Monthly Archives: April 2016

Publicly Available Information

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Okay, I am probably going to get a lot of flack for this blog post, but I am writing it anyway and I don’t really give a damn. If someone can give me a compelling reason to think I am wrong, I am happy to hear it.

So, yesterday I posted a few pictures of packages I have received on Twitter. I had several of my friends reach out to me to ask me if I meant to post my address on Twitter.

I didn’t post it on purpose, but I didn’t think that it was that big of a deal. I understand that one of the big things that tech feminists have been mentioning people doing to terrorize them is to “dox” them by posting their phone numbers and addresses on malicious websites where people who mean them harm can see them.

I am not in any way discounting how terrifying that can be and they have every right to be upset by that behavior, but this is my take on things…

Back in 1985…

Back when I was growing up we had these things called “phone books.” They were large books that arrived in the mail each year that had a listing of the names and addresses of every person who lived in your county. If I wanted to look up a classmate’s phone number, I could haul this stupid large book out and look up their last name. Sometimes there were a few people that all had the same name and you would have to call a few of them to find the right person.

We didn’t have caller ID, so you never knew who was calling you. You couldn’t block malicious numbers, but most calls weren’t malicious. More often than not it was a telemarketer and you learned after a while that if you picked up on the first ring and there was a long pause it was probably a telemarketer and you hung up on them.

Having your address and phone number publicly available didn’t used to be a big deal.

The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!!

The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!!

Today

My address is publicly available. Wisconsin (for now) has open records. I went through a divorce last year and never moved. You can go to the Wisconsin Circuit Court access and look me up and find out where I live.

Back when I was starting out I was really stupid and printed my home address on my business cards. I handed these out for a while before I realized this was a really stupid fucking thing to do and got new ones printed that only had my personal phone number on them. Then I just started handing out pug stickers with no identifying information whatsoever on them.

Point is, if someone wants to find out where I live, it’s not hard.

I know there is an outside chance that someone I don’t know will show up at my door and do something to me, but that possibility doesn’t worry me very much. I live in a town in rural Wisconsin that has no public transportation. Most of the developers I am aware of who live in my area live in downtown Madison because it means they don’t have to have a car. In order to get out to where I live they have to find a car and drive half an hour to where I am. My parents live closer than that and even they don’t like to drive to where I live. That’s just the people who live here. If you’re some asshole in The Bay Area you would have to fly and drive out here to mess with me.

Every one of my neighbors has a gun. I have had my neighbors call my parents when my ex husband and I got home early from a trip and they saw someone moving around in my house.

If someone intends to harm me, it would take a lot of trouble and money for them to do so. My not publicly posting my address somewhere is not going to prevent someone who is intent on harming me from doing so. I also will not hesitate to call the cops if someone shows up that I don’t know and didn’t invite.

Risk Assessment

Of all the things I worry about, having a stranger show up at my house is pretty low on my list.

I worry about my house burning down while I am at a conference. I worry about my pugs choking on something and dying. I worry about losing my job and having to relocate to San Francisco because no one will let me work remotely.

I am willing to accept the possibility that at some point in the future someone could show up at my house with the intention to harm me. Someone could send a bomb in the mail to hurt me and my pugs. Any number of things could happen.

I just think the odds of that happening is so unlikely that I don’t think it honestly matters that much if I inadvertently post a picture of my address on Twitