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).

Placeholder Post

Okay, this isn't exactly a placeholder, but I've started so many posts in the last year that I haven't finished that calling it one may be the only way I'll publish it. I decided I would publish something after attending Wikimania last week, which was one of the best experiences of my life. Since I haven't updated this blog, I must explain that four months ago I began working for the Wikimedia Foundation as a Software Engineer on their fundraising tech team. This was a hard transition because I had to leave LaborVoices, where I had grown so much and had gotten to solve amazing problems. However, it was made easier because in my then-new role, I get to be working on exclusively open source software, and for an organization with truly global reach and impact.
If I had any doubts about my new role, they were dispelled in the last week. The moment I felt most joyful about the work I get to do was when I sat in this session on how marginalized knowledge can be represented on Wikipedia(s). While there are still huge barriers to that work (that the panel participants described far better than I ever could), I came away feeling proud to in some small way contribute to the platform that allows these conversations to take place.
What made Wikimania so much more fun was that I brought James! Now 14 months old, his presence made it such that a work trip became an adventure. With help from my husband and a wonderful Canadian babysitter we met online (did I mention we were in Montreal?), I was able to do the juggling act that is a work trip with a baby. I'm so lucky to have the flexibility and resources to be able to do that. Pushing a stroller back and forth during a Susan Herman's keynote was pretty fun, though having to run out of a talk on the sustainability of Wikipedia was less so. However, the good far outweighed the bad, as I struck up conversations with other parents who'd brought their babies, or who missed them. Given how afraid I was that having a child would ruin my career, it was very affirming to be in this space and be able to walk (and sometimes blur) the line between my professional self and my mother self.
As I wrote about a year ago, in the last year, while I struggled with burnout at times (especially when sleep was scarce), I have mostly found myself newly engaged with work, really letting go of expectations of my own personal success in the wake of desire to effect real change in the world. I'm still learning how I can do that in a way that uses my skills and limitations but between my old job, my new job, volunteer work with a nonprofit here in Baltimore, organizing work around environmental justice, and returning to creative writing, I'm feeling on a better path than ever before.
As I wrap up this "placeholder", I can see I'm almost gushing. I'm on a post-conference high, so I'll admit that I don't feel this way every day or even close to it. Like so many others in this country, I drown in the news every day, especially this past week. I mourn on a daily basis for my own naive assumptions about fairness and justice that feel mocked by the political reality, not just of this administration, but highlighted by our current president and Congress. I maintain some sanity by taking small steps through work, what activism I feel capable of while caring for James and myself, and challenging myself to keep learning about the work ahead. I'm heartened by Baltimore's decision last night to take down its confederate monuments and am grateful to the amazing people doing the work that made that happen. While I no longer spend as much time doing the "grassroots" work, I hope my skills can support the efforts of those brave souls.

A letter to my son at three weeks old

Dear James,

You were born on June 12^th, 2016 at 2:39am. I asked you to be born at that time and you listened. I had no idea the toll your birth would take on me. Not in labor, which is what I prepared for, but in my life. It wasn't the impact I thought it would have. I wrote a blog post a couple months ago that I never posted about my worries. I was afraid of not being as good at work. I was afraid that I would lose myself and all the things I loved and I would blame you. You have taken none of these things from me. While I'm not back at work yet, I've already found myself thinking about it and having new ideas and feeling energized to return. I'm going to miss these days with you, but the truth is that I feel like a few quality minutes together are as good as one day where I'm feeling trapped and bored. I love the late night feedings, except when I'm tired. I love watching you learn new things. I also love my job and the career I've built for myself. I love it more because you exist. I spend my days writing code to helping workers' voices be heard. I want to do this all the more because any one of these workers could be you. I look at you, James, a white man growing up relatively affluently in the US and I know you could be anyone. You could be anyone and I would love you the same. It's funny because when other people see your picture or meet you they say, “What a perfect baby!” or “Wow, he is cute!” and I feel proud but I also think, I hope every mother gets to hear this about her child. Because when I look at you James, I think you're special and I don't. I don't think you're special for being cute, for being healthy (which we now know you are after your NICU stay), for being white, for being male, or for being anyone but yourself. You are my child and I love you for being in my life. I love you for the way your father lit up when he first saw you. I love you for the joy on the faces of my parents, in laws, and siblings when they met you. Even if I didn't get to see it, I love you for the joy the people I love felt knowing you were in the world. I try not to overshare your picture because I would hate to foist it on someone who didn't want to see it. I am hesitant in how I post about you on social media because I don't know who is reading my posts and I want to protect you.

