BSides Luxembourg 2026 - True Community Spirit

With BSides Luxembourg, my conference year 2026 officially started. And what a kickoff it was! What an inspiringly insightful, community connecting event. We've built fond memories together and this instance will most definitely not be my last one.

Speaking in Luxembourg, how come? Well, it all started with a sketchnote. As usual during on-site conferences, I also took sketchnotes at BSides Munich 2025 and published them on Mastodon. One of the organizers of BSides Luxembourg, Claus Cramon Houmann, saw them and expressed his wish to see me at their event. That brought it to my attention in the first place. I checked out their website and things looked really intriguing!

As I try to get to conferences mostly by speaking, I checked out their call for papers. To my pleasant surprise, they offered financial support to reimburse costs occurring with speaking, aka travel and accommodation (mind me, I'm not speaking of a honorarium here). That's the normal bar I have for conferences, and I'm used to expect this from the many tech events I've been to. Sadly, this doesn't seem to be as common for cybersecurity conferences. Usually, I don't submit without that offer as I’m paying out of my own pocket otherwise – and many underrepresented folks have way less privilege than I have. Hence financial support is a green flag I’m actively looking for, indicating that the conference cares about inclusion and diversity. [Side note: That being said, I do understand that some community-driven non-profit conferences really cannot afford offering financial support (yet). I also am willing to meet them where they are - yet I can only support so many community conferences a year this way. Also, just inquiring about reimbursement often reveals a lot about where the organizers currently are, so I can make a way better informed decision for myself whether I'd like to continue with them or not.]

Back to BSides Luxembourg. I decided to go for it and hope for the best. For real, I caught myself time and time again the last months, hoping that I would get accepted - I had a feeling this would be awesome, and I really, really wanted to get in. The first round of speakers were revealed - I was not among them. I continued to hope. Then the email arrived - clarifying what financial support I would need! If they could make this happen, I would be in. I honestly loved this transparency from the start, as it made me trust this would be good for real.

Well, as you can see, I made the program indeed. My latest workshop and a brand-new talk got accepted. We also agreed that an older talk would serve as backup talk in case any speaker won't be able to make it. You can't imagine just how happy I was! Until I realized how close it was to the conference already. That was beginning of March. The conference took place beginning of May. I just agreed to a brand-new talk. Aaaaahhhh!!! This was cutting it awfully close to my taste. Especially given I knew what else was happening during these two months. Then I learned that even more and more had to happen during these exact two months as well. Literally everything all at once at the same time. Two travels, creating yet another brand-new conference talk with a dear co-speaker (and figuring out what works for us doing so), editing the latest novel of my best friend, preparing for all other upcoming conferences with due dates, oh and I also happen to co-organize my own conference, right? Of course we had certain immovable due dates during this exact time frame. All of this costing enormous amounts of hours and hours and hours.

What an absolutely stressful time. I knew it would be worth it, it was worth it, and yet. I cut and canceled everything I could (okay, not as ruthlessly as I would have loved to due to my inner people pleaser, and yet as much as I could possibly do). I halted my personal challenge. Friends and family didn't really see me during this time. The only thing I did not cut was movement - I even increased it because it was a one-time-too-good-to-possibly-true offer. I also didn't want to repeat my mistake to cut on exercise as I did the last years - and I had dearly paid for it as this resulted in losing range of movement, strength and general quality of life. I had just reclaimed some very basic capabilities I would not give up again anytime soon.

All in all, this was such a close call. Massive kudos to the folks who joined the dry run of my new talk, giving me just the constructive and tangible feedback I needed, allowing me to revise it heavily and cut it to the first version it had to become. Everything was close-knit to the very last moment, even finishing last tasks on my travel to Luxembourg. Anyone who knows me for a while, knows that this is absolutely not me. I'm the over-preparer par excellence, and while I've gotten pretty good at keeping things "good enough", this was unheard of. But hey, I made it. Still wonder how, but I made it.

Alright, fast forward to the conference! Here's how it went.

 

Arrival Day

My travel required to change trains several times - and to my pleasant surprise, it worked out. I arrived well in time to do another dry run of my brand-new talk and also prepare last things for my workshop. Most speakers had come together in a Signal group which made it easy to find a bunch of folks to go to dinner with together. I make use of such opportunities whenever I can as they allow getting to know a few people in a smaller setting before the conference starts.

Putting faces to names or aliases from the chat was great. I even uncovered I've already met one of the speakers already back at New Crafts 2024! The tech world is small, the conference speaker world even smaller. We enjoyed a lovely dinner and conversations on all kinds of topics together before it was time to prep for the next day.

 

Workshop Day

My own workshop "Secure Development Lifecycle Applied - How to Make Things a Bit More Secure than Yesterday Every Day" was scheduled for the morning just before lunch. We had a nice group of folks from all kinds of backgrounds coming together to learn and practice. The session worked out pretty well and my duty was done for the day! Things were off to a good start.

The lunch break was decently long to enjoy the food, have conversations with participants and also get some rest before the afternoon. I've decided to join "How to Read Code to Find Vulnerabilities" by Louis Nyffenegger. I was curious about this workshop due to a few reasons. First, I've been part of a code reading club a while ago, actively practicing techniques to understand code snippets and exchanging insights. Second, reading code was a big part of my previous role as a quality engineer, and still is as security engineer, with the specific focus on security. Third, I was keen on learning how Louis teaches code reading, as this is a topic I want to share further myself, and also given he's the founder of PentesterLab and I liked their style of conveying knowledge and skills. Long story short, it's been a really interesting workshop indeed! He shared a bunch of advice on what to look for when reading code and how to train this skill. We ran lots of exercises together on finding flaws in various code snippets, dissecting what made these insecure and how to build things in a secure way. Both detection and also knowing how to do better is such a crucial skill to hone. As the cherry on the top, Louis gave away copies of his book "CVE Archeologist's Field Guide: Methodology and lessons from 10 vulnerability analyses" - so much appreciated!

Right afterwards, I managed to get into the session "Dismantle The Bomb" by Stijn Tomme. This was designed as an escape game like scenario - and way too much fun to spoil what happened in this session! Let's just say: it's been the very first time I've seen a key being cut, a potato battery lighting up an LED, and cutting wires to deactivate the bomb. We had a really nice group to solve the riddles and puzzles together - teamwork for the win! Anyone having a chance to catch this session, go for it. We had a massively good time with this well-designed game, used our collective skills in new ways and came in touch with things that are not as common. Perfect for the afternoon - energy was really high afterwards.

Time for me to go back to the hotel and practice my talk for the last time, then head for the speakers dinner. The organizers were so kind to make this happen for us and we enjoyed lovely Vietnamese street food together - much appreciated! That kind of opportunity is usually great to connect with other speakers, learn about their passion topics and values, and just have a good time. As usual, we also discovered a few first-time speakers among us and shared experiences; we're all in the same boat and new folks are very welcome to realize they are not alone with struggles like last-minute preparations, coping with nervousness, and more. It was a great evening and things were ready for the conference days.

 

Conference Day 1

If you had seen the program for this conference, you probably understood my massive struggle to decide which sessions to attend live. There were the main conference tracks, as well as an AI village, a detection engineering village, a lockpicking village and a car hacking village. So many amazing sessions to choose from! In addition, talks were hosted across not only one building, but two - without many breaks in between to get from A to B, which really made a difference in my choices. Fortunately, most talks had been recorded and I will still have a chance to catch up. Some talks, however, were not recorded, so I tried to prefer them where I could. Also, as usual at on-site conferences (as shared already above), I did sketchnotes for almost all talks I attended.

• "Things Fall Apart: Allying Cybersecurity and Diplomacy against Authoritarian Disorder" by Luc Dockendorf. I was a bit late for this opening talk by Luxembourg's Cybersecurity and Digitalisation Ambassador, so I chose not to sketchnote it. I did, however, really appreciate the clarity in addressing the current planetary, geo-political and social challenges we face. What a strong opener for the conference!
• Keynote: "Identity Security Just Exploded" by Wendy Nather. Wendy presented what makes identities for authentication such a challenge, back in the days, and especially nowadays given AI agents. Lots of problems that never got solved (like delegation) are multiplying now. What we can do right now is to make sure our fundamentals are covered. 
  
• "What Does Threat Modeling Solve for AI Security?" by Nathan Pembe. Nathan made a great point how threat modeling can not only help to make pentesting efforts a lot more targeted, it also helps fill the gaps to implement security controls for audits in the age of AI. I really appreciated his down-to-earth call to focus on realistically reachable attack paths and separate those from noise.
  
• "Beyond the Prompt: A Framework for Agentic AI Attack and Defense Strategies" by Jeremy Snyder. Jeremy walked us through the major risks that AI agents introduce. It's not only about the agent itself or the model used, but we need to consider the whole architecture including interfaces to retrieve incoming data as well as the output created. This talk was full of awesome questions to ask!
  
