There’s nothing more pathetic than a sore loser.

I’ve never thought about losing as a skill set, but it’s what I’ve spent most of my life doing. It’s probably what I’m best at. For example, I’m a mediocre chess player. This means that at around 4pm everyday I’m losing positioning midgame to a coworker. It means I fumble material, botch a knight, or don’t see the attack on my queen 2 moves ahead. I lose house keys and USB sticks, earrings and lipstick caps. I lose focus. I lose my temper. I’ve lost family members and lovers. I’ve lost religions, homes, jobs, and at my worst, I’ve lost dignity.

During my first six months in New York I lost almost 30 pounds. I remember having the flu twice, once while working a double shift shucking oysters. It wasn’t long before I was sitting on the steps of my apartment, sobbing on the phone with my mother. I was going to give up acting. It was too hard. I was 22 years old and my brain was rotting away in the waiting line. A few months later someone dropped a $300 Lenovo in my lap and told me to “just fucking move on.”

So I moved on.

I built shitty websites like people crack their knuckles. I grokked Git. I learned what a pointer was. I loved JavaScript, I hated JavaScript, I liked JavaScript. I dreamt in error messages and logic gates. I had opinions on Emacs vs Vim (obviously Emacs) and read essays by Richard Stallman. I gave bad presentations about Backbone.js at meetups. I helped you with that CSS float thing. I even tried to figure out what the hell a Monad was (hint: I didn’t figure it out). The better I got the more of a failure I was. WARNING: Looking at code three to four months old may cause blindness!

I’ve never been happier.

One of the more disappointing things I’ve noticed in the tech community is the aversion for women to feel pain. We’re hyper-sensitive of their alienation (as if the way to make someone feel less odd is to talk about how odd they are constantly). They should feel rewarded for the accomplishment of being female and knowing what Linux is. Congrats! You’re tech savvy and you have a vagina! You’re a winner.

Actually, no. You’re still a loser.

As much as you win, you lose more. Anyone who’s ever written code can tell you that. Coding is applied math that looks like English– a.k.a. it’s hard as fuck. The majority of your day is spent focusing on where you tried and didn’t catch. These coding bootcamps (see also: Women Who Foo or Girls That Baz) seem to forget this. You can’t spend 6 weeks coding and magically become a programmer. God, I really wish that was the case. You have to like puzzles. You have to like doing things yourself. You have to be okay with failure. Being a programmer is a state of mind. Maybe I’m more comfortable with the masochism of coding, because I came from acting. Maybe I’m just a masochist.

I’ve been to a buttload of hackathons. My bottom drawer is filled with hackathon t-shirts. Last weekend I went to one, spent all night making something, and didn’t land an honorable mention. The particulars of this hackathon aren’t important and although I’m going on the negative, I admire and respect the volunteers. I’m not upset because I didn’t win. I’m not upset that people made better things (and they did).

I’m upset because the judges lied to an all-female team to support a political agenda.

After deliberating, the judges announced a new “Most Inspirational” category to specifically award a group of young women who made a Wix website and PDF resources for teachers’ curriculums. If you’re unfamiliar with what Wix is, a quick google will help you (for the lazy: a SaaS website creator from templates without coding). Is it inspirational that they made static PDFs at a hackathon? Maybe it is. Maybe it is and I’m a bitch.

Let me reiterate– they did not write one line of code.

We can argue semantics, but a hackathon is not an idea-a-thon. There were people at this hackathon who built robots, complex 3D models, and games. People who actually hacked at a hackathon and did not get mentioned. Instead a team of judges, some of which had degrees from MIT, decided to pretend that PDF curriculums were hacking. I don’t blame the girls in that team. They aren’t at fault. I’m happy they participated. I’m angry that we’re breaking what it means to be a builder for agendas.

Later at a friend’s apartment, I was discussing this with other participants, some with valid points. The girls had mentioned in their speech that it was their first hackathon, that they were new to “hacking” and we should be lenient. Their winning meant more to them in the long run than my losing. I joked that I was inspirational, right? I was a female who went to the bootcamp of LMGTFY. To paraphrase a colleague, I’m no longer “inspirational”. Now I’m part of the irrelevant, established order of brogrammers. Pass the mountain dew, brah. Git push -f, brah.

We were all new once. Tech changes so quickly that every few years we’re all new again. Will these women keep going to hackathons because of this win? Probably. Will they ever become programmers? I doubt it. I say that because a real hacker is someone who tries to code all night, and regardless of how shitty it looks, stands up there and says proudly, “Yeah, I made this. It didn’t work out very well, but I learned a lot.” This nonsense is not only discouraging to others who genuinely love to build, it’s dangerous to young women who could actually become programmers.

Don’t lie to women. Tech is hard enough as it is.

As a final note, if you’re reading this and you ran said hackathon, I’m sorry. I know this post has made you unhappy. The irony that some of the organizers were also the very members of my first hackathon team 2 years ago is not lost on me. The New York community is small and these types of views are unwelcome. Please know I am motivated by wide eyes and love for a craft that has recently become my own.