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Is there any explanation of how she died? Was it sickness or an accident?
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Suicide, jumped from a bridge. Not too much good information out there, except for the basics.
Rachel was a transgender gamer and developer, who got her more than fair share of harassment online. So, lots of groups are trying to fit her death into an existing narrative they are pushing, making many articles less about her and more about [issue X].-
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It is my understanding that she did suffer from pain related to those (or at least chronic pain). That said, there are a lot of various articles claiming the suicide was related to [issue X] and they are far from consistent.
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ah, ok.
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I’m sad to say that as soon as I saw the commemoration with a photo of her, I thought, “How terrible. She looks trans. Probably suicide.” Suicide risk among trans people is super high, and a largish fraction of female hackers are trans, and of course there are lots of blue hackers.
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Sorry, I meant Blue Hackers.
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Is this the same woman that had an article written about her (stunning) contributions to Dolphin? In any case, it’s truly sad to lose such a dedicated engineer, my condolences to her family and her friends and the dolphin team.
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That seems more familiar, and indeed, googling about it w/ that in the title revealed: http://www.pcgamer.com/how-gamecubewii-emulator-dolphin-got-a-turbocharge/ – which I believe is what I was thinking of. Notably, the subject of that article (Fiora), references this engineer as an inspiration which drove her to try contributing (and ultimately to make many of those stunning contributions).
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Thanks for finding this. For those who are too lazy to click, here is a relevant quote:
Getting involved in Dolphin was a bit nerve-wracking at first; I’d never really contributed to an open source project before. It was an internal conflict for me for many years; on the one hand, there was so much cool open source stuff I wanted to work on, but on the other hand it could be really intimidating (with the 50:1 gender ratio certainly not helping). The inspiration to try out Dolphin actually came from the realization they already had a female team member (Rachel Bryk) – I figured if she found it okay, maybe I should try too? My hope ended up being justified: Dolphin’s team was really unusually helpful and friendly, and never seemed like the sort to mock me for having seemingly dumb questions.
– Fiora Aeterna
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Sure deal! I also think it’s probably worth calling out Dolphin’s whole team. Surely Rachel was the catalyst, but the whole team made her feel welcome and – crucially – didn’t scare either Rachel or Fiora off; that’s a big deal. A lot of teams wouldn’t have been so mature as to be welcoming, and that deserves some praise. Big ups to Dolphin as a whole, not just for building a great emulator, but being the change I’d surely like to see in the wider engineering world.
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I’ve never worked anywhere with a reasonable build strategy. I jumped ship from the last place in part because I didn’t feel I could ever be productive, and a large part of that was the build process. It took about 2 hours to build and run unit and integration tests.
Then I ended up somewhere where compilation takes ~10 minutes. Unit tests take 2 hours. Integration tests take all night. So now I’ve accepted that this is the norm, and that I will never be even 5% as productive as I am working on my own projects or working for a company under 10 or so people.
Basically what I’m getting at is that you can’t examine pain threshold in a vacuum. It’s not a one dimensional vector where you can say “ok, this process has too much friction, fuck it”. There are external factors that play into a decision to alleviate that pain. The reason why I am not actively working on making the process better is because there’s a ton of momentum behind the current way of doing stuff, and organizational challenges in trying to change strategy such that I could work 24/7 for the next year and would not be able to put a dent in it. And the reason why I’m working at the place I’m at is in part because I’m not confident that anywhere else I would go would have a sane workflow either, as I’ve already gotten bitten by this once by jumping ship.
Eventually this sort of debt catches up to any company and progress grinds to a halt.
I wonder why you didn’t use the interview with the new company to make sure they do it better. I mean, isn’t the hole point of an interview to get information from the other side to be able to judge whether it is a good fit for both sides?