Just by accident, a tweet hit a nerve today and made me finally write this blog post. Also, to not bore you to death, its a "how I got started with IT" kind of story in disguise.

Please stop using "my mom" as a stand-in of "computer-illiterate" (and generally a bit dull on the technical side) person in your talks (and anywhere else, for the record). You will lose me there. Not because its subtly sexist (it is, for as long as "your dad" is not mentioned quite as often in that context), its also a subtle mistake. This might sound a bit like arguing semantics here, but let me explain on how its really an issue of not opposing your audience, because some of your audience does not hold your world view.

CFPs as pull requests on Github are the new hotness in town, at least when organizing a Ruby conference. Euruko 2012 did it, Sapporo RubyKaigi did it and RubyConf Australia and RuPy are following suit. My tweet today that I don't like the approach at all was met by a fair amount of reactions and I was asked to elaborate, so I'd like to do this here. I organized eurucamp this year and we consciously decided against it for various reasons, but these reasons are solely my own.