10 May 2018 |
Professional Development,
Community
Video-freakin’-interview! Wowowowoww. Code for America is putting together a video interviewing people from brigades who have careers in public interest technology. That includes government, and part of the focus is to show how helping the brigade network builds our digital capabilities within government. Questions they’re asking include:
- What do you do?
- What led you to working in Public Interest Tech?
- What has been the biggest challenge working in government?
- Tell me about the most rewarding experience you’ve had as a result of the work you’re doing.
- Have you ever considered taknig your skills and experience to the private sector? If so, why haven’t you?
- What advice would you give to someone interested in working in Public Interest Tech?
- What’s something that people don’t know about your work?
That’s a lot to think about and cover! And this is the culmination of my week. Since it’s recorded, I think it will be a walk in the park compared to the other things I had going on. Yesterday I was this month’s Date + Donuts speaker, and it was my first time talking about a work project at an event open to the public. Tuesday I had to give a presentation about the same project to another department who’s interested in it. That was a little easier to do because I’ve had more experience, but it’s always a little nerve wracking not knowing if they’re going to be hostile or friendly, or not knowing how skeptical they’re going to be of your project. After that I met with a member of Public Health’s PLACE team who is working on a bunch of efforts for Vision Zero, Homelessness, and Sex Trafficking. That turned out to be a great meeting and we’re optimistic about collaborating in the future.
This weekend is already Mother’s Day. Next weekend we’re going to the Renaissance Faire with Nikk and Traci. The weekend after that is my trip to the Bay Area, continuing into the Code For America conference where I’m supposed to be on a panel (no further details yet!).
30 Apr 2018 |
Life
I really dropped the ball on writing this month! This will be only the 4th post… and plenty has happened. I think I’m feeling the fatigue of feeling like I need to constantly be productive. Stopping to reflect feels like falling behind. Nevermind that I still waste way too many hours every day refreshing Facebook, Instagram, and my RSS feeds.
April 12th was the second Grand Park happy hour meeting of “WomenLeadLAC”. It’s hosted by Sachi Hamai and a lot of the top brass attend. This time, they included a scarf exchange, where you pick someone else’s scarf and contact them to build a connection.
I met several knew people, including Rachel who works in the CEO and is interested in GIS and open data. I even went with her to attend the female government employee Toastmasters group that meets in City Hall. I met a woman named Julie who works for the State, and who’s an active runner and organizer for the Firecracker Run. I attended Jose Soto’s group, the Data Science Forum. He seemed to be having a bit of trouble justifying the continuation of the group. I’d love to help, but I already have a lot on my plate.
On April 19th, Lawrence, Amy, and I went on an impromptu overnight camping trip in Anza Borrego! We took the truck, tossed our bikes and camping gear in the back, and booked it to the desert. After setting up our tent, we rode our bikes through Borrego Springs to check out the giant metal sculptures. It was late afternoon by the time we were done and the winds had picked up. We now know what it feels like to ride in 25-50mph winds on dirt roads. Back at camp, we managed to get a fire going to cook dinner. Unfortunately the rising winds began to blow the embers all over the camp site and were threatening to lift our tent into the air. We put out the fire and huddled in the tent, but then we decided that staying in the tent couldn’t be any worse than being outside so we threw our sleeping mats and sleeping bags into the truck bed and slept there. The sky was clear and the stars shown bright. We had a great time stargazing and the walls of the truck bed were good at blocking the wind. The next morning we drove the truck offroading into the Borrego Badlands for some stunning views.
I’ve been doing a good job with weekend bike rides. First it was the Emerald Necklace ride with Dan on April 15th. We rode from Memorial Park station in Pasadena all the way to the Rio Hondo River path, followed that south to Whittier Narrows then came back up along the San Gabriel River. We ate lunch at Burrito La Palma and then met up with the BikeSGV ride in Temple City. Funnily enough, several people that I knew were there - Machiko and her partner Max, and then Johnny of Milestone Rides. Hunter and I rode back to DTLA from there with a woman from the BikeSGV group named Blair, who happened to be a City employee that works a floor away from Hunter at City Hall! Small world.
