In her speech (audio of the speeach)at the National Women’s Caucus, Fanny Lou Hammer uttered the words of the title of this article. It has since been echoed by people and struggles all over our earth. I have used this slogan in posts and writings as a way to signal my position and to show that I understand that things are connected. It wasn’t until I was on a five hours drive listening to a conversation on Upstream podcast that I actually internalized and understood what this phrase means.

Vi har lett for å skylde på andre når våre fordommer og rasisme vises i det offentlige rom. Et ferskt eksempel er når vi snakker om folkemordet i Palestina. Folk bruker polarisering som grunn til at de ikke vil stå fram eller vise støtte for Palestineres rett til å eksistere. Det er en betimelig unnskyldning at sosiale medier og importerte problemer fra USA er grunnen til stillheten fra ledere og bedrifter.

You were forced to work a lot to reach a milestone set by someone else. It could be for a number of reasons and often times it’s because someone made a mistake that these things happen (or the person in charge is an ass or an incompetent ass). You put all things on hold, dig in and put in the hours. Depending on how long this lasts , days, weeks or even months.

This post contain learnings from over twenty years working as a programmer and close to half a century living on this planet. I met my partner over a decade ago, not long into our relationship we had a conversation: “why do you say things as if you know them, when you don’t?” I would usually reply “Of course I don’t know these things. I’m obviously guessing, you should know this”. When I first was confronted by this I felt misunderstood and even a little attacked.

The title of this post is a phrase often repeated in the onboarding process at my current company (and probably many others too). It sounds like a pretty straight forward thing doesn’t it? What kind of person would not automatically do this? I am afraid I’m one such person, and there is a reason why. Once in my career I was bullied at work in a very subtle way for a long period of time.

I was incredibly fed up waiting for the chance to make a living writing code. Since I was very young, I’d wanted to program computers for a living. The years it took me to get there felt like an endless wait of learning things I didn’t care for. Looking back though, the learning I didn’t care for was perhaps the most valuable. Anyways…. When I finally was given a job as a programmer I was living the dream, my dream.

I was fortunate to be able to attend JSConf EU in 2011. This turned out to be a life altering event. Going there I expected to see some nice talks and get drunk in the awesome city of Berlin. While I did both of those things, what happened in the can going to Berlin airport was not expected. I got on board to organise a JSconf-style conference in Oslo: The Web Rebels Conference.

Too many people try to change their surroundings and feel miserable while doing it. If you’re not happy with something, either suck it up or move on! There’s nothing in the human rights about the right to always feel great at work. If you’re not, it is up to you to change your situation. The chances that something will make you feel different in a while are slim. Nobody is going to look at your situation and sort things out.

The first record of me interacting with a computer was a picture of me when I was three years old playing the game Pyton on a Tiki 100. I have always known what I wanted to do in life, I wanted to be a programmer and create things using computers. School was just an endless wait before I finally got to do what I wanted at the age of 19. That was when I finally got to Molde College where I could learn to program.

I’ve come to realize, however, that while technology may make it more convenient to communicate, it doesn’t improve our ability to get a point across This is a quote from John Maeda’s book Redesigning Leadership. I think it captures the essence of the problem we have today with communication. We have all these amazing tools which enables just about anyone to potentially communicate with millions of people around the globe.