• "Cloud Misconfigurations: Poke Poke, Breach" by Kat Fitzgerald. This was a talk that was not recorded - hence I asked Kat afterwards if she consented to me publishing my sketchnote of her talk. Fortunately, she agreed! This was a really cool talk about how misconfigurations just keep coming and showing up in various (way too known) shapes and forms. All the classics included. The solution: policy as code to provide safe guardrails! No chasing, instant feedback, actual clarity.
  
• "Managing Uninvited Guests: Securing Open Source Dependencies" by Frithjof Hoffmann. Originally, this talk was meant to be given together with Kadi McKean who unfortunately couldn't make it. This was an ever-green reminder to evaluate which dependencies we really want to build on and which ones to keep out. SBOMs can help find vulnerable packages, while we also need to acknowledge that scans can be flawed. 
  
• "Out of Security Exception - What to Do Without an Expert to Secure Your Software" by me. This was the premiere for my brand-new talk. For anyone who missed it, it was recorded so you can still check it out once it's published. Unfortunately, there was no immediate feedback feasible as the next talk started right after mine. Yet all in all, I'm quite content with how it went and people seemed happy enough as well. 
  
• "The Forgotten Fingerprint: DNS Based OSINT Techniques for Product & Service Discovery" by Rishi. This talk looked at TXT records in specifics and how they could be used in threat hunting and hence accelerate incident response. Rishi demonstrated both OWASP Amass and Nuclei as two of the main tools you can use to start your discovery today. 
  
• "Turnkey Code – Enhancing Secrets Management in Large Scale Organizations" by Diogo Lemos. Diogo presented an interesting case study of what they learned when building a proper secrets management platform. They needed to control the noise and consider the whole lifecycle - including rescanning safely without overwriting human triaging decisions. 
  

That was the last session for the day. Participants gathered, enjoyed good food and conversations together, sharing their insights of the day with each other. Then it was time for "Security Impress Karaoke" hosted by Kirils Solovjovs. Basically PowerPoint Karaoke but using OpenOffice Impress, with slides sourced from Cybersecurity talks. Lots of folks accepted the challenge to present random slides thrown together and combine them in a way that's concise and hilarious at the same time! Good fun.

 

Conference Day 2

The final conference day started tired and early, as it's usually the case for me the longer a conference goes. And yet, I wouldn't miss it and didn't regret it one bit.

• "The High-Performance Fuel for Social Engineering (Now in AI Flavors!)" by Glen Sorensen. Glen showcased how much data companies are collecting about us. They claim to have legitimate interest, yet do they really? What's considered justified, by whom? The problem here is that all this data is used for highly effective social engineering attacks. Having LLMs at hand, this danger became even more imminent. Glen shared lots of things we can do to reduce our own attack surface.
  
• "Spyware: The Invisible Threat" by Julien vander Straeten. Really interesting talk on spyware as a specific type of malware. Its goal is to persist on the device, deep in the lower layers, and exfiltrate all kinds of data. Lots of countries buy spyware, including 14 EU countries - and quite a few of those also produce their own. Spyware is expensive, though, so attacks are highly targeted.
  
• "Confound and Delay: Honeypot Chronicles from the Digital Battlefield" by Kat Fitzgerald. Yet another talk by Kat that was not recorded - so once again I asked her if I could publish my sketchnote, and luckily, she gave her okay for this one as well. This was a really cool talk on what you can learn through deception, offering attackers a realistic enough trap to observe their behavior. What they try to do. Including hilarious attempts! Honeypots can not only reveal how attackers operate but also predict production threats. 
  
• Lightning talk "Good things can happen at conferences" by me. Well. This was not planned at all! Hence there's no proper abstract either. Here's the background story: On the workshop day, I shared with Claus as organizer of BSides Luxembourg that I am co-organizing the Open Security Conference (short osco). He instantly offered us their partnership - something I was just about to ask them as well. Super cool and kind! And then he shared there might be still a lightning talk slot available and asked whether I'd like to share a bit about osco. I usually don't do lightning talks at all, yet this one I felt would be feasible - it's pretty easy to talk about my own conference after all, I've done that plenty of times already. I kept this option in mind and inquired the next day whether the slot would still be free. Organizers shared it wasn't clear yet until the following day, but at best I would be ready for it. So at midnight I sat down and drafted a script. I knew I could just do a shameless plug - yet I wanted to give people more of a real message than just the mere promotion of our event. So I thought, what if I told the story how osco came to be? In general, how good things happened at conferences? I would have had plenty of examples on that matter, yet I decided to focus on three events. One, conceptualizing osco at SoCraTes 2023. Two, meeting my now manager at the first osco edition and only weeks after getting hired by him. Third, our freshly made partnership at BSides Luxembourg. Now I had my script ready to go. The last conference day came, and during the lunch break just before the lightning talks, I asked again if that slot would still be free. It was indeed! Just 15 minutes before the talks started, mine was added to the program. Then I realized, everyone else had slides - I had planned to just tell my story. But one supportive slide would be great indeed as a visual support. So I put our logo on one slide. A QR code next to it. That would do. Finished just a minute before going on stage! My whole speaking experience paid off in that moment. I went on stage and told my story. I made it. Later people came to me to tell me how much they loved the idea of osco and how good this talk was. For me as a recovering perfectionist and over-preparer, this whole feat was a real achievement unlocked! It seems I hit a note there. I'm already very curious if I'll ever learn what people took with them in the end. But well. Here's the script as I prepared it, and only slightly adapted when telling the story live.

  This is a true story on how good things can happen at conferences. 
  
  The year is 2023. I'm not yet working in security. I'm part of an engineering team, building products hands-on together. 
  
  I'm at a tech conference, called SoCraTes. It's a special kind of conference, as its program gets created right at the beginning of the conference - by the participants. The format is called an open space. It's designed in a way that everyone can contribute and everyone can learn in the ways they want at that moment in time, about the topics they want to learn about at that moment in time.
  
  So I'm at that open space conference, where I get to have a say on the program. I have a clear focus topic: I want to learn more about application security. Oh cool, there's a person who works in security and is also curious to learn more from other participants. His name is Claudius.
  
  Claudius and I, we agree to host a session together on usable security. Lots of folks join our session and we learn from each other. It's energizing. Claudius and I find we work well together, so we decide to host a workshop. Another success! Inspiring.
  
  We sit at lunch, and Claudius shares his idea with me: he wants to start a new conference. A security one. In the open space format. He feels that that's currently missing in the security community. I was hooked! And I added: Yes, a community-driven, non-profit conference - for everyone interested in cybersecurity, no matter their current roles or skills. Breaking down barriers and gatekeeping. I believe we all can learn from each other. 
  
  The idea of osco was born - the Open Security Conference. 
  
  We find further co-organizers on our journey. We find participants who love the idea. The idea becomes reality.
  
  Good things can happen at conferences.
  
  The year is 2024. We have the first edition of osco. Small. People love it. Many will return the following year. 
  
  And I? I also enjoy our conference. I'm sitting at dinner next to Rudi, who talks about his security team at his company. It sounds like a good place. Little do I know that I'm sitting next to my now manager, just 3 weeks before I will get laid off from my former company. Yes, I co-organized a conference and I got a job thanks to it. In application security. 
  
  Good things can happen at conferences.
  
  Fast forward to 2026. Our organizer team is preparing to host the third edition of osco on November 5th to 8th, in Germany, close to Frankfurt am Main.
  
  I'm here, at BSides Luxembourg. I talk with Claus and the other organizers. I share about osco - and our two conferences partner up. 
  
  Good things can happen at conferences.
  
  If an opportunity presents itself to you, seize it. It might come with the person right next to you, at lunch or dinner. Look out for them. 
  
  And if you're curious to learn more about the Open Security Conference? Come to me, get a postcard to spread the word, and become part of our story.
  
  Good things can happen at conferences - and beyond. 
  
  Thank you. 

• "Building Secure AI: Making Threat Modeling a Core Part of Development" Diana Waithanji. This talk was the perfect closure to the conference for me! Diana explained her approach to threat modeling, where I just sat and kept nodding along. Like that there's no one way to do threat modeling. Diana showcased how frameworks like STRIDE are still applicable when it comes to threat modeling AI systems - as one of many possible ways. She involved the audience actively and we heard from several people what they do and how it works for them. She also emphasized the importance of fostering good relationships with engineering teams, involving the whole team and collaborating across roles, as well as making threat modeling sessions high-energy and inclusive. So much this! Diana's talk highly resonated with my own experience. 
  

And that was it. Originally, I had planned my last conference afternoon differently beforehand, with more talks - yet things came different than expected. First with me joining the lightning talks at last notice, and then with me standing by to give my backup talk, as pre-agreed with organizers. In the end, I didn't have to give it, and I used that unexpected time as a lovely chance to catch up with Marina Stephanova, one of the organizers, instead.

Right after the conference ended, there was yet another neat opportunity: Marina invited interested speakers to go sightseeing together and showing us around Luxembourg city! An offer way too good to refuse for sure. We had a lovely group of around 15 people, the weather was perfect, and we enjoyed a nice tour together while learning about Luxembourg's history and people. Afterwards, we had a great dinner together. Once we headed back to the hotel, how could it be differently, the last core of us ended up in the hotel lobby. Just really good company (thanks to Ellis Stannard and Leonardo Wolff Takemasa Fernandes!), deep conversations in the middle of the night (extra special thanks to Diana Waithanji and Sonia Seddiki!), while tasting fiery hot snacks from India (huge shout-out to db here!). What could be better. 