Next weekend (April 22) was the CicLAvia ride with Hunter and Aaron from KPCC. We took the Gold Line to Azusa, then took Foothill to the San Dimas end of CicLAvia and biked the route to Claremont. Along the way we encountered Dan and Johnny! Small world again. We continued east through Upland to eat at a cute little family-run Indian restauranted named Ashirwad the Blessings. The dosa was so good! From there, it was a quick and easy ride to the Upland Metrolink station, which we took all the way back to downtown.
This past weekend (April 29) I rode to Culver City in the morning for Murriel’s LATechLadies brunch. Then in the late afternoon, Lawrence, Amy, and I met up with Lauren, Alex, Hunter, Dalton, Kevin, and Dylan at Highland Park Brewery for a sunset ride up to Griffith Park via the LA River bike path. We rode up Commonwealth Ave., then Vista del Valle Drive to an area known as the Helipad, or the blacktop. From there we watched the sunset and the moonrise. The uphill was brutal, but I think I’ve gotten a slightly better handle on it after doing Elysian Park a few times.
Saturday the 21st, Leonard was in town and I hung out at his birthday pool party! It was also the 1-yr anniversary of his first date with Jason! I saw Grace last Thursday at the DIY Cocktail Funderaiser. Last week I also went to the new Monday night Westside Hack Night at Carbon Five. Friday was the Arts Datathon, where I hung out all day with Emily. It was interesting learning about so much military and veteran history at the Patriotic Hall, as part of the track I participated in. We looked up the origins of a Purple Heart medal in the County DMVA’s collection and pieced together a bit of a WWII soldier’s past.
Reading this month has been a little slow. I might be overwhelmed by the sudden stack of books I accumulated. NAC activites have been a little slow as well. It’s easy for it to be out of sight and out of mind since communication is only through Slack and group calls are only once a month. I’ve spent more time doing cross stitch. The project for Sonny’s baby is on hold because I need more gold metallic thread. I’ve made a lot of progress on my Field of Fucks. No new work done on the Great Wave. I periodically get the urge to start on additional new crafting projects. Tapestry weaving. Modern macrame tapestries hanging off of a branch. Leatherworking. Bulky crocheted bins. Quilting. Sewing clothes.
DAMN, I still haven’t re-assessed my goals for the year. I’ll try to tackle that later today.
Edit: Add onto the list of things to make: zines about things (crafty things? programming things? civic tech things?), and cool programming or civic tech merch.
17 Apr 2018 |
Reading
I finished another book - Dan Ariely’s The Upside of Irrationality - and finished digitizing my notes. There’s a lot of great stuff in the book, both things that feel intuitive because of personal experiences and heuristics as well as things that are non-intuitive but proven through experiments and data.
There were two chapters that stood out for me personally. Chapter 6 - On Adaptation was about hedonistic adaptation. Just as our bodies are able to physically adapt, our minds are able to adapt to our environment and experiences. This applies to both negative and positive experiences. It’s why we feel compelled to “keep up with the Joneses”. Thing that we anticipate will increase our happiness are eventually adapted to so that we are again at our baseline levels of happiness. We adapt to life changes that seem catastrophic, and eventually have a new baseline for happiness in that situation as well. How do we utilize this knowledge to our benefit? Plow through the annoying tasks so that we adapt to them and they seem less bad. Conversely, interrupt your happy experiences so that you don’t adapt and your elevated level of happiness is prolonged.
Chapter 10 - The Long-Term Effects of Short-Term Emotions described a series of experiments that showed how our emotions influence our decisions long after those emotions have faded. Merely experiencing emotions through watching movie/tv clips and then recalling a time in your own life when you experienced something similar was enough to make a difference in behavior. Once we make the decision to behave a certain way, it becomes part of how we see ourselves and then influences our future behavior. This resonated a lot with me, but I’d have to devote more time to it if I want to write about why.
