A realisation about working for myself

One of the best things about leading my own project has been not having to pretend I’m some sort of shit hot programmer. It’s nice to be able to to say “argh, that’s too hard, fuck it” or “I have no idea how this works” without worrying about my performance review.

Of course, I also like to claim that I’m providing a visible example that it’s okay not to be perfect or know everything, to help make it less scary for our newer contributors. But mostly it just feels good to realise that the pressure’s off, I don’t have to pretend to be what I’m not, and I can learn and get shit done at my own pace.

Syndicated 2013-06-13 05:20:48 from Infotropism

Travels: SFO for the weekend, PDX for Open Source Bridge

Hey, I am massively disorganised this week, but I figured I should probably mention that I’m going to be travelling and would like to catch up with people.

Saturday 15th to Monday 17th June, I will be in San Francisco, mostly in the Castro/Mission/ish area. Social activities planned so far include:

• Saturday afternoon: hanging out on Liz Henry’s patio in Bernal Heights, with laptops and snacks and generally socialising. Likely to be a hackerish/feminist crowd. If you know Liz and where she lives, just show up. If you don’t, then she says to email her and she’ll give you directions.
• Saturday evening: drinks and foods at The Liberties, corner of Guerrero and 23rd. My old local. I believe that a space has been booked for a group in either the back or side room. Not sure what time this’ll go to, but just a warning that I’m not likely to make a very late night of it what with jetlag and stuff.
• Sunday morning: brunch at Erica’s, and again, if you know her then you know the drill.

Sunday afternoon/evening are unscheduled, but I would expect that we’ll probably have some kind of dinner plans, so let me know if you’d like to be part of them.

Monday I’m hoping to have lunch with the Metaweb crew at Google (I’d better email them about that, huh?), meet up with some other folks (yipe, gotta email them too), and then off to PDX in the evening.

PDX: mostly I’m just gonna be at OSBridge. I’ll be keynoting Wednesday morning, and splitting my time between talks and the hack lounge. I think there has been talk of an outing to yarn and/or fabric stores at some point. Yes? Then, the weekend afterwards, some Growstuff folks are going to carpool and head out into the country to visit some farms and community gardens and stuff like that.

I would love to catch up with as many people as possible, so please, drop me a line if you’d like to have tea or burritos or go yarn shopping or whatever. See you soon!

Syndicated 2013-06-12 08:48:44 from Infotropism

Sadly, I suspect that cosplay would be frowned upon.

Not many people will be as excited about this as I am, but I just found out that the local Unitarian Universalist Church has a lecture about “Muscular Christianity and the English boarding school system” on Sunday July 14th. I am so there. </nerd>

Syndicated 2013-06-11 09:24:25 from Infotropism

Meetups, redux

Me: “Hey, housemate, do I want to go to the local technology group’s monthly hack night tonight? They posted about it to the mailing list but didn’t mention the time, the facilities available, or whether there’d be food, but I managed to figure out the location by looking at older mailing list posts, and I’m guessing it might be at 6pm, the same time they hold their meetups. There’s no information about it on their website.”

Housemate: “What’s the best case and worst case scenarios?”

Me: “Best case: it’s where and when I think it is. There are bunch of cool people hacking on awesome projects. I find someone who is knowledgeable but doesn’t yet have a project to hack on, and they pair with me on Growstuff. Someone has provided pizza, including good vegetarian options, and there are drinks other than beer. We get lots of good stuff done, and they sign up as a contributor long-term.”

Housemate: “And worst case?”

Me: “I take public transport for over an hour to get there, find a motley group of people, some of whom I dislike or who dislike me, others of whom just dismiss me as not a serious/cool enough coder. There is no food, and I haven’t had dinner, so I wind up low blood sugar and cranky. I try to work by myself but nothing goes right and I give up in frustration. I spend over an hour getting home again. In the rain.”

Housemate: “I have to say, the worst case sounds more likely. If you want to get out of the house that badly, you could just go for a walk.”

Housemate gives good advice. I’m going to go for a walk. I wonder if the grocery store has paneer?

Syndicated 2013-06-11 06:38:07 from Infotropism

Thankfulness

A while ago I realised I was starting to get ridiculously cranky and negative about things, so I’ve been trying to turn that around a bit. Lately whenever I catch myself feeling shitty about stuff, I mentally list three things to be thankful for. I try not to repeat stuff (at least not too close together), and I try to think the full sentence, “I’m thankful for…” for each thing, rather than just making a quick list. It seems to be helping so far. So if I seem slightly less cranky lately, that’s partly why.

PS. anyone who refers to this as a “life hack” will get to witness me rolling my eyes and/or miming sticking fingers down my throat, which is way better than the punch in the face that would previously have been my default response.

Syndicated 2013-06-01 02:52:28 from Infotropism