 

Returning Home

The next day it was time to depart, saying thank you to everyone one more time, and take my memories with me. I realized how tired I was, and while that made it a more complicated ride home than it would have needed to be, I did arrive safely and roughly in time.

My heart was full and brimming of the community spirit I just experienced. Lots of folks I met for the first time where it was just easy to connect with each other. Some people I even met the second time; the world is small! What a pleasant surprise. And not to forget all the care that organizers put into all the little details, always ready to help out and solve things or make them at least better, always appreciative of feedback. Special kudos to the team for making this whole event such a welcoming and inclusive experience, I really felt that I belonged. Their choices how to craft this space for community showed in everything: representation among the speakers, reflected in the participants joining, the options in conference T-shirt fits and range of sizes, the food offer, the choice of language. Everything. It clearly showed their continuous intentional effort and it paid off. 

Looking back, this was such a good conference. The smooth organization, the speakers and participants from all kinds of backgrounds, the variety of super interesting topics, the space to connect with each other and stay connected. Can only recommend you checking this one out next year! It won't be my last BSides Luxembourg for sure. I'll cherish the memories we've made together and the kind feedback this community provided.

Creating the Space for People to Learn Together

A few weeks ago, a colleague reached out to me. They looked for input on how to make a new approach successful within their domain. They knew I experimented a lot with various collaborative approaches in teams. Therefore, they asked me for advice and ideas how they could set things up in a way that teams have a fun time, people learn together, and the whole thing has a chance to become successful. Today I learned that the input was valuable to them and they included it in their concept, so I decided to share it publicly as well. Please note that I've learned a lot of this from other people who added to my own experience, like Maaret Pyhäjärvi and Woody Zuill, so lots of credit go to them.

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The most important thing I learned from enabling people to learn together: creating a safe and inclusive space for learning is crucial. This starts with inviting everyone in at times they can make (considering people like parents or caretakers have a difficult life to balance and we all have a pandemic ongoing, too) and making a point everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or what they bring to the table. When we're learning together we will have to show what we know and especially what we don't know yet (yet!). This can trigger lots of uncomfortable feelings, especially if you're not used to learning together (and most of us grew up in systems where learning together was rather discouraged and this runs deep) and if you're likely to fail. Failure is part of learning (love the acronym FAIL - first attempt in learning), yet many of us first need to unlearn that failure is a bad thing per se. Make it clear it's okay to be uncomfortable, it's okay to fail and learn from it; it's not okay to make it unsafe for people to feel uncomfortable.

One way to set the scene is to set some ground rules we all agree on before starting, making them bilateral. I love the guidelines and principles I learned from ensemble programming (formerly known as mob programming), which I use in many of my workshops. See also my Miro board to introduce the ensemble approach.

• You're in the right place if you're either contributing or learning.
• You have two ideas what to do next or more? Bias to action, try them out both. It's a good idea to try out the one from the more unexperienced person first.
• Use the rule from improvisational theater: "yes, and ..."; don't destroy each other's ideas but build upon each other's ideas.
• We cannot know where people are coming from, so let's treat each other with kindness, consideration and respect.

An additional way to create a safe space is to be vulnerable ourselves, especially if we're holding a privileged position (e.g. as facilitators, hosts, experts, experienced persons). If we show it's fine to say we don't know, we're curious to learn, we learn from everyone (no matter how unexperienced they are), we set the stage and evolve the culture we want to see. Small things matter, language matters a lot. For example: "Oh you don't know that?! Everyone knows that." or "Oh but that's easy." - these messages can come across belittling and hence can cause harm. Instead we can say: "Great, here's a learning opportunity! I offer to walk you through."

To make group sessions more inclusive, be sure to hold space for all kinds of people and balance their speaking time. Loud voices that frequently talk need to learn to hold back and create space for others, quiet voices need to get the space to contribute and learn that they are welcome to do so as well. Observing communication patterns and dynamics can help immensely; some groups need more facilitation from outside, others already learned to be balance this out themselves better. Language plays an important role here as well. Make an active effort to avoid stereotypes and use neutral language (e.g. gender-neutral language; no matter the group you're working with).

To make a learning session fun and energizing, it's best to make it as hands-on as possible for everyone. We all learn in different ways, yet for work related scenarios, hands-on learning is so far the best approach I've experienced with groups. To make things hands-on, it's a good idea to take turns at the keyboard. Beware that this can be a very uncomfortable situation for some people, yet if it's safe the learning effect is massive. Also, it will allow facilitators to observe where people stumble, where they lack local setups and tooling, where they find new approaches, if they understood what the group is up to, to uncover implicit knowledge, and more. To facilitate this remotely, either work on something everyone has the same access to and they can switch easily so screen sharing alone works, or stay on the same computer and share screen control.

Be intentional about how the group navigates, i.e. who knows the next step to go, who keeps the big picture in mind. Whoever navigates has to think and speak out loud, and practice how to communicate well. They explain the intention behind the next steps; if that does not help yet, then location and details can help; yet the intention why we go this step is crucial for learning and sharing the mental model. If you combine the navigator role with being at the keyboard (usually called the driver), this can be a lot of cognitive load for this person and all others might easily loose track. If you split this task from the keyboard and have the driver taking instructions and taking care of implementation details while the rest of the group navigates, this can work well in mature teams where they learned not to speak over each other and give each other space; yet people new to this might not do too well. If you have the driver at the keyboard and another person practicing the navigator role, taking input and suggestions from the rest of the group, people have a good chance to learn together. At first this might feel artificial and slower, yet it allows for more thoughtful thinking, clearer communication and deeper learning. Things will speed up naturally. Having an expert on the group who knows a lot more than others (might be you), you can consider to take over navigation from time to time to unblock the group; yet you can also consider to navigate the navigator instead of navigating yourself, which is once again a learning opportunity for them.

Making things fun is a tricky thing. Learning itself can be fun already, learning together with great people as well, just as solving a tricky problem. So might be that fun evolves naturally given the structures you provide. One approach you can try in addition is to gamify the session, especially if you'd like to run more of them. However, beware not to make this competitive and compare people within the team or teams with other teams. Instead, have the whole team work together on a goal (as they're also supposed to in the real case), and measure something that matters to the group (they can set their goal themselves so they have a say and are invested). After the first session they then have historical data they can compare themselves to after the second session. We can only compare ourselves to ourselves in the past as no one else shares the same context; and if we do so we can make our own learning more visible and tangible. After all, practice does make all of us better.

A few more things: it's a good idea to start with why we do this, why it's an important investment, what's the desired outcome. Make it clear this is part of work as learning time is part of working time. Depending on the length of the session, allow for good recreational breaks where they are not supposed to work on anything else but take a real break for body and mind. Depending on the length, allowing snacks might help as well (especially as people have different eating habits and needs).

Hope this helps. :)

Ensemble Is the New Mob

Back in 2017, my team gave "mob programming" a try, a collaborative approach to product development that was new to us back then. We made really good experiences so that I started to spread the word and introduced more teams and people at my company to this social approach. I started giving workshops and talks about it, I initiated cross-team groups learning together using this approach, I enjoyed any opportunity in my free time where I could hone my skills in a group, I even joined the program team for the Mob Programming Conference to get practitioners together and gain new ones. Always talking about a mob, only interchanging the activity depending on where our focus was: mob programming, mob testing, mob documentation writing, mob presentation crafting, and so on.

Over the years, the concept became more known across teams at my company. Mental models of what it entailed differed, yet people acknowledged that solo work or pairing weren't the only options, they realized you can also get work done synchronously in a group setting. They saw benefits and several people built upon the idea and tried the approach in various contexts, from learning settings to solving a real problem at hand, from on demand initiatives to a full time working mode.

Beginning of February, one colleague from another team shared an observation with me. They noticed I was speaking about an "ensemble" these days instead of the "mob". They were curious to learn about the background of this switch and if both terms referred to the same approach. It really made me smile - what a great learning opportunity! For everyone who might have had the same question, here's what I answered.

Both terms "ensemble" and "mob" refer to the same approach. People had been looking for a replacement term for many years to get rid of the negative connotations of the "mob" which was perceived as problematic. Many people had been appalled by the term "mob" and hence didn't want to give it a try. Thinking of bullying or lynch mobs, the term is triggering trauma. Since last year we now finally have a new term that's a lot more inclusive: the ensemble. It's already been taken up and lived by many leading experts like Emily Bache and Lisa Crispin. The term was found by Maaret Pyhäjärvi and Denise Yu and you can read more about the origins in Maaret's blog post introducing the ensemble.

I worked together with the brilliant @deniseyu21 in finding a term we could work with. #EnsembleProgramming is the choice we work with and it’s great seeing parts of community moving their language with us.

