As someone who was already aware of the incident, here's my reaction to the article.
A few moments earlier Hank and Alex had been giggling over some other Beavis and Butt-head-type tech in-joke about “forking someone’s repo”.
One of them clarified afterwards that the forking line was not a joke, but just a straightforward statement that Richards misinterpreted.
"There is something about crushing a little kid’s dream that gets me really angry."
Holy crap. With this kind of aptitude for rhetorical misdirection, Richards should go into politics.
"It takes three words to make a difference: 'That’s not cool.'"
Curious that Richards didn't see fit to make a difference that day.
"Yesterday the future of programming was on the line and I made myself heard.”
Now approach Kanye levels of self-aggrandizing.
“Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him."
I resent Richards' implication that blacks, jews, and women have no sense of humor or proportion. At least to the extent that a white male jew is allowed to resent such things.
"Fuck that bitch, make her pay, make her obey.”
Disgusting. And that's far from the worst in there. This is an example of true, unambiguous misogyny, a word that's unfortunately been diluted by using it to describe softer forms of implicit sexism. Having a video game where the female's breasts are too big isn't misogyny. But the use of the word "obey" here is downright revolting.
“Maybe it was [Hank] who started all of this,” Adria told me in the cafe at San Francisco Airport. “No one would have known he got fired until he complained. Maybe he’s to blame for complaining that he got fired. Maybe he secretly seeded the hate groups. Right?”
This degree of mistrust is completely consistent with her original decision to escalate their comments to the internet instead of asking them to mind their manners.
"If I had a spouse and two kids to support I certainly would not be telling ‘jokes’ like he was doing at a conference."
This is the second time in the article that she scare-quotes "jokes". She truly believes that what Hank and Alex did was inexcusable. The way she talks about it, they might as well have assaulted someone.
"Oh but wait, I have compassion, empathy, morals and ethics to guide my daily life choices."
And sarcasm, in spades. Somehow you can always tell who's more mature in these situations by seeing which one uses less sarcasm.
"I often wonder how people like Hank make it through life seemingly unaware of how ‘the other’ lives in the same world he does but with countless less opportunities.”
Check his privilege, yada yada. Her upraising story is tragic and depressing, and may provide some explanation of her odd and confrontational personality. But it does not excuse it.