Dyepot, Teapot

So busy I haven’t updated my blog since May.

Since the last post: I co-organized Ignite Portland 3.
I staffed the pdx.rb booth at RailsConf.
I’ve been participating in biweekly Calagator code sprints (we’re hoping to have our 1.0 release in just a couple weeks).
I set up a few local Labyrinth training sessions for The Lost Ring, an ongoing ARG.
And then there’s the day job. No wonder I’m feeling exhausted and a little burned out.

What’s up for July?
Finishing the Calagator 1.0 roadmap.
OSCON. (I’m leading a panel on Tools for Local Communities and I need more participants. Know anyone doing interesting things with their local open source group? Send ‘em my way.)
A trip to the coast with Lucas to celebrate our fifth (!!!) anniversary. (Mom, can you catsit while we’re gone? It’s .. um, this weekend.)
My birthday is next week, which means I need to make more than vague plans if I want anyone to come do stuff with me … pub crawl on the 19th, anyone? (wishlist here if you were wondering).
Getting WhereCamp PDX planning off the ground.
Playing with my new camera.
Five-zillion other unfinished projects I am likely to forget.

In August? I plan to sleep. A lot. And stare blankly at the ceiling.

I went to the beach for Labor Day. Gorgeous as always. I wish we could get out there more often.

I’ve been sick lately, which has meant taking rest days, getting behind on lots of things, and much frustration. Right now I’m feeling slightly better, but tired. Please think healthy thoughts in my direction.

It also means the only things I’ve managed to work on are in the crafty category. (I’ve discovered I have a hierarchy of activities when not feeling well. On one end of the continuum is sleep, followed by reading Discworld books, knitting, and other fibery things, and on the other we have writing, programming, and going for long hikes. I probably overthink this issue.)

Thus, yarn. And a sweater. And scarves. And brightly colored wool.

Also, I’m going to be doing Crafty Wonderland again this month with my mom. It’s Sunday from 11-4 at Doug Fir. We’ll have yarn and jewelry and cute pins and bags and all of you in the Portland area should really stop in and say hello.

Finally, my last and most exciting note is that this month O’Reilly is presenting a series of essays by women in technology, including contributions by Selena Deckelmann, Gabrielle Roth, Dawn Foster, Shelly Powers, Kaliya Hamlin, and … me! I have no idea when mine will be up, but you can subscribe to the RSS feed and have all ~30 essays delivered directly to your feed reader. I am really thrilled to be a part of this project.

I’ve been neglecting my blog so much that even my mom noticed. Oops. I’m too busy again. Some neat things are coming out of that: a new group for local women who write code (or want to learn), much craftiness, talking with various people about contract projects, getting Yog’s Notebook in front of a wider audience (we were at the Portland Zine Symposium this past weekend). And so on. If you were expecting to hear from me and didn’t, this might be a good time to send a reminder.

The zine. It’s coming together nicely. We have stories to print. No one has run screaming at the sight of our publishing contract (yet). Two people have even thanked us for prompt and polite rejections. Buying InDesign was bad for my credit card, but it’s a dream to work with. Still need to figure out where we’re going to print it, and find out if I can get it into any local stores.

Publishing. It’s a weird business. I was thrilled to rediscover that the front of the Chicago Manual of Style is a guide to bookmaking, which has enough crossover for serial publications to be useful and interesting. I really wish someone had a similar kind of guide to serials, though. I’m discovering that print on demand is a hot topic right now, even though it’s immensely impractical for most kinds of publishing. I’m discovering that most people still don’t want to talk about business mechanics and economics. I don’t get this, because looking at the mechanics of things makes me feel like I have more control. Don’t other people want to know where to apply the lever?

Work. There isn’t much I can say in public. I’m feeling frustrated and burned out. We’re so close to finishing the project, and yet… not.

Planning. This is another area where it’s all about mechanics. You have resources, you have time, you have goals. Getting all of those to work together is mostly an issue of breaking it up into pieces and knowing where you can compromise. One of my coworkers likes to talk about goals as a kind of boundary. You use them to determine whether a given activity is inside or outside. So if the goal is to fix the car’s engine, you don’t waste time cleaning the windows. It doesn’t feel hard to me, but it must be more difficult than I think because a lot of people are really bad at this. They don’t pay enough attention to the details.

I’ll stop there, because I have a long list of bugs to fix. If anyone feels like commenting, tell me: what have you been wanting to talk about?