— Maaret Pyhäjärvi (@maaretp) August 20, 2020

While I made the commitment to start change on the language I use, the term proposal is from @deniseyu21. I’m delighted to see both @emilybache and @lisacrispin pick it up and hope the community runs free with it and creates a more inclusive experience.

— Maaret Pyhäjärvi (@maaretp) August 2, 2020

Personally, I made the switch in September 2020 when giving my talk "A Story of Mob Programming, Testing, and Everything" (nowadays "A Story of Ensemble Programming, Testing, and Everything") for the Agile Testing Days webinar series. This is the talk where you can hear my own take on why the terms you choose are impactful and how changing our language can reduce harm.

Inside my company, I haven't been actively advertising the term switch. I just continuously used ensemble as the new one; sometimes adding "formerly known as mob" to make it easier for people to know which approach I was referring to. Given this, I was really happy when my colleague asked me about the term ensemble, appreciated my explanation, and shared they will introduce the new term to their team in which they frequently use the approach.

Language allows us to express ourselves, and it shapes the understanding of our world. Language matters. Changing my language to the term ensemble is a little thing to do for me and matters a lot to someone else (kudos to Gitte Klitgaard for such wisdom). So, ensemble it is.

Do one thing today that matters little to you and much to another person. Lend a hand, smile, something :)
We can make the world better :)

— Gitte Klitgaard (@NativeWired) July 6, 2012

My Personal Vision and Mission

This year, I set out to craft a personal vision and mission for myself. I'm sharing it now for multiple reasons. On the one hand, for my own learning and growth, as writing about it forces me to summarize my thoughts and preserve my reasoning for my future self as a reference. On the other hand, for your inspiration, in case you want to create a personal vision yourself to see if it helps tackling your challenges, or in case the content of my vision speaks to you in some way.

Balancing Opportunities and Impact

Since last year I became very deliberate with what I spend my time and energy on at work. Where can I provide the most value? Where do I want to have impact? How? Given the privilege and freedom I have at work, there are many opportunities at hand. The last years, especially coming with my promotion to principal level, I took the bait of saying yes to way too many topics. All the things sounded great and worthy after all! However, it's a trap. Juggling with contributing to too many initiatives at the same time can hurt a lot. It hurt the quality of the outcome achieved as I was spreading myself too thin to have as deep an impact as I wanted to have. It hurt due to opportunity cost, as quickly agreeing to all opportunities that came my way didn't leave the option to contribute to others that might have been more valuable to pursue. It hurt me personally as my stress levels increased with each topic exponentially, especially when tasks and deadlines collided. And it also hurt the interactions I had with other people as I was constantly in a rush, causing me to miss a lot of nuances in collaboration, often not having energy left to show my best behavior. I had to learn that the hard way last year.

Reflecting on this, I tried to increase focus for my commitments and see where I could provide most value every day, every week. Using a simple notebook page per work week (yes, an analog one), I started planning ahead for the upcoming week. I jotted down the most important points to work on, on which day, so I could provide the most value overall for all of us. Making things visual and having them lying next to me at any time indeed helped me focus. I could tick items off as I went, highlight them if I didn't come to them, or strike them out in case they didn't apply anymore. I also tracked my mood at the end of the work day to indicate whether the day worked out well or not so I could adapt what I had in my hands. While this was (and still is) helping already, I still was spread across too many things. I felt I needed even more focus and not fill my time up fully to keep a certain amount of flexibility. Yet what to focus on? Where to best spend my capacity?

Beginning of this year, I started reflecting on who I wanted to be and how I wanted to lead by example. I came up with five characteristics I'd like to see for myself, calling it my vision for my future self. That helped with grounding myself a lot. Also, I thought about the productive and generative work I wanted to do, both short term and long term - kudos to Maaret Pyhäjärvi for the approach and inspiration! This helped me come up with concrete strategies and balanced focus.

As you move up on the IC ladders, you’re expected to find a balance on what you do alone (being productive) and what you get others to do (being generative). I find tracking that I do both helps me a lot.

— Maaret Pyhäjärvi (@maaretp) August 27, 2020

I viewed things from a "range of impact" perspective. If I do this, who would be impacted? Me, my product team, our cross-team testing community, the tech department, the whole company? I started limiting my initiatives to one per category, which already helped. Work in progress limits for the win. Over time, I condensed these even further to three groups only. Only three topics in progress at the same time, next to my everyday hands-on work in my product team. That worked well for quite some time.

This year, however, with limited energy at hand, I made the choice to reduce my topic limit yet again. Now I'm counting the every day hands-on work as one of three buckets I can fill. I could still approach this in new ways of course, yet now I'm explicit about combining these initiatives. Why? Last year I had created an explicit agreement with my team that on average I will work for two thirds on team topics and one third on topics beyond the team, impacting maybe another product team, or our domain, or any kind of grouping with people from various teams. So now I'm thinking of this roughly as follows: one third of my time for hands-on everyday topics with my product team (e.g. pair testing with my teammates), one third to drive initiatives within my team (e.g. increasing testability for our interfaces with services from other teams), and one third for topics beyond the team (e.g. supporting our domain technical offer experimenting to evolve a quality culture in the domain). So now I had roughly three buckets overall, so I'd rather only have only one focus topic for each of them.

All this worked quite well for the time being, and throughout this year I got better and better in not taking on new commitments. I even found an accountability partner when it came to saying no, my dear colleague Paulo Azevedo. I rather streamlined the attention and energy I had, driving less things at the same time - and I was feeling better.

With 2020 being a special year in itself, having a toll on everybody, I felt not guilty about not taking on formal cross-team topics and initiatives and instead chose to experiment more informally on my own. There was a lot of value in having this free time and new flexibility to involve myself and drive small things forward. Still, now that I went through the first waves and turbulences after my promotion and managed to calm down and regain energy, now that I'm in a good position where I can really trigger change, it was time to take up something bigger again. Take the next step in my personal growth as well. So once again, during the last months I've thought a lot about what I wanted to achieve, which impact to have.

Around the same time, I've completed a series of leadership workshops given by my amazing colleague Shiva Krishnan that provided a wealth of food for thought. It allowed me to understand myself as well as past interactions a lot better, and inspired me heavily to try out lots of different things. Along with the workshops, Shiva offered personal coaching sessions. I was eager to take him up on his offer as I had already learned how valuable personal coaching can be. In our first session I told Shiva I wanted to define my next step on my journey. So I shared the vision I had for my future self at that point in time - and his questions made me realize that my points rather described the how, not the what. What was it that really inspired me, that I wanted to achieve, my dream vision? I didn't have an answer. I could tell who inspired me; I tried to follow their lead by example. Yet what is it that inspired me personally, what did I want to reach or work towards as an individual? Thinking freely without barriers, leaving out all the things I might think I "ought to do"? What makes me happy, what do I enjoy, what do I want to continue? Shiva said to me that I don't always need to know everything, only where I want to go. So my actual next step became clear to me. I wanted to create a personal vision for myself to serve as guiding light when it comes to deciding which impact I want to have, where and how to provide most value, and which opportunities to decline, accept, or even create myself.

My Personal Vision and Mission

So far I had helped creating a vision and mission for groups and initiatives, yet never one for myself. I searched the internet for tips. I brainstormed and reflected on the past and present. Lots and lots of questions asked. What would I observe when the dream became reality? How to notice that what I did got us closer to my vision? How to know the vision is good enough at all for my purpose? Well, for the latter I found my answer. Given a vision, I wanted to be able to ask myself for any kind of opportunity: Does it support my vision? If yes, go for it. If not, it's either not the right thing to do or not for me to do it.

A vision is the dream goal, the ideal state. A mission leads to a vision, it's how to reach the higher goal. A vision and mission is never carved in stone, they evolve over time or might even change completely. Given all this, I created a first draft of my vision and continued iterating on it. Shiva was instrumental here in guiding my thinking with invaluable questions which triggered lots of thoughts, helping me uncover and shape what I see as mine. In the end, I had crafted my personal vision and mission as of now.

Vision: Systemic inclusion and growth for a better world 

Mission: By fostering a culture of DICE

                    Diversity, equity & inclusion 

                    Inspiration 

                    Collaboration 

                    Experimentation

=> Simple words: Foster a culture where everyone is sharing and learning with each other 

=> Shortest version: Everyone learning together 

My vision, the ideal world I'd like to live in, is to have systemic inclusion and growth for a better world. Because I strongly believe if we really include all perspectives and all the people with different lived experiences and we all get better together and grow and learn more, it will automatically result in a better world in the sense of better policies for our planet,  for our other fellow humans, for everything. Better products, more innovation, better ideas, better solutions. That's the base that I would love to have, the ideal, the dream.

It's about having a system where this is just natural, where people just do this naturally, where this is the easiest way to go. It's just the way it is, not something out of the norm, it's the default. There's no effort for people they have to put in as it's the usual way to go, you don't have to be a super human to do that. All good will come out of it, we can move forward together from a safe space. This vision needs me to think of systems more. How to set up policies, how to create the space, shape the environment - so that good things happen. That's my dream for the world overall, but also in a smaller part for tech which is my bubble. It's the higher thing that I'd like to contribute to and work on. I strongly believe if we have that we have a better world.

