Weekly review cw 37

It's a late autumn evening in Hamburg. I'm sitting on the 5th floor of the House of Sports – the Olympiasaal. The nine participants in my club management training course are waiting for the start of the lecture “Diversity in Sport.” A certain familiarity has developed within the group over the past ten sessions. We've learned to appreciate one another. Similarities have been uncovered, as have differences, perspectives, and experiences in club and personal life.

This harmony has enriched us all. The discussions on topics such as club development and event management have become, on the one hand, a source of new ideas, and, on the other, a true treasure of shared experiences. That's why I was worried that today would be a mandatory event that would be rushed through. That was true, until we discussed the phrase “You're blind.”

App Deployment Chain

Back in March of this year, I was working on the pipeline for an app. With the upcoming production release, I wanted to add an essential step to this flow: In addition to the staging build for the customer's manual acceptance tests, I also needed to create a production build.

The goal for every deployment to the main branch is to create a staging build with EAS, which the customer can review on their test devices. Depending on the customer's availability, several features are tested in a bundled acceptance test. This doesn't correspond to the hoped-for flow of small increments going live, but that's the reality. The customer doesn't have the capacity.

In accordance with this restriction, we will only publish certain releases as production builds. This saves valuable build minutes, but requires us to initiate the build manually. The solution is a manual pipeline that is triggered in GitHub with a button click. The result (the IPA artifact) is rolled out to the target devices via mobile device management.

These work-saving pipelines seem primitive in the age of AI, but they are significant in everyday developer life. Committing the code triggers all automation, including quality control through unit tests, version number assignment via SemVer, packaging via the tool pipeline, and simple error feedback via version display in the app. I don't worry about the process—it just happens.

The Power of Language

Our task is to explain what is discriminatory about the phrase “You're blind.” In addition, we made assumptions about what was actually meant and how it could be expressed better—i.e., in a non-discriminatory way.

As obvious as it seems in the context of such a training course and as crystal-clear to me at the time, I have to say: I have used this phrase frequently in the past. Usually, in a sporting context, when a pass doesn't arrive, or when throwing a snowball in the garden. At no point did I realize that I wasn't using inclusive language. However, I pay close attention to it.

This purely personal realization alone wouldn't have made the evening enjoyable. That happened with the indignant and thoroughly annoyed comment: “These days, you're not allowed to say anything at all.” This didn't just refer to the phrase “blind.” We delved deeper into the way the phrase was formulated.

Despite our previous training in the communication module, there was no understanding of the distinction between criticism of behaviour and criticism of being – in English both are “You are late”. In German, we distinguish “You kommst zu spät” and “Du bist spät.” And that the latter is not something anyone is entitled to – regardless of whether it is formulated inclusively or discriminatorily. So, ultimately, I can say for myself: Language shapes, language creates truth, and change is difficult, especially when it involves recognizing that I have made mistakes.