Life
Word of the Year: Equipoise
When I started thinking about my word of the year, the image I kept returning to was an object at a Lagrange point. That’s one of the five places in the orbits of two celestial bodies where a smaller object is effectively balanced between the competing gravitational forces of the larger objects. It’s related to…
10 reps, 3x a day: Burnout recovery and PT
I don’t know why I thought burnout recovery was a single event. Nothing is like that. When I went on leave, one of the things I did was go to my doctor and get signed up for physical therapy to rehabilitate my elbow, because I have tendinitis, possibly from yanking a 30-pound suitcase off a…
What I learned about my brain from playing 300+ hours of Stardew Valley
Yes, I got the Switch at the start of November. Yes, that is a lot, so many hours. Many of them were on planes and in waiting rooms, but many more were not. Yes, I do have a lot of internalized shame/misogyny/self-criticism about playing vidya games that much, and I’m working really hard on not…
Like butter across too much bread
I knew it was coming. My team knew it was coming. My peers knew it was coming. One of the things we know about developer advocacy is that there is a really high rate of burnout — it’s because we care so much. There isn’t any time that I’m not running a constant background process…
What did you think was going to happen?
My mom taught 6th and 7th grade (often a gifted/STEM) class for the better part of two decades. If you think back, you may remember this as not your peak decision-making time of life. You can spot my mom’s former students by their love of history, language, learning and connections, and by a slight flinch…
BuJo Pig
It’s a joke about bourgeoisie performative productivity and how it intersects with bullet journaling… Nevermind. Bullet journaling is: a) a productivity system that uses a journal to capture to-do lists, stray thoughts, and planning, with various levels of elaboration b) an art form ostensibly about planning journals, but also worth time and devotion in itself,…
Satiety
In Disney’s Fantasia, Mickey, the sorcerer’s apprentice, enchants brooms to magically do his tedious chore. The problem is, Mickey is only an apprentice and although he can get things started, he is not wise enough to give the brooms an end point, an “enough”. I’ve been thinking about this concept a lot, lately, satiety. (It…
A Parable of the Polar Vortex
The best time to shovel your driveway is immediately after it snows, but failing that, any time before you have driven on it. Driving on fresh-fallen snow compacts it into something between “ice” and “pure evil”, depending on the temperature, humidity of the air, humidity of the snow, etc. I just went out and shoveled…
The Year That Was 2018
A wrap-up of my year’s travel, including links to conference talks, and photos of places I’ve been.
This job is all the best parts of going to college
I used to say that technical writing is an endless series of research papers, and if I had realized that when I started doing it, I might have studied harder at the Java class I flunked. But not really, because the thing I loved about research papers was reading the primary text, and a bunch…
Upcoming appearances
Velocity Berlin
Minneapolis DevOps Meetup
DeliveryConf