Next up I’m reading a book called Organize Tomorrow Today by Dr. Jason Selk and Tom Bartow. Thinking Fast and Slow is the one I should be reading as it’s constantly mentioned as the book about behavioral economics but it’s also really thick. -__-‘ A problematic aspect of reading all these behavioral economics books is that it’s hard to know which studies and claims actually hold up to scrutiny and which don’t. I’ve seen a lot of mentions of questionable studies, failed replication, and leaps of logic within the field but no mention of a better alternative. While reading something that requires you to be open to challenging your beliefs, I find it hard to maintain a critical mind (especially as a non-expert in this field).
Just gonna throw these links here for future reference:
05 Apr 2018 |
Personal Development
I’ve read in a book about stress, that an effective way to combat the anxiety you feel before a task is to tell yourself the physical symptoms you feel are due to excitement instead.
I’ve also read that the best way to grow is to put yourself in situations outside your comfort zone and I’ve been doing a lot of that in the last several years. I used to say ‘Yes’ to things without any consideration for a long term strategy/goal. Now, I’ve learned to say ‘No’ to some things but also to say ‘Yes’ to the the things that help me grow.
I still feel the anxiety every time, but with a few experiences under my belt I can now tell myself that it will turn out fine. I’ve been able to speak in front of an audience without making a total fool of myself. I can do it again!
04 Apr 2018 |
Crafting,
Programming
I recently came across this post from @sailorhg, which I really like and also find adorable (in the best way). I’ve similarly had to struggle with reconciling my ‘artistic’ and ‘rational’ sides. The idea that “Making Things” is the intersection of Art and Engineering resonates with me strongly. I never seriously tried to develop my artistic skills. I was convinced that it would be futile because I had no inherent talent. I took piano, er-hu, and drawing lessons but found it frustrating. My body didn’t seem to want to consistently produce a result that was up to my standards. Instead, I spent my time coding in HTML or digitally editing images in Paint Shop Pro.
Ultimately, I gravitated towards activities I considered “craft” rather than “art”. I’ve seen many projects that make the connection between 2-D art and 2-D digital mediums, like this excellent concept of a project. I’ve struggled to figure out how to incorporate 3-D crafts like sewing, knitting, etc.
One idea I had a couple years ago was to use stylized map tiles to generate simple embroidery patterns. As a MaptimeLA project, members would stitch each tile’s features onto fabric (essentially a quilt square), and then add their own landmarks to that geographical area. The quilt squares would then be sewn together, thus creating our own community-generated representation of Los Angeles. Deciding on standards for the common features was very off-putting and ended up stalling the project. I didn’t know how to handle all the suggestions in a way that was collaborative but still maintained my vision. I was also stuck on the technical aspect of how to easily transfer the computer-generated patterns onto the fabric. I’m still working it out because I want to bring back the project. I’ve considered starting on it solo as a prototype, but I worry that doing this is just a way for me to avoid facing difficult things!
I’ve wanted to create an app that lets me visually create pattern charts for knitting and crochet, but I think that would be beyond my ability to do on my own. It’s not the coding logic, but the graphical representation that I don’t feel up to.
Using wool felt for UI design prototyping in a physical medium seems interesting.
Is there a way I can teaching programming concepts using crafts? Arrays versus dictionaries, objects, classes, functions. This could work as a stop-motion video, or a fast motion video of the crafting process. Is the process representative of the concept, or is it only the resulting pieces that are used to demonstrate the concept?
What concepts need simple explaining? I think - the invisible things which we take for granted. For the average person, there is no way to visualize how the internet works beneath the surface.
- How do browsers render webpages?
- How does HTTP work?
- How do web servers work?
- What happens when you navigate to a URL?
- How do load balancers work?
- What happens when code is compiled?
Writing these blog posts has become a nice way to take a break and brainstorm for ideas!