Jonathan Heron

@[email protected] - Product Lead at @Shopify . Previously PM @Udemy & @Intercom

[BUCHANAN: Dublin Time Machine @RobLooseCannon]

Declan Flynn was a 31-year-old working at Dublin Airport for Aer Rianta. Were he living in 21st Century Dublin you might see him as just another good looking young gay lad smiling in a selfie on Facebook or maybe bopping on the dancefloor of The George with his mates of a Saturday night.

But Declan, and countless others like him, lies cold in the grave now, his young life brutally snuffed out by hatred and ignorance on a cold September night in 1982. Dublin in the early eighties was a grim place to be gay. Criminalisation made it extremely difficult to learn about other LGBT people, let alone actually meet them.

Within this environment of dread and isolation there was an ongoing campaign of harassment, blackmail, assault and robbery against gays actively ignored by the Gardaí.

That fateful night Declan sat down on a park bench beside another young man. Before he knew what was happening he was set upon by a predatory gang who had lain in wait behind some trees. He managed to break free and ran terrified towards the gate of the park but he didn’t make it.

They caught him and laughing they brutally battered him. They kicked and punched him and beat him with sticks. When he stopped moving and they had exhausted themselves they stole his watch and the £4 in his wallet. They left Declan's horribly beaten body where it lay, choking on his own blood. Declan Flynn would pass away shortly afterwards in hospital.

The very same year that Declan died for example a man called Charles Self was viciously murdered, stabbed 14 times. I’ve never felt the expression "Gay bashing" is appropriate. It seems almost dismissive in its simplicity, reductionist in its childishness.

It doesn’t fully articulate the violence, the terror, the chilling effect the crime and its anticipation has on both the LGBT community and wider society as well as the direct victim. It doesn’t illustrate the gruesome wilful denigration, the robbery of the person’s safety and sense of self.

The ages of the perpetrators of (two 18 year olds , a 19 year old, a 17 year old and a 14 year old) and their names (with the exception of the youngest) are a matter public record.

When asked about the crime, one of the killers blithely said: “We were all part of the team to get rid of queers in Fairview Park.”

But it was the deplorable comments of the presiding judge Justice Sean Gannon which most chillingly showed the opinion of the State towards the value of gay life. As he handed out suspended sentences and allowed all the killers to walk free he said: "This could never be regarded as murder.”

Bonfires were lit and street parties were had in celebration in the neighbourhoods in Fairview as the five returned home to heroes' welcomes. Tragically in 1992 one of the five who had walked free broke in to a flat in Ballymun and brutally raped a woman. She was seven months pregnant.

But if the families of these thugs and the justice system would not respond to the horrific crime the wider Irish society was disgusted by it and the gay community, motivated by both righteous anger and understandable fear of a reoccurrence, began to come together and rise up. Disparate groups and concerned individuals were galvanised in to action.

A crowd of almost a thousand people marched from Liberty Hall to the scene of the murder in Fairview Park. Openly gay citizens and their straight supporters from unions, political parties and social organisations stood shoulder to shoulder to express their desire for justice.

The likes of this had never been seen before in Dublin. The visibilty of so many LGBT people on the news was itself shocking to Irish society. Bonded by their outrage and desire for change, a community was formed.

The event lit the fuse on the Irish Gay Rights movement, and that summer, the first Dublin Pride took place, more protest than parade. Two hundred brave vanguards of equality marching from St Stephen’s Green to the GPO. Irish Pride was born.

[Jonathan Heron @jonathanheron]

@AerLingus after 83 minutes on hold to try get seats changed, your phone system disconnected me. Is it possible to get help via DM please?

[Danny Boy @Care2much18]

One of the dumbest tweets I've seen this week.

The comments underneath it are somehow even dumber.

I would suggest restaurant guy do some basic research, before talking utter nonsense, but I doubt he would risk talking sense.

A few facts to try counter this shite. /1

[Jonathan Heron @jonathanheron]

@IrishRail do you know when the 19:20 train from Galway to Dublin will be rescheduled to, and if it will definitely run today? My kids are currently in Galway, trying to get home. Thanks

[Jonathan Heron @jonathanheron]

@pedrotgimenez Looking’ sharp

[Jonathan Heron @jonathanheron]

@jonnybelton Chief Architect has a bit of a learning curve because it’s designed to support architect’s workflows, but you basically won’t hit into a limit of what it can’t do

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

I wrote this Format dialog back on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, I think it was.

We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where WindowsNT was different enough from Windows95 that we had to come up with some custom UI.

I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on.

Then I busted out VC++2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn't elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived.

That was some 30 years ago, and the dialog is still my temporary one from that Thursday morning, so be careful about checking in "temporary" solutions!

I also had to decide how much "cluster slack" would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB. That limit was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and one that has stuck with us as a permanent side effect.

So remember... there are no "temporary" checkins :)

Follow me for more random code musings!

[Jonathan Heron @jonathanheron]

@pedrotgimenez Happy new year mate

[Danny Boy @Care2much18]

This tweet, from a racist, encapsulates the distorted sense of Irish nationalism that fueled awful events yesterday.

Cited deaths of Ashling, Michael and Aidan as examples of foreign savagery and failed diversity.

Let's look at names he didn't mention and why they matter. /1

[Brian Donohue @brian_donohue]

🤗 Unusual opportunity for product leadership role at Intercom!

I'm now hiring for a Sr. Group Product Manager for our Platform Group. The remit is a challenging one, as you’ll be working across a broad set of our product, including the customer data platform, apps & integrations, developer experience, web & mobile messenger, and our just-about-to-be-released phone offering.

I’m particularly keen to find folks with real depth of experience in first 3 parts of that remit. Also, we're open to Director-level candidates for this role.

We have strong internal candidates so we’re gonna be moving quickly on this one, so hop on it if you’re intrigued!

https://t.co/T8IUF3yDs8

[parker lyons @tweetsbyparker]

maybe selling an $8 megaphone to anyone in the public square and offering them direct monetary incentive for impressions during hyper-sensitive geopolitical events isn’t all that beneficial to society or the health of the public conversation

[Jonathan Heron @jonathanheron]

@thevrnrd @superpac Gorgeous art style

[Jonathan Heron @jonathanheron]

@VodafoneIreland fibre broadband has been down in the Citywest area for 2+ hours. Do you have an ETA for resolving this?

[Henry Wismayer @henrywismayer]

An unbearably touching image of Najin, one of two remaining northern white rhinos, resting beside her caretaker on the Kenyan plains.

Since the death of Sudan, the last male, in March 2018, Najin's species has been functionally extinct. Only she and her daughter, Fatu, remain.

[David Newell @DavidNewell95]

Is my “For You” page meant to be 14 @elonmusk tweets in a row only broken by one ad?
That’s the kind of bland experience that’d actually make me leave

[follow @bencollins on bluesky @oneunderscore__]

This grim prediction on the future of AI and newsrooms from @broderick seems.... awfully likely.

[Jonathan Heron @jonathanheron]

Ivory is excellent and even before Ivory made using Mastodon nicer, Mastodon has displaced a lot of my Twitter usage

[Tapbots @tapbots]

Say Hello to Ivory. Our Mastodon client for iOS available on the App Store! If you liked Tweetbot, you'll love Ivory and feel right at home. Go download it, try it free for 7 days, and experience it for yourself!

https://t.co/cJ9DseD31W

[Cllr Eoin Ó Broin 🇮🇪 🇫🇷 🇸🇪🇪🇺 🌏 @CllrEoinOBroin]

Say it loud, Say it clear, refugees are welcome here - says #clondalkin today with a roar 🙂