comfortable raising this issue themselves, so you have no way of knowing how many people feel excluded by the word “guys.”

I work in IT. Like many other fields, it’s male-dominated. If we want to diversify our workplaces (and who wouldn’t, given so much evidence that diversity is a Good Thing?), we need to stop using language that may make people feel excluded or uncomfortable. In my opinion, it’s a needless microagression.

So, let’s put aside the argument of whether or not you consider “guys” to be gender neutral, and ask a different question:

If you knew that your language, this single word, “guys,” was making a person you’re addressing uncomfortable, wouldn’t you want to change it?

It’s not that hard! there are plenty of alternatives:

  • folks
  • people
  • peeps
  • y’all
  • everyone

Those are just the few I came up with off the top of my head. I’ve just done a quick search, and found this blog post, which adds, among others:

  • friends
  • team
  • pals

(check out that post for more), and that post references Ways Men In Tech Are Unintentionally Sexist, which I’ve only skimmed, but which is an amazing resource and links to heaps of other amazing resources, such as A Guy Is A Man Is A Guy, and Geek Feminism.

If you still would like to be convinced that “guys” isn’t gender neutral, A Guy Is A Man Is A Guy offers three exemplary thought experiments:

Thought Experiment #1: Imagine a room full of men and women. Someone stands at the front and says, “I want all the guys to stand up.” What happens next?

Thought Experiment #2: You are with a woman. You tell her you think she’s such a guy, a great guy, the smartest guy you’ve ever known. Note the expression on her face.

Thought Experiment #3: You turn on cable news and the first thing you hear is someone saying, “Everyone knows it’s a guy’s world.” Picture in your mind what he’s trying to say.

I love these examples so much.

Now, back to the matter at hand: changing your language. Yes. It requires time and effort, to stop using “guys” as a collective noun for a group of diverse genders. I have largely settled on “folks” as my replacement word, and I still slip up after at least a year of trying. There are certain situations that I’m so used to saying “guys” in, that I have a lot of unlearning to do. But the important thing is that I’m trying, and after just a couple of months of conscious effort, 90% of the time, I was not using a term that some people may find exclusionary.

So pick a new word to replace “guys” in your everyday vocabulary. There are plenty of them. It won’t take all that long to get used to if you keep at it, I promise you, and most people won’t even notice the change.

But for those that do notice, it’ll mean the world to them.

That’s all, guys folks!

The pain of passwords

This post may get a bit rambly and is kind of self-indulgent, but some might find it an interesting story. There’s a tl;dr at the bottom.

I use a password manager to manage passwords to the majority of services and websites I have accounts with. Most of these sites have unique and complex passwords that I have no hope of remembering. I like it this way.

Password managers can’t help with everything. You still need to remember the password/phrase to unlock the password manager, and the phone and/or computer you access it from. If you host the password manager’s data file on a cloud storage service, like I do, you need to remember your password to log into that too. Further, given that, that in my case, my cloud storage service of choice, ownCloud, is self-hosted, I need to remember all the passwords pertaining to the server that runs that service. This includes local Linux passwords and SSH key passphrases.

Now, sure, I have a copy of the passwords on removable storage somewhere safe so I’m not dependent on all this infrastructure. But guess what? That copy is PGP-encrypted. With a passphrase. That I have to remember.

So let’s recap. The passwords I currently have to remember include:

  1. Local workstation computer password
  2. Smartphone PIN/password/pattern
  3. Password manager passphrase
  4. Cloud storage password
  5. GPG key passphrase
  6. SSH key passphrase
  7. Server login password

Now I’m going to put aside the questionable design decisions I’ve made here; I grant that I could just use a single encrypted password file on a USB key (with backups elsewhere), that I can plug into any computer I trust, and access my passwords. And that’s great for a fallback which I could easily implement, but it’s not exactly something I want to do on a day-to-day basis. Let’s say I simplified this system, though, so I wasn’t worrying about the cloud-hosting of the file. I’d still need to remember 2-3 passwords:

  1. Local workstation computer password
  2. Smartphone PIN/password/pattern
  3. Password manager passphrase

Yes, that’s better, and more manageable. Say, though, that I have multiple computers. Do I use the same passwords for all of them, or should I be a good security-conscious person and use different ones everywhere?

