What's in a name? Tools for allyship

Updating from FactoryGirl to FactoryBot

Posted by David Haley on November 03, 2017 · 1 min read

#bias  ·  #equity  ·  #software

On October 24th, 2017 the ThoughtBot team renamed their popular Ruby testing library FactoryGirl to FactoryBot. The change, and even the request itself, was controversial in some crowds, even though it takes very little time to update software to reflect the name change.

I thought the outcry was peculiar because it was so disproportionate to the impact. Why object so strongly to something that barely impacts oneself, but is very important to others? Watching the conversation and speaking about it with colleagues taught me some valuable tools in examining and checking my own unconscious biases to be a better ally.

See the original Medium article, published to the Square engineering blog.