My mission to reach this vision is to foster a culture of "DICE". I use this as an acronym to make it more snappy and memorable. The D stands for diversity, equity and inclusion which is often abbreviated as DEI. The I is for inspiration, C for collaboration, and E for experimentation. I felt if I put this mission in very simple words, it would be to foster a culture where everyone is sharing with each other and learning with each other. So everyone learning together would be the shortest version, sort of the elevator pitch. I still kept the more verbose original one as default because I felt it's more explicit and expressive for me, but if I would need to explain it for someone else, probably the simple words and short version will help.

I am aware that some people might wonder where the testing and quality part is in here. I did not want to bind my vision to a specific aspect, activity or role. That does not stop me, however, from being able to see this vision and mission from different perspectives and takes. I can focus on testing and quality but don't have to. I wanted to have it explicitly overarching and including not only all those things that I do, not even only all those things we do in product development, yet be applicable to a lot of contexts. Shiva asked me whether I feel bad that quality is not explicitly mentioned in there. The answer is no. Based on my own experience, I believe that quality will emerge out of such a system, be the natural outcome so I don't need to focus on it.

I am also aware that my personal vision and mission can be perceived as quite open, high level and generic; so how could it be useful for decision making? Well, I see this as a benefit. I can do a lot of different activities to get closer to this, to help this vision. So many experiments I can think of that can contribute! Also, I wanted a vision I could live every day. Keep in mind that this is not tied to work only. I wanted to have a real personal vision and mission that's guiding me in life, which means in work life plus my personal development and private life as well. I hoped it would be a tool, a guiding light for prioritization and decision making, using which I could always ask myself: does this pay into what I actually want to achieve, the higher goal?

In the end, my vision and mission really feels good to me. I can remember it even when not reading it every day, can just tell anyone that's what I want to work towards. Also, it inspires me. On the one hand I'm already working on some of these things. I'm working on the growth part for several years now with all my personal challenges, learning together in groups, help others grow, sharing what I learned. I invested there a lot already. The inclusion part I always wanted to work on yet haven't done much yet, there's a lot of potential in this part and I'm just at the beginning. I could also say that this will lead to personal growth again; I feel I first need to learn what I can do to create such systems where others can do it, too. The key change in thinking now is the systemic part. I always thought of cultures yet never made it that explicit, never really considered deliberately shaping the space during my experiments to drive change. People have reasons for when they do something or not do something; I need to take care of the environment to be able to trigger change.

A Guiding Light

Having my vision and mission at hand and always visible, I wanted to give it a try to see if it really helps my decision making. New options and opportunities showing up? Now I could bounce them off my vision and mission, see if they pay into them or not. Also, I wanted to come up with my next big initiative. During our personal coaching sessions, Shiva mentioned the VMOSA framework that can help break things down further to actionable steps we can take towards our vision. VMOSA stands for:

• Vision: the dream
• Mission: what you will actually do to make your vision a reality
• Objectives: what you're hoping to achieve in a given time frame
• Strategies: the how
• Action plans: detailed plan of who, what, by when, to make what change happen

I felt this VMOSA framework might be too blown up for my usual case, yet I wanted to try it out as a thinking tool and see if it would allow me to derive with concrete guidance for the next year 2021. I already had the vision, and the mission. The objectives? Phew, that one felt tough. However, thinking about strategies, Shiva had already made me realize that my original wishes for my future myself had represented strategies rather than a real vision. So I skipped the objectives for now and instead took the strategies I already had, extended them where needed, and mapped them to the points in my mission. Which strategies could I apply to get closer to which parts in my mission?

• Leading by example 
• The kind includer: creating space for people and helping them grow by providing crucial feedback, prioritizing the most vulnerable (D, I)
• The inspirer: sharing my stories and lessons learned for others to discover and explore (I) 
• The doing leader: demonstrating the whole team approach by getting my hands on wherever I can provide value (I, C) 
• The collaborator by example: going the way together by pairing and ensembling (C) 
• The learning advocate: becoming better every day by running small frugal experiments (I, E) 
• Creating spaces with policies that have consequences 
• Make inclusion and growth the default (D, I, C, E) 

The concrete action plans were also not hard to come up with. I felt that my actions would be represented by my experiments. Experiments applying strategies to achieve objectives paying into the mission to get closer to the vision and hence having real impact. Well, I have long lists full of ideas for my next experiments. Mapping these ideas to parts of my mission made also visual where they would pay into. Some experiments would pay into several, others only into one of them.

So far so good, yet I had skipped the objectives step. So now I thought about concrete, measurable objectives for 2021. It took me some time until I could formulate my first objectives, and all of a sudden I had nine of them. All quite big. Definitely very ambitious, most probably too many to reach in 2021. Am I spreading myself too thin again? Especially as I wanted more focus and balance? I wonder, what if I would see those rather as objectives and key results (OKRs), where it's recommended to define them in a way that you probably reach 60% of them? I definitely was up for a challenge again. In the end it's about outcome over output. I also mostly chose high numbers for my measures so I have to make it systemic to achieve them. Well, the objectives I have now might not be perfect, yet they are a starting point. And they did what I wanted from them initially, to provide guidance and help me choose my next initiatives to involve myself in. Which experiments to run now, which ones not to run, or not yet.

As a final step in this thinking process, I checked if my vision and mission is in line with our company vision, goals and values as well; especially considering my work objectives for next year. I was happy to see they actually do pay into it as well (or did I just see what I wanted to see?). Well, all that was an exercise to help me think. I cannot tell yet whether the objectives chosen will actually help me decide which experiments to try or not. Maybe they will indeed, yet they definitely won't be the only aspect. Whatever I will learn on my way will inform my next experiments in any case.

For now, I only decided on my very next experiment. This one is a real big one that is scary as well. It will definitely need me to be out of my comfort zone, stretching myself into the learning zone. It's as safe as it can be at the same time, as I'm going to pair with Shiva on this one. We agreed to do the next round of the leadership workshops for my location together. We're going to build upon each other's ideas and make this a new workshop series, an evolved one, our own one. These are going to be the first workshops where I not only talk about learning, collaboration, experimentation - but also about diversity, equity, inclusion, systems of oppression like racism, privilege, cognitive biases, psychological safety, and more. So much looking forward to what we will all learn together.

Building Future Systems

For the time being, I know my dream vision and my mission how I think we can get there. I do not know every exact step on the way there, though. Yet now I can work on this a lot more deliberately, experiment by experiment. I'm curious where it leads me and which ways I find to create systems, shape systems, and help them evolve - and us with it.

With all coaching I have received, I have always had it hard to set myself "goals". The goals don't matter. The system I create that keeps me where I want to be matters. Outcomes from systems, not steps of goals.

— Maaret Pyhäjärvi (@maaretp) December 6, 2020

I Am white

⚠️ Content warning: racism, sexism, death

I am white, I am privileged, I am biased, and I want to do better, for a better world for everyone. Taking action was long overdue. This time I finally got moving.

Disclaimers:

1. This post is targeted at white people as we share this part of our experience. I hope that by reading this you gain one new insight, one topic to research further, and one thing to do yourself. Input for your own learning journey on racism and how to dismantle it, and for helping others learn more. It always starts with ourselves.
2. I am no expert in racism and will never be. I don't have first-hand experience. Therefore, I am not qualified to write on racism as such. I cannot write about the lived experience of anyone else. I can only write about my own journey learning about racism. Yet there's a problem: even though I write this post from my perspective it's not about me - and all about me at the same time. I tried to strike a balance here, speaking about my own experience without centering my own experience. I really need to learn how to do this better. Still: I felt that not even trying would be worse.

   Something I've heard from people with large audiences is, "I'm afraid I will say something wrong, so I don't."
   
   Whether or not you say things is *always your choice.*
   
   But know that your silence says something too. Often, it says, you've chosen the side of the oppressor.

   — Tatiana Mac (@TatianaTMac) June 1, 2020

3. I do harm, and feedback is a gift. It's not about intentions, it's about the impact. We can mean well as much as we want, and people still get hurt; especially the most vulnerable. I know I will do harm, as much as I don't want to cause harm. Also, I don't want to make anyone a target by what I'm writing.
1. If you are Black, brown, or in another way have a different racial experience compared to me, and you decide to spend the energy of reading this, then I am grateful. If you in addition decide to share your thoughts with me, then I owe you a lot. I offer to pay this debt back or pay it forward - double, in any kind of form you prefer, you tell me. I know it's on me and only me to educate myself. It's completely up to you if you decide to give me a push in a better direction, so please know that I don't take this for granted.
2. If you are white like me and you see anything written here that potentially could cause harm, I really appreciate it if you let me know.

We all do harm. By existing, we do harm to people and the environment around us.

The "catch" is that when we exist and harm in ways that *fit the systematic status quo,* our harm is normalised and seen as neutral, because our harm impacts the vulnerable not the protected.