I will tell you right now that in the longer list of passwords above, several of those services shared a password. I hate remembering passwords, as everyone else does, so naturally, I try to remember as few as possible and put as many as possible in my password manager. It got to the point that the aforementioned shared password was one that I’ve used for a long time. By long, I mean at least 10 years. Now before you start yelling at me for being careless and insecure, in my opinion, it was a pretty good password. It was reasonably long, contained non-dictionary words and different character classes, and for the most part, the services that used it were not directly exposed to the internet, so you’d likely need possession of one of my devices to try to crack it.. I had no reason to expect that it was compromised.

Monday last week, I typed that password into a group chat. You know how it is; it could happen to anybody. You see your computer screen is blank, and, given how unlikely it is that you’re within the 5-second grace period, you assume your computer is locked, so you sit down, and blindly type in your password while your screen wakes up. You hit Enter, switch to the window you want to be in, and get on with your day. Then your colleague leans over quietly and says “perhaps you want to delete that message you just posted,” and, confused, you take a look at the channel, and feel the ground fall out from under your chair.

Not just because you remember that the password you’ve been typing from muscle-memory for a decade without really thinking about can actually be interpreted as a rather juvenile set of words that your present self would never use, but also because now you’ve got a problem: you have to relearn a new password or passwords, for the machine you type the password into about 50 times daily.

Bother.

Because of the nature of passwords, ones like this one have existed since before the jury came back on what a good memorable password looked like. My general passwords that I’d drop into a password manager look something like this:

$pyf|?u?'yB7pCNW~$y:yv;Kc*^<c,%U

The length I use has increased over time, as I’ve found less occasion to have to type these manually. There’s no way I want to remember a password like this, let-alone have to type it, fingers moving all over the keyboard, hitting Shift every second character. I don’t even want to contemplate having to regularly type something like this into my smartphone.

So after some deliberation, I took a leaf out of Randall Munroe’s XKCD comic

password_strength
Pictured: A comic contrasting the struggle of memorising low entropy passwords like “Tr0ub4dor&3” with high entropy passwords like “correct hors battery staple” (CC-By-NC Randall Munroe, XKCD 936)

This, combined with a handy shell script, written by a past colleague, which assembles a password from several words from Linux’s /usr/share/dict/words file, gave me a password that I just had to start remembering. I quickly set the password on my laptop, while storing it in my password vault accessible from my phone (which I could access with other, different passwords that I already knew and didn’t need to change right now) for the inevitable moments I forgot it.

I probably had to look it up about a dozen times, and about two dozen other times I had to sit at my computer for several seconds while I (a) typed my old password before remembering it had changed, and (b) remembered which words comprised the new one, getting it wrong the first couple of times. So all it all, it’s taken almost a week, but I think I’ve got it embedded in my memory now. I still want to have a backup of it somewhere safe in case I have a lapse of memory, but I’m pretty pleased.

There are still a couple of services that shared my old password that I haven’t changed yet (a reason I was reluctant to publish this post yet, but decided wasn’t a big deal), which I’ll do shortly, after I’m a bit more confident in my memory. My main remaining question is whether I get ambitious and try to use different passwords for each of these services. I suspect that if I leave some time between changing each one, I’ll be able to sufficiently remember them all, but it’s a bit scary to think that I could forget one of them and then be completely locked out. I will consider this further.

In summary: Passwords are hard. Brains are fallible. Computers are the worst.

Tl;dr: I typed my very old workstation password into a work chat room and had to go through the pain of choosing a method to generate and remember a new one, then change that password in all the places I used it.