Today, Coraline Ada Ehmke, a respected developer in the Ruby community, posted an GitHub issue on the GitHub repository for the Opal project, a Ruby-to-JavaScript compiler. The TL;DR of the issue is "one of the project's core members has posted transphobic tweets; he should be removed."

If you've spoken to me about programming over the past several months, there is a high probability that you know about my love for Opal, stemming from my love for Ruby and my lack thereof for JavaScript, which I also do not try to hide. I wrote the Clearwater web framework with Opal because I love using it that much. I've spoken about it at the B'more on Rails meetup in Baltimore twice now; the first time was in January 2014 about how great Opal is and again in January 2015 when I announced Clearwater. I talked about it at RubyNation just last week. Opal makes front-end development enjoyable for me like nothing else does.

I bring that up because when I tell you that I'm fucking furious at how the Opal team handled Coraline's GitHub issue, I want you to understand all that that implies. Seriously, it's fucking horse shit.

If you read the first response from an Opal core member — whom I know only as "meh" — he dismisses her in about the most insulting way I can think of. He then proceeded to defend his actions throughout the thread.

Admittedly, the title of Coraline's original post toes the line of feeling like dictating who should be on the project's team. However, the body of the post reads more as "hey, you might wanna reevaluate your team". That easily overrides the initial visceral response I had to the title.

I understand the desire to defend yourself in his situation. Whenever someone calls me out for doing something stupid like that (as a cisgender, straight, white man, it's not unheard of for me to overlook my own privilege), it's my first reaction, too. But I also understand how that makes people feel, so rather than act on those defensive impulses, people need to realize maybe they should have a look at what they're doing that might not be in everyone's best interests.

Even if he had posted the dismissive, insulting comment and come back later saying "I'm sorry, I got defensive. I rushed to Elia's defense because he's my friend. I should not have said that.", maybe Coraline wouldn't think any better of him (or the Opal project) — the insult was directed at her, after all — but it might have gone a long way to mitigate the damage he caused in the eyes of the community.

What about Clearwater?

My friend Kurtis expressed interest in Clearwater a while back and I invited him to work on it with me. It's the reason the repository has moved to the clearwater-rb organization. If he had done what meh did today, I would've dropped him from the organization.

Instead, though, he wrote a fantastic article about how Clearwater supports trans developers. I don't want to detract from it so I won't try to TL;DR it here. Please, check it out. It's not long and you've already gotten this far through this one.

A ray of hope

At the time this all went down, I was at the hospital with my mother, so I didn't have much time to contribute to the conversation until well after the damage was done. Once I got home, though, I opened up my laptop to check on the situation and saw this GitHub comment from Adam Beynon, the creator of Opal:

In response to meh and others who are under the impression that a project has no beliefs or feelings toward any particular subject, he had this to say:

This give me some hope here. I was afraid it'd be too little too late, but he's actively pursuing the code of conduct, which will help define what to expect in situations like this moving forward. Adam created Opal; he has full control of the project and has the power to make this right.

Please, Adam. Please make it right.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Betsy, who brought this to my attention first. I met Betsy at RubyNation and she was easily one of the most interesting people there (and she wasn't even the one who brought robots). She also spoke up to meh in the GitHub thread.

Thank you to Kurtis for writing that blog post. He wrote it without even talking to me about it. I knew I could trust him completely on issues like this. He is a strong LGBTQ advocate, stronger than I could ever be. His tweets to Elia are a big reason this got so much attention.

Thank you to Coraline, whom I haven't had the chance to meet but who does amazing things for LGBTQ and other marginalized people in tech. Given the great things I've heard from people who have met her, I'm missing out.

Thank you to Nikki Murray, who sent me messages of encouragement through this, letting me know she still thinks my project is great. Considering she likely hadn't ever used Opal before goofing around with Clearwater last weekend, that's huge to me.

Thank you to Adam Beynon for stepping in and doing the right thing — not for his project, but for the members of the community.

And if you're not one of the people I mentioned above, I still appreciate you for reading this all the way through. I know saying that is like the trophy kids get for showing up, but you didn't have to show up here. You chose to. That's important to me.