— Tatiana Mac 🚁 (@TatianaTMac) August 31, 2020

If you only read this far, then here's the gist: Listen to more stories and learn about the lived experiences of people who are not like you. Listen, don't judge, no need to understand. Just listen, then listen some more. Share these stories, amplify these voices. Most importantly, act: actively work on tearing systems of oppression down, therefore improving life for everyone. We can always learn and do better.

My twitter timeline is full of people who look like me sharing wisdom learned from a lifetime of oppression. It'll be hard, but ignore your first impulse to console. Instead, listen, learn, empathize, and figure out what you can do to help deconstruct this system of oppression.

— Bryan Liles (@bryanl) June 1, 2020

“I’m here to listen”

I don’t need to vent. You don’t need to be my diary. Do something. Take action. Donate, support black owned businesses, educate your own families & help them unlearn racism, teach your future generations how to do better. Advocate & elevate > just listening

— Tae’lur Alexis 🖤 (@TaelurAlexis) June 3, 2020

Still reading? Welcome to the full thing. This is the most important blog post I've ever written and maybe will ever write. I took my time with it, and now it's time to share it. Learning about a topic so deeply ingrained in everything we do that it influences us every day, if we want to or not.

It's a rabbit hole. One that invites to a journey. A journey long overdue. A journey that has me looking forward, backward, sideways, down, up, through time, right here, everywhere. That opened my eyes and ears and senses further. A journey of many stories, stories waiting to be told, stories long told yet never listened to, stories evolving, stories of the past. An emotional ride that is moving. It is moving me. It didn't start now and it won't end here. Yet I really needed to get moving.

I have a lot of thoughts, not a lot of answers. But this is how I feel. #BlackLivesMatter #drawingwhileblack pic.twitter.com/sa08CMcvZQ

— Ky (@KyWilliamsDraws) May 31, 2020

I needed me to be finally speaking about this publicly. Loudly. Following the footsteps of so many great people out there who did that long before me. Acting on what I learn, actually driving change. Hoping to pave further ways for more people to follow. We need to dismantle racism, together.

White people:
We gotta talk about burn out. You aren’t conditioned to be thinking about race this much because of your privilege. We need you to do all you’re doing today, tomorrow, and until the end of time.

Let’s talk about ways to focus on current & systemic change.

👇🏽

— Tatiana Mac (@TatianaTMac) June 5, 2020

Why Now

You might have guessed it. The events of the past months in the USA triggered me to move again. I won't list them here, if you haven't heard what happened, then there's homework for you. The blatant injustice and obvious oppression. The countless deaths that still seek justice. All this didn't just happen now. It was there for a very long time already. I could have seen it. I could have taken it seriously. There's no excuse why I didn't act on this before. 

There are various systems of oppression. Yes, systems, because they are indeed systemic. They are designed by humans to be systemic. I did not create them, yet I inherited them. I've learned a bit about them over the last years, so I cannot say I was not aware of them - the hard truth is I didn't prioritize learning more about them. It was more of a side thing, picking up pieces here and there shared by others. And yet, we do need to become more aware of these systems to enable us to change them. Especially as we are always whole humans with many identities that makes it so crucial to consider intersectionality in everything we do.

Right now, I feel the focus needs to be on racism. Systemic, institutionalized racism that's omnipresent in my everyday experience and behavior. It's so blatantly obvious it's a wonder people still believe that we were past that. And with "people", I mean myself in front row. After all, I grew up in Germany. Believe me, the irony is not lost on me. Let me be clear that this focus on racism does not invalidate any other system of oppression. According to my current understanding, racism is the most burning topic and it's essentially underlying everything. In addition, I'm part of the oppression, the dominant group - not the majority, bear the difference.

Since All Lives Matter, why y’all not just as angry as we are?

— lani (@LaniGrayer) May 30, 2020

I stopped many things I was working on before. Personal challenges and other opportunities I've committed to. They felt just not as important anymore, and they aren't. I might pick them up again some time. Three months ago, I finally started a learning and growing path that was long overdue. I wanted to become more aware of what racism really is and how it works. I wanted to act on this increasing awareness. I did not want to share before I acted. I felt it was not the time to talk about doing things, it was time to actually do things.

A pattern I see in tech, organising, and especially in techies organising is we get stuck in cycles of endless discussion without ever taking action.

The fear of *not even failure* but of *making mistakes* overtakes action—we remain stagnant, allowing status quo to grow freely.

— Tatiana Mac (@TatianaTMac) August 28, 2020

Well, I did share this journey and my intention to write this blog post with a few selected people. One of them was surprised I changed my usual approach to tackle challenges: set my goal, design an experiment, announce it publicly to keep myself accountable, at best coupled with having a learning partner. This is how I approached all my big personal challenges of the past years and it worked really well for me. This time, though, I felt I needed a different approach. Of course, these are only a few steps on a lifelong journey, not the end of the story or legwork to do. Still, I wanted to share my experiences - actual experiences, not something I planned to do.

Now, when I write above that the events in the USA moved me to act, I find it sad that this was the trigger to open my eyes a bit further and stop postponing this topic. Let me be clear: it's tragic what happened and is still happening every day. It's tragic that I was aware of systemic racism for some time, also in my own country. It's tragic that I kept putting all the recommendations on resources I received on my list of things I still need to look at, and then always gave something else the priority over it.

The only time black lives have been prioritized over property is when they were property.

Let that sink in. #BlackLivesMatter

— QuackQuack (@AshColeman30) June 1, 2020

What I Did to Learn More

Just doing what I did to gain more perspectives already got me changing my behavior, tiny step by tiny step. There's still a long, long lifelong way ahead of me, yet this moved me a lot more further than idling on the topic like I did the past years. Let's also be clear these are just the things that I decided to do and did already. Your list can look completely different. The important part is the actual doing and continuing with it.

I'm eternally grateful to all those people out there doing the hard work of recommending resources as well as creating these resources. All these helped me massively grow my own understanding. There's a whole lot more out there, I'm just starting out and will add more on my journey.

• Diversified my Twitter stream further, especially the subset I'm following on a more daily basis. I want to learn from experiences that differ from my own. I want to amplify voices that need to be heard and aren't heard enough yet. I'm aware that this is a bubble and will continue to be my personal bubble, yet I still can deliberately make it bigger and include more people to learn about their lived experiences. I started to follow a whole lot of people I didn't know before, especially a lot more Black people. As tech is my context and the context I'm using Twitter for, these are mostly Black people in tech. I have to say, such a simple thing as this had a huge impact on me. So much food for thought - and for action. Diversifying my stream is continuous effort that's so much worth it. Want to get started yourself and you're also interested in tech? Then discovering people using the hashtag #BlackTechTwitter is a great starting point. Personally, I'm really grateful for the work of all the Black and brown people who spend the energy to share their thoughts on all kinds of topics. There are so many more so you better do your own homework, yet here are some of the wonderful people I'm learning from.
• Abadesi Osunsade
• Marco Rogers
• Chenjerai Kumanyika
• Mina Markham
• Anjuan Simmons
• Erica Joy
• Duretti Hirpa
• Ceora Ford
• Pariss Athena
• Meaghan Lewis
• Nikema Prophet
• Timirah James
• April Speight
• Lenora Porter
• Abeba Birhane
• Imani Barbarin
• Kim Crayton
• Angie Jones
• Ash Coleman
• Jessy Halison
• Tatiana Mac
• Veni Kunche

I appreciate you taking a moment to pause.

Many are continuing to tweet about tech, maybe bc they aren't sure of what else to do.

I'll say that a tech tweet sticks out like a sore dismissive thumb rn.

