Lil Wiki

I want to share a project that took me over a year to complete, if it could be called complete now. Lil Wiki is a tool I built after my now four year old kept asking me to look things up for him. Once I had done so, he'd ask "What's this?" about every picture about five times until I was tired of reading the captions out loud. Somehow, mid-pandemic last year, I managed to build the first prototype of a web app that would look up articles on Wikipedia, get the images, then read the captions out loud. It did exactly the trick and I could give it to my son and feel like he was getting reasonably educational screen time. This week was "inspiration week" in the Wikimedia product department, where I'm now an engineering manager for a new team that will support our Trust and Safety department. I used that time to fix up some blemishes in the user experience, and make it ready for sharing. Specifically, I improved the app by opening a new modal each time a user clicks on a search result, rather than loading the images at the bottom like I'd done before. The tricky part had been getting the close button working, but it went quickly this time. Unfortunately, I can't remember why I was struggling with this feature six months ago. I also added a title to the new page/modal. This turned out to be slightly trickier than I first thought, because I had to pass the result name to the state through an attribute on the DOM element. I got it working after some trial and error.

While I wanted this post to detail all my trials, tribulations, and learnings while building this, it turns out this blurb is what I have the energy for. I felt very accomplished after working on this. Next up will be url parameters for image pages. Wish me luck!

Written in the five minutes before I see my kids

I just wanted to write a quick post because I did not have a great day at work. The only good thing was that I was more aware than I used to be of some of my more negative coping mechanisms. Basically, my debugging tools are no longer working locally and I'm trying everything that worked for everyone else to get them working and as of now, they STILL don't work. It made me feel pretty useless. I'm currently transitioning from management back to an individual contributor/software engineer role, and it feels really vulnerable. I'm afraid of not being productive or supporting my team adequately in this role. Today triggered all of my "not good enough" shame and I can't say I fully pulled myself out, which triggered another round of shame. What's funny about shame narratives is how quickly they wipe out everything I've ever achieved. It's so tempting to find someone to blame for how I feel (which I guess could be JetBrains) but trying to stay away from that also feels scary.
Anyways, time for lots of self-compassion and baby laughs tonight. I wish I had a nice, twee ending to this story, but hopefully I learned something about both debugging and myself today.

Sundown

Over the weekend, amidst everything shifting with coronavirus in the US, my mom died at her nursing home after struggling with dementia for years. It broke my heart, especially since I couldn't be there with her. In her memory, I wanted to share a link to the free pdf of Yellow Arrow Journal in which you can read "Sundown", my non-linear account of losing her to alcoholism and dementia. The theme of the journal is Time, which seems increasingly relevant right now.
My mother, Specie Love, wrote One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles Drew. You can read about Charles Drew on Wikipedia, but the story she wrote is actually about the history of the incredibly unequal treament black people have received at the hands of the medical system in this country and the indelible impact that has left
If you are reading this, I hope you are safe and healthy.

Self-compassion in the time of the coronavirus

Let's start with how silly my title is. There are probably going to be a lot of these "in the time of..." references. But it came to me today so I'm writing it. This blog is really just for me these days anyways (and you, lucky reader, if you stumbled across this).
I keep coming back to my need for self-compassion. The need is not just, in fact, for me to feel good, but I'm realizing that not being compassionate with myself has prevented me from most of the meaningful accomplishments I've longed for.
As a side note, I gave a lightning talk a few weeks back at Wikimedia All Hands on Self-Compassion and it may be one of the highlights of my professional career (aside from the Solarpunk talk I gave the year before).
I realize not everyone has heard of self-compassion. Kristin Neff has written extensively about it and has good examples on her website. To me, what's important is that it's about recognizing pain and giving myself kindness instead of criticism.
Right now, people in the US are starting to panic about coronavirus (at least, according to my social medias). I am trying not to panic too. I am enormously privileged and the truth is that the impact on me is likely to be much, much less than for a lot of other people. However, I still see the future shrinking up and disappearing in front of me. I imagine all my dreams to be suddenly out of reach. Of course, this is happening not because of COVID-19, but because this is my default reaction to stress.
When I step back and try to use self-compassion though, I see how I'm talking to myself, and how it is my own view that I am unable to cope with these stressors that is hurting not only me, but the other people I do not even think about in my panic. And because I am panicking, I want to hoard my own resources, money, time, health, and can't see how I could help anyone else.
I don't know what I have to offer to others in all this. Money is a good first step, and if my skills can be useful in another way, I hope to be able to provide that. Accepting myself and the situation with kindness will be a necessary first step towards any contribution though.

New Year, New Resolutions

I see it was a couple months ago I pledged to update this blog more. I've been writing a post in my head recently, and I'm hoping I can capture it to some degree. I've been thinking about this journey (to quote the Bachelor), and I'm still not sure where it's going. Over the last couple of years, I've had a lot of guilt about not being the "typical" software engineer. Even if I compare myself to other career changers, I feel like my path has been different. I'm not sure I know enough typical Computer Science concepts to pass some coding tests (even though I have passed the coding test for a Senior Software Engineer role), but when I set out to learn it, I never get far. It's because I struggle to learn when the only goal is to feel better about myself. If I'm coming from a place of insecurity, I don't stay motivated.
I wrote that over a month ago and I'm just now posting it.
I'm currently in a time of reset, as we've passed the winter solstice and the year draws to a close. I've had a few dreams die in the last year, and my own idea of myself is changing. In the meantime, I've embraced the fact that raising my children will take up a lot of my attention right now. I've also realized that my children are not my biggest barrier to what I want to accomplish in writing, coding, career, and creativity. The bigger "blocker" is me, and not knowing what I want. There's work worth doing, to slow climate change, to protect the rights of those less powerful, to try to impact politics, but I struggle to know where my work would be most, or at all, impactful. I feel like I've been flailing about, investing my energy too broadly to be useful, and in the meantime, shying away from anywhere that makes me too vulnerable, too seen. I'm not sure how I can change that, but my resolution for the upcoming year is to be more focused, and goal-oriented, in areas which matter not just to me, but to the world at large.

Inspiration to write more

A coworker mentioned the term "Radical Vulnerability" and a quick Google search led me to an article by Alaina Leary on practicing Radical Vulnerability in online spaces (link). It talks about the importance of boundaries and safe spaces. This blog is only safe because I rarely share it.  However, if I come up with my boundaries for posts here, perhaps I could start writing more and sharing it.

Two years

Welp, I never made it past my "Placeholder Post" two years ago. In the past two years, I've begun managing my team, had my son go from baby to toddler, and was pleasantly surprised by my daughter. (To be clear, I knew I was pregnant, but I had not expected to be pregnant and I did not learn her sex before her birth.)
It's been a lot of change, and yet it's also been two of the most stable years of my life. I've been living in the same place, working at the same organization, and on the same team. I've been a bit of a career vagabond (job hopper is how I'd describe it when I'm being less generous to myself) so I've both valued and struggled with that stability. Especially given the state of US politics and world events (especially the climate crisis), I've wondered if I'm having the best impact I could. I haven't found any conclusions to those struggles, but I've come to realize I'm far from alone in them. The best part about my current role has been getting to know my teammates and learning how common it is to struggle with uncertainty about my own contributions.
I'm posting this without much conclusion, just to practice at putting it out there. I will be trying to post again shortly. I'm off to Prague with the baby next week for leadership training so I'll have a lot of time for reflection. (Okay, that may be overly optimistic).