I admit that when I initially saw trigger warnings at the beginning of articles, I was a bit baffled. That sense of bafflement was well-captured in this New York Times article from May, about requests to apply them to literary works in college courses. I’ve come to think that the appropriateness of trigger warnings depends entirely on the context in which they are used. If you want to know more about them, the Geek Feminism Wiki has a good writeup of how trigger warnings are used and the reasons for using them.

A couple of days ago, my colleague Lara Swanson posted about unsolicited feedback she received from dudes after her Velocity keynote, and I realized that there’s definitely one context in which trigger warnings are underused. Clearly the men who gave the feedback would have benefitted from a trigger warning that might have prevented them from unexpectedly having a negative emotional experience while watching a conference talk.

With that in mind, here are some new trigger warnings speakers may want to use to protect men from having a damaging emotional response, and worse, taking it out on others.

• TRIGGER WARNING: Woman to speak authoritatively about topics not considered “girl stuff.”
• TRIGGER WARNING: Content may force representatives of privileged groups to confront the existence of that privilege.
• TRIGGER WARNING: Speaker apt to apply metaphors men are unfamiliar with.
• TRIGGER WARNING: Speaker to extoll diversity for its own sake.
• TRIGGER WARNING: Speaker using whatever tone they like when giving this talk.

With these precautions, hopefully we can make conference talks a safe place for men.

In a fit of World Cup enthusiasm, I bought Franklin Foer’s book How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. The book is roughly 10 years old, and ages less well as you progress through it. The initial chapters on soccer history and racism in soccer feel fresh and are really interesting. Foer says in the introduction that the book progresses from bad news to good news, and unfortunately gets gets worse as you make your way through it.

Foer’s argument that soccer will provide the organizing force that disrupts Islamic fundamentalism in Iran seems particularly regrettable with the benefit of hindsight. The good news for wannabe soccer fans is that the book argues effectively that Barcelona is a perfectly good fan for a dilettante to support. The team is owned by its supporters, serves as a foil for fascist Real Madrid, and plays an exciting style. If you want to cultivate a soccer rooting interest and are afraid of unwittingly making common cause with white nationalists, Barcelona is there to offer safe harbor.

Jean-Louis Gassée’s critique of Microsoft CEO’s latest is really an excellent primer on how to communicate about strategy. It also includes the shortest useful guide to how to identify a platitude that you’ll ever read. Great stuff.

The degree to which open source software has reduced time to market for web companies and saved them money in operational costs over time cannot be overstated. Indeed, open source is so crucial that in most cases we simply take it for granted. I don’t think people who have joined the industry in the past 10 years or so can really imagine what it was like. We used to pay for everything — databases, Web servers, application servers, version control software, compilers, and everything in between.

Now, you can build a massive business without spending any money at all on software, thanks to people sharing their work. People who are willing to give away their work created the foundation upon which this industry rests.

Stripe is doing an awesome thing to give back to the open source community — providing grants and office space to programmers so that they can work on their open source projects. It’s an interesting addition to the usual options of hiring open source developers and letting them spend some or all of their time on their open source work, or contributing patches back to open source software.

Andrey Petrov wrote a first-hand report on the two weeks he spent at Stripe working on his project, Urllib3. More companies should follow Stripe’s lead on this.