Here's a nice approachhttps://t.co/RnyGIOkrSb

— Angie Jones (@techgirl1908) May 31, 2020

• Read the book "So you want to talk about race" by Ijeoma Oluo. I have to admit many people in my bubble had recommended that book ever since it came out, and I've put it on my reading list back then. Shame on me: more books got added to that reading list. And always some other book got my priority over this one. Better late than never, I finally read it. This book is very insightful and us white people should educate ourselves by learning how racism is systemic in nature, how it manifests in our everyday lives, how it impacts us very unequally. Some parts I was aware of, many other parts not yet, and the stories shared helped opening my eyes further. If you haven't read this book yet - stop what you're doing and get to it. Too busy? For me that was a mere excuse. Think about it: can you afford ten minutes per day? I cannot know your lived experience, yet for me that question led to my resolution to finally do it.
• Checking my own privilege regularly. Ever since I started attending international conferences, I started learning about my own privileges, becoming more and more aware of them. I'm still learning a lot about them every day. Reading Ijeoma Oluo's book now finally triggered me to write them down, review them on a weekly basis, and keep that list living. Wow. This exercise is mind-blowing. I thought I knew a lot about my own privileges. Already on the first day I listed 47 ways how I am privileged and which impact that has. Within three months after I started this exercise on June 8th, I've now documented 107 more, which sums up to a total of 154. 154 distinct ways how I am privileged that I am aware of today! I'm at 154, and still counting. I'm very clear I'll discover many more on my journey. With any further resource I came across, or any casual conversation overheard, I realized more privileges. Now let's be clear - being privileged does not mean I automatically have it easy or I am not suffering or hurting or anything. It simply means I get a headstart by benefiting from unearned advantages that I didn't do anything for to get them, while less privileged people are actively hindered by the same which represent themselves as unearned disadvantages. While I'm not actively hindered by the system, it's made a lot harder for them. Remember: 154+ ways life is easier for me. Every single day. Also: this is not a competition about who got more privileges. It's about learning how much more we need to become aware of. I considered sharing this list publicly to provide an example, yet these points contain lots of sensitive information about me. However, there are lots of examples out there, an internet search will reveal a great starting point for your own list. As soon as I started writing my privileges down, I noticed I listened more to the realities of others. Whenever someone mentioned something about themselves or I read about something, I took a mental note: "Yes, yet another privilege I have. Oh, and this. Yep, put that one also on the list." When it comes to my achievements, I definitely put in a lot of effort myself. But the thing is, I did nothing to deserve my starting point that sets me at a huge advantage compared to others. Opportunities, access, sponsorship, mental and financial support - I had so much of it. I can only hope paying this forward - in an anti-racist way. For example, by sponsoring people with less privilege, shining a light on them and getting out of their way. Feel you should check your own privilege? Besides Ijeoma Oluo's book, here are more great resources to help you get started.
• Deconstructing Privilege - Patricia Aas [C++ on Sea 2019] by Patricia Aas
• Privilege/Class/Social Inequalities Explained in a $100 Race - Please Watch to the End. Thanks.
• DDDDD: Bourdieu's social theory applied to tech by Romeu Moura
• Understanding white privilege: 20 everyday examples by Ella Alexander
• White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh
• My White Friend Asked Me on Facebook to Explain White Privilege. I Decided to Be Honest by Lori Lakin Hutcherson
• Listened to the podcast series "Seeing White" by Scene on Radio. This was recommended by Kim Crayton as required history lesson when it comes to race and racism. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Each episode of this podcast series enlightened in a different way, allowing to see things in a different light and from a different perspective. It was so good I also listened to all other seasons of Scene on Radio as well, they're amazing pieces of education. This is the only podcast I've listened to all episodes, ever, and the one I learned from most.

  For white folx who find yourselves asking “how did we get here?”, it’s time to take a look back at history
  
  Take this weekend to listen to “Seeing White” by @sceneonradio because knowledge is power and your ignorance is no longer an excuse for causing harmhttps://t.co/kHQygqVnyH

  — Kim Crayton [She/Her] 🏢 💻🎙#causeascene (@KimCrayton1) May 29, 2020

• Talking about systems of oppression, especially racism, with people I know. My circle of influence. This was and is still scary for me, although I don't have much to fear. Yet doing so, step by step, is truly enlightening, too. I started with people closest to me whom I consider family. I continued with dear colleagues at work. Trying to work from a rather safe zone to increase my circle. All these conversations were worth it. Some triggered further thoughts in myself. Some triggered further thoughts in the ones I talked with, only for them to come back and us having new conversations starting from a different base. I feel this is a place to stretch myself a lot more still. Step by step, continuously.

  non-black folks:
  prepare your “actions i will take when i start learning about systemic racism and anti-blackness and recognize either or both in my workplace, coworkers, cofounder(s), friends, or loved ones” playbook now.
  because it’s gonna happen and strategies will be helpful.

  — EricaJoy (@EricaJoy) June 7, 2020

  AND get ready to be disappointed a LOT as you confront your employers, family members, friends, etc. you will have to make some hard decisions and it sucks.
  
  for us it's about lost jobs and friendships, not **our lives** keep that in perspective

  — Tatiana Mac (@TatianaTMac) June 3, 2020

  If speaking out against racism hurts a career in tech, then that says plenty about the industry. It just boggles my mind. Being racist is what should hurt a career.

  — Rohit Sharma (@rohitcodes) June 3, 2020

  White people talking to white people. More of this please. If you’re white and you believe yourself not to be racist, yet you don’t talk to your white friends like this or stand up beyond tweets for Black people... you simply aren’t who you think you are. pic.twitter.com/hUjJsZ0iFv

  — Ava DuVernay (@ava) May 31, 2020

• Set up regular financial support for initiatives focused on increasing diversity and inclusion in tech. It took time to research all those great projects going on doing anti-racist work, so many of them worth funding and donating to. In the end I decided to go with the following: a monthly donation to Black Girls Code and Project Include as well as signing up for a membership with the Hustle Crew. I feel all their work is dearly needed for a better future.
• [Detour: Read the book "White Fragility" by Robin DiAngelo.] This was another book I already had on my reading list for some time. It was brought to my attention again when Kim Crayton explained why she does not recommend this book for anti-racist work. It's about unconscious biases, not racism. I decided to read it with having Kim's advice in the back of my head, hoping to learn identifying these things myself better. Still, let's be clear - it was a detour. I decided to mention it here as it was recommended a lot. Yet it is not the time to focus on the white experience. If you would like to learn more about racism and anti-racist work, this book is not on the list.

  Stop Recommending #WhiteFragility As A #Antiracist Resource #causeascene https://t.co/2ROXykW2Co

  — Kim Crayton [She/Her] 🏢 💻🎙#causeascene (@KimCrayton1) June 9, 2020

• Watched the documentary film "13th" directed by Ava DuVernay. An extremely enlightening close look at what happened during the last 150 years in US history. Why had certain political decisions been made, which language had been chosen, how the dots are connected. Not growing up in this country, my perspective is that of a foreigner with little pieces of the puzzle here and there. This film helped me fill a lot of the gaps and see the system a lot clearer. It's still very active today, just changing its shape whenever needed. Thank you Angie Jones for making me aware of this great piece, and the next one as well!

  That's cute. But um...if you want the real tea, watch 13th and When They See Us. Both are on Netflix. https://t.co/q04kBBOtID

  — Angie Jones (@techgirl1908) June 6, 2020

• Watched "When They See Us" directed by Ava DuVernay. What a powerful story. A true story, lived experiences. For the first time told through the eyes of the ones who got oppressed, the victims of a system. If you haven't seen it yet, stop what you're doing and watch it right now. I don't want to spoil this powerful story telling. If you have a chance, watch the bonus session included where Ava as well as both actors and the real humans they're embodying get a voice in the Oprah Winfrey show. Be sure you're in a good place when you watch this or not watch this alone. It's moving to the bones.
• Took the course "Introduction to Being an Antiracist" by Kim Crayton. Kim offered (and still offers!) anti-racist training for all kind of time zones around the world. I definitely wanted to learn from her and listen to what she has to share, so I registered. Unfortunately, I couldn't make the live event, so I watched the recording and it was still so much worth it. So many things needed to be heard. More pieces falling into their places! So I registered for her next training "Being an Antiracist at Home" and am once again learning a lot from it. Very insightful and thought-provoking. Made me register for the third part in the series as well: "Being an Antiracist at Work". I'm very much at the start, yet I want to keep moving.
• Read the book "Was weiße Menschen nicht über Rassismus hören wollen: aber wissen sollten" by Alice Hasters (German). After educating myself about racism and history of other countries, especially the USA, I felt it was way past time to learn more about racism in my own country: Germany. At school we do learn a lot about the times of national socialism, a still very recent and crucial part of our history, and I'm thankful for that education (more than I was as a pupil). Yet these history lessons, as everything taught at school, were heavily biased and did not really include many perspectives. What about politics today in my country? Well, things could be a lot worse, yet it's not all shiny at all. I felt I was missing out on a lot more perspectives and really wondered: what about racism in my own country? How is it to be Black in Germany, today? That question alone is telling enough. There's a lot more than I am aware of. So I did my research and picked Alice Hasters' as my first book out of many. Once more my eyes opened further. Wow. Things that I already got aware of, told by a different human, and so many things I wasn't aware of at all.
• Joined Hustle Crew's webinar "How to navigate race discussions in your role". Signing up for membership also provided me access to lots of great resources, advice and a monthly member workshop. I took this first one and was glad I did! It was great, having a close look at our implicit biases from yet another perspective. I joined a second session and signed up for more. These people are wonderful and I have so much to learn from them.
• Took one of Project Implicit's implicit bias tests. This university research initiative was recommended by Hustle Crew as a way to figure out our own biases and how bad they really are, no matter how much we try to act against them. I was eager to give it a try and did a first one of many available to see how they work. I've started with the "Skin-tone test" and was confronted with the result: "Your responses suggested a moderate automatic preference for Light Skinned People over Dark Skinned People." I know this is rooted deep inside me and I grew up internalizing this system - yet I really want to change this. A lot more such tests on various subjects are waiting for me, too.

  Also, your children already understand race. Studies show this. Maybe not consciously, but they know. They know that whiteness is "good" and Blackness is "bad".
  