Addendum on planning: I’m really tired of people acting like I’m an asshole when I say, “Given our resources, the only way we can finish by Tuesday is by cutting a deliverable.” or anything similar. I’m not doing it to yank anyone around. It’s just my honest assessment of the situation. If you don’t like it, change the timeline or add more resources (though there’s a limit to what you can do with that second one–see Mythical Man Month).

I haven’t spent any time on my photos since I last posted. Instead, I’ve been burying myself in several books: Idlewild, The Android’s Dream, Ender’s Game (I never got around to reading it before now), The Cassini Division, and the first 50 pages of Herzog, which is the book club assignment this month, but I’m getting the impression that it’s more style than plot, so I don’t know if I’ll try to finish it.

Work is hectic. My job has changed a fair bit from what I expected when I started, and while I enjoy project management, sometimes it makes it hard to focus on just programming. But slowly I am getting the hang of test-driven development, and the project hasn’t exploded yet.

The lack of sunlight in our office is really getting to me, too. Only one side of the suite has windows, and almost nothing filters over to the developer area even on sunny winter days like today.

I’ll try to post something more interesting soon. I had an idea the other day to talk about how my knitting process is a lot like the way I program. “Do the simplest thing that could work.”

There are many, many evenings when I come home and don’t feel like doing anything. This is a normal feeling for the 9 to 5 wage-earner, I suspect. The last few years I’ve felt like I’m wasting my life if I sit around and do nothing after work, but if I force myself anyhow, I feel burnt out and tired. So that’s not good. But there’s so much I want to be doing, and I hate when I’m at work and the day is creeping along, and I think, “I could be doing something so much more meaningful with my time, if I didn’t have to be here right now”.

This is a long way of saying, “I don’t really feel like blogging right now, but all day I thought of things I wanted to write, so I’m forcing myself to do it anyhow.”

I miss the free time I had when I was only working sporadically or part time a few years ago, except it was a depressing and stressful experience in all other respects, so for now I’m keeping the day job. I just really wish I could pick what I worked on during the parts of the day when I feel motivated and energetic.

Anyhow, when I’m not at work, or moping, or finally managing to find the energy to code, I’ve been going to things like the Portland Ruby Brigade meetings, or Perl Mongers, or Portland BarCamp meetups, which often seems like my entire social life in the soccer off-season consists of drinking beer with programmers (not that this is bad, or even that different from the soccer season when my social life is drinking beer with soccer fanatics).

I always plan to take more pictures at these gatherings, but the lighting in most bars is pretty terrible, and I often forget to bring the camera out before everyone has already downed a few pints, which can lead to some strange photographs.

One of things I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, to the extent that I’ve been picking people’s brains about it during the various social hours, is the rockstar attitude in the tech world right now. There’s an article about it on Forbes.com that really grosses me out.

I asked [the founders of Yelp] where they thought they would be in five years. This is what they said:

Stoppelman: Sitting on top of a pile of money … [in unison with Simmons] … surrounded by women! Yeah! [high five]

This isn’t actually what first brought the issue to mind for me, though. Once again, it’s the job postings. Here’s the sort of thing I’ve been seeing lately: Rockstar Web Designer Wanted!, We’re looking for a rock star architect-coder (top 1%), ASP.Net/C# Rockstar Needed for Name Brand Luxury Website.

And maybe this is just me, but when I read the increasing numbers of job listings with this attitude, I think, “my god, now it’s not just enough that I’m smart and articulate and professional, but I have to be a cool kid on top of that? What the hell?”

Someone I mentioned this to at the BarCamp meetup said perhaps I just needed to try thinking of myself as a rockstar and not feel intimidated by the wording, but I’ve realized I don’t actually want to be one. I want to make amazingly cool things. That’s all. I don’t need a fan club, I don’t need the attitude, and I really don’t need the upkeep or to worry about whether wearing jeans is some kind of statement.

It’s not that all of the jobs are like this, but almost everything else is “Seeking Enterprise C#/.Net/Java Developer for Large Soulless Corporation”. That’s terrible in the other direction, and anyhow I’m still desperately hoping to avoid any significant contact with .Net and The Microsoft Way in my future activities.

So that’s my current existential angst, in not quite a nutshell. I thought if I wrote about what’s bugging me, I might get around to something actually interesting, but if not tonight, there’s tomorrow or the weekend. I want to talk about Atom XML, and Amazon’s new business direction, and the thought-provoking article about Howard Dean and the DNC in this week’s New York Times Magazine. And kittens. Did I mention I have a kitten?

Tags: life, work, rockstars