Two days into your life, you swallowed milk wrong and started gasping for air. The hospital staff took you away and I believed they would return telling me you died. I also thought it was my fault. They came back and explained this happens sometimes when babies are learning to eat and that you had recovered on your own, as all they'd done is put you on a warmer. You started your NICU stay that day and after testing you for inflammation, they announced they were keeping you for seven days to have you on antibiotics. Honestly, I feel I should have been upset but I was on some level relieved. I hated missing those days, but I was scared I wasn't the best caregiver for you. I felt grateful that someone else would be responsible for keeping you alive. It felt like a gift. I got to visit you and enjoy you and learn from the nurses how to take care of you. I started feeling joyful at the idea that other people could take care of you, as I realized it would mean I could go back to work but come home every day to you. By the time you came home, I had learned the gift was different than I thought. While you were in the NICU I had been triggered by a lot of family, personal, and hospital dynamics and my anxiety level was higher than ever. I had to get on short-term medication—something I'd always avoided—and saw my therapist for an extra session. When you came home, I felt even more protective of you and of myself than before. I realized that of course my first job is to keep you alive, but after that I have a lot of other responsibilities to you, to myself, and to your father. I owe it to you to protect your emotions, but only as much as I can. If there is nothing I can do, I owe it to you to walk away, maybe just for a few minutes, maybe until you need me. I owe it to myself to take care of my needs and to make sure your father and you, as you are able to understand, know what they are. I owe it to your father to help him meet his needs, but not at the expense of my own. That is how we will become a family that can do the hard things we need to do. I'm not sure what all of those things are yet, but I've realized doing hard, worthwhile things is important to me. The worthwhile part is important, as I don't want to be a family that does hard, pointless things.

James, I'm not sure when you'll be able to understand all this. But know, that your mother is so glad she has you in her life. I had my doubts during pregnancy but I don't doubt my decision to have you anymore. I also don't doubt my decision to return to work, or to be a software developer, or to work at LaborVoices. I love the life I've built and I love it more because now I have you in it. I left social work, I learned to code, so that I could have a meaningful career and have you and it was the right decision. I wish everyone had what I have—a life they want. I'm debating whether to post this to my blog because it's very personal for me, though probably not for you yet. I feel like so far in your life, you've done nothing but share your joy with others. So many NICU nurses told me how much they loved you. And yet, for me, sharing joy terrifies me. I don't want anyone to crush it, because I believe it's fragile and tender. I look at you, though, and wonder if it isn't a strong force, something that can't be killed.

Love,

Mom

Editor Practice

The last year of my life has been one of major transition. I've just moved out of the city I've lived longest of anywhere in my life (seven years!). I didn't move far but making that decision felt huge. Within the past six months, I got married and promptly convinced my husband to adopt the world's cutest cat, changed jobs, and then decided to buy this house. It's no wonder that my attention to coding has slipped. (Even now, our cat Dolly is perched in my lap, occasionally scrambling to block my keyboard). However, using the philosophy that got me to learn to code in the first place, this week I remembered that it's never too late to start again. 

As is typical for my self-directed coding sessions, I began by playing around with a few old code bases before settling on starting a new project, one I've had in the back of my mind for a long time. Of course, as soon as I had created the rails project and went to edit it, my usual text editor crashed. I decided to return to using vim, a tool I had developed some proficiency with in my last job. Curious about how to use vim as a full IDE, I went looking for resources and found Janus. As I was reading the documentation, I decided to complete vim's built-in tutorial (which can be reached by typing vimtutor in the terminal). Previously, any skills I'd picked up had been as needed and through specific Googling, but it was nice to run through a structured set of commands, and I was shocked by what vim could do. Since then I've begun working on my personal project with MacVim and enjoyed the process, even though there's some adjustment. This blog post was helpful in outlining some of what I'd learned on my own, and pointing me in the direction of new plugins to install. I highly recommend Vim, even if just so you can get the reaction I did once at a code sprint ("You use vim?!?")...though not sure if that was really compliment.

Like Myself

It’s been a long time since I posted anything to this blog, so I doubt anyone is reading it (if they ever were). However, I woke up early this morning, and found myself re-reading old entries. Since my last post, I’ve received some criticism that made me afraid to return to writing, but I actually found myself proud of my old posts. Yes, they were a little cheesy, but one thing I learned as a social worker is that there’s a real place for cheesiness, especially when you mean it. And I did mean every word I wrote in those posts.
I could recap the last year, but instead I’ll just say that I have no regrets about the choices I made. While I loved the people I worked with in my past career, I believe I made the right choice for myself and for them to leave. I can support myself and others so much better now that I make choices to do work that makes me happy. While of course there are still time where work is tedious or people frustrate me, I love what I do. The moment when a complex problem becomes clear feels just as good as it did when I first learning. And I’ve found a new joy in taking complex and difficult to understand code, and re-writing it to be easier to update and fix.
Recently, bootcamps like the one I did have become more popular and accessible, so a lot of people ask me if they should do one. Rather than give advice, I usually ask: do you like to code? Because if you don’t enjoy coding, don’t do a bootcamp.
More importantly, only do it if you really want a job as a developer. If you don’t , find something you do love and find a way to balance your love of it with making money. That’s certainly not very easy, but it’s a lot easier than trying to make money doing something you hate. I am so much happier doing work that fits my personality than trying to make my personality fit my work. But the really hard part is that it means I have to show people my personality, and know what that is. And that’s terrifying.
It is funny though the little ways people surprise you when you tell the truth. A couple months ago, I went to coffee with one of the owners of my company, Social Driver. He asked me what I missed most about being a social worker. I told him about the white board I used to have in my office where I posted weekly inspirational quotes, and how much they meant to me and to some of my clients. The next day at our all staff meeting there was a package in the corner. During the time in our meeting that we call Victory Lap, where we acknowledge special effort over the last week, the owner mentioned me and said how much my story had touched him, and then presented me with a white board! I almost cried.
I recently posted this quote:

I feel like it sums up what I'm working on now.