  If you're not actively raising your white kids to be anti-racist, they will be racist by default. https://t.co/z6c45dWyob

  — keziyah (@KeziyahL) June 4, 2020

• Read the book "Sprache und Sein" by Kübra Gümüsay (German). My next move to educate myself more about the reality of people in Germany who are not considered the norm and hence we find names for them to explicitly point them out and inspect them. This book elegantly shows how important language is and which impact it has. Free speech? Really free speech will still take a long time so we better make our next moves on this journey. So much food for thought in this book.
• Started a resources page on all things inclusion. The past months I've read a lot more about the subject and had so many resources I found super valuable and helpful to open my eyes further, to find new perspectives, to see different realities. It was about time to collect the most valuable ones and make them available for everyone on my blog. We are working together with people every day. We are living together with people every day. We better learn how to include everyone better every day instead of just staying comfortable in a system convenient for us as we white people tend to do. The collection is meant to be a living one, so expect more resources to be added.
• How I want to continue? Reading more, watching more, listening more. Decentering whiteness. And don't stop taking action.

  Please read happy Black books too. We don't just write about slavery and colonialism. Consume Black history and art about anything. It all helps to decenter whiteness

  — #KWA (@athenakugblenu) June 1, 2020

  The important question is not, "what are you going to do now?", but instead, "what are you going to be doing in two months or two years from now?" I'm happy that people are protesting and paying attention to Black lives right now, but what happens when it leaves the news cycle?

  — Bryan Liles (@bryanl) June 3, 2020

I am struggling with not centering myself in this narrative. Guess what - I've written about my own perspective in this blog post. Yet it's not about me and my feelings or anything. It's not about me being a bad person. It's not even about me trying to do better these days. My experience is not the point here. It's about systemic oppression that we white people keep reinforcing as we benefit from it and about those people who suffer because of it.

Go out there. Look for those humans with different experiences than your own. Become aware of the system supporting it. Go inside yourself and see where you're supporting this system and keeping it alive, passively or actively. It's often in the "little" things, the casual everyday things, the things that are repeated a million times. These things can have a huge impact - if we change them to the better, then this impact can be a positive one.

People are dying because of existing systems of oppression, because of racism. People are hurting from thousands of microaggressions every day. It's so not about me or any of us white people feeling comfortable. It's about actively dismantling racism and doing anti-racist work.

Black people are deadass saying “stop killing us” and there are people saying “but”

— 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐰𝐧 ✞ (@ogsoupreme) May 31, 2020

One of the worst things I realized on this journey is this: for me, it's a decision to learn about racism, to feel the discomfort and stay with it, and to grow my understanding of how to do better. For most other people in the world it's not their own decision. It had been decided above their heads. It's their daily reality and lived experience. And here I am coming and "finally" deciding to face this. I am guilty and very much deservedly feel guilty. I hope my own drive to change the world for a better place adds to this guilt, and both forces make me do better. 

Am I an anti-racist? As much as I want to be, I can't. This is not something I can become or label myself with. What I can do is to continue doing the work. Anti-racist work. Every day. I do want to stop supporting the system and I need to be doing this very actively. The actions I took so far might be a start, but there's continuous work to do.

Where I'm Coming From

If you've been reading this far, thank you. I hope you got some inspiration for yourself how to educate yourself and do better. You could stop here. Yet if you also want to know where I'm coming from, my personal context when it comes to racism, then read on.

I am starting to realize further how I grew up internalizing and therefore supporting a system of racism. The picture is becoming less blurry and I feel there's a lot more to discover here. Care for some examples?

• All those messages I soaked up during childhood from systemically racist novels or children's TV shows only telling one side of the story. I didn't realize Black kids were portrayed like this as they were meant to be "exotic", not "normal" like me. Several of my favorite children's books? "Questionable" is a euphemism for them. One of the most popular children songs of my time was about Black children dying one by one, until all are gone. Wow. One of the most popular children's games when I grew up? It's called "Wer hat Angst vorm schwarzen Mann?", literally meaning "Who's scared of the Black man?". Not joking.
• Messages from my family who warned me about racially mixed relationships as they would be "difficult due to cultural differences" and hence not worth the trouble. They meant well, I get that, but these were the messages my parents internalized as post-war children and the ones they passed on to their own children. Remember? It's not about intentions, it's about the harm caused.
• Messages from school, even in elementary class, where it was made very clear who was "meant to be here" and who was a migrant's child and hence foreign forever and usually troublesome from a teacher's point of view.
• More messages from school about German history, especially the recent past. I'll be eternally feeling guilty for being German, I always wished for another nationality. Patriotism? Never felt that. Waving my country's flag? No way I'm ever going to do this. At first, I was glad that we really covered the national socialist period and World War II in large detail at school. Having this topic return every year in even more detail, I felt haunted by it so at some point I rejected learning more about it. We had nothing to do with it after all, right? Well, that's way too easy. Nowadays I'm very grateful we had that education while at the same time I know we're missing a lot of perspectives on the same time period. So, feeling proud to be a German never came to me. Only nowadays I keep learning how many benefits we have just from growing up or living here that many other people in other countries don't have. By the way, all this are social benefits. The social system here is far from good but can be a lot worse. And this once more shows how privileged I am. 
• Messages from friends and their families, mocking me for my very light skin. Back then I desperately wanted to have darker skin; yet I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have liked to lose the advantages my skin tone brings with it. Being made fun of that I am so light-skinned that I glow in the dark was not fun for me at all. Yet I was still part of the dominant group here and therefore inherently safe; I will never be able to fully comprehend the lived experience of people being mocked for their skin tone when they're not part of the dominant group; how much this hurts. Only these days I'm starting to gain better understanding what privilege my light skin brought and still is bringing with it.
• Growing up as a teenager during the 90s, I received lots of messages about Black people from music, TV shows and movies. Going into just this area alone does reveal so much. I won't go deeper here, but there's a lot to uncover.
• Let's jump to my time at university. Many people know I studied sinology as it's part of my speaker bio. Nearly no one knows I also had two minor subjects: computer science and - here it comes - intercultural communication. Back then I felt that this subject indeed was the most valuable and hands-on one of my subjects. I learned about concepts like "positive racism" (this is an oxymoron, racism can never be positive), transgender people, and more. This all opened my eyes to misconceptions I've held before. Yet as all these messages were deeply biased themselves, and even outdated at that time - and they probably fostered so, so many more biases. Today I'm quite scared to open the most famous study book from back then. One day I will.
• First job after university. I was finally "one of the guys"! And loudly telling everyone my belief that we've solved the gender issue in Germany. Discrimination didn't happen to me, didn't it? So surely, it's solved for everyone. Oh my. I was the only woman working in our small start-up's development team. And there was discrimination indeed - yet truth be told, I often benefited from it. This wasn't so bad, right? All good! Well - nope.
• My first conferences. Attending international conferences was one of my biggest eye openers. I had been working in very multinational and multilingual companies before and was always proud to be in such a "diverse" environment (well it was indeed a lot better than many other places all my friends told me about). Yet at these conferences, I've finally learned about different realities, sexism, and especially my own privilege in so, so, so many aspects. It took me years to come clear how much support I received throughout my life, not deserved or based on what people like to call "merit", just on mere access, chance and people who made me visible. While all the time the human that's closest to me did not share these privileges. I had it right in front of my eyes. Denial is strong.
• Finally, I started seeing more things - and once I saw a thing I couldn't make it unseen. With every insight I learned from people who already saw more than I did, with every realization how people get systemically hurt, every racist joke I heard people laugh at, every more "guys" shouted by company leaders, every casual slur about "political correctness" - I felt I needed to speak up. With all my privilege I was - I am! - in the best position to do so. How not to stay that coward that I was so many times? How to become someone who people can truly rely on as an ally? How to fight for a better world? How to do what's simply right? For a long time, I wanted to be someone else. Badly. The more "exotic" the better (sigh, I cringe when thinking about this). Someone special, someone to talk about. Someone who's a cool kid. Someone who is brave. Someone from foreign countries, someone from my fiction books, someone saving the world. Now I know I can only be a better version of myself, and that's all I want these days.

These are just examples. I knew that racism is systemic for quite a while. It's way too important to ignore, and I'm not proud that I've postponed and de-prioritized this for way too long. Yet enough is enough, it's due time to become really uncomfortable.

Closing Thoughts

I got socialized into a racist system. It's institutionalized, systemic, everywhere. We can't run away from it or deny it. 

This post is composed of my own reality together with what I learned from dear people kind enough to share their own stories or recommend valuable resources. I am fully aware that what I wrote might be - most probably is - flawed and can harm someone. In the end I grew up in a racist system, a system constructed by white people like me, a system I supported and benefited from (still do), a system that kills people and needs to be torn down. I want to use my own privilege and speak up. Continue learning how to do anti-racist work every day and grow from supporting this system to actively dismantling it. Attempting to change the world and start with myself for the better of everyone. I will continue learning.

This is for everyone. It's on me to do better.

What are Y’ALL willing to do?

✅ Change your profile photo
✅ Say “Black Lives Matter”
✅ Write lovely tweets and blog posts
✅ Put yourself between police and black people
❓Catch a severe ass-whuppin’
❓Open carry for the cause
❓Put your lives on the line

— Kevin Stewart (@kstewart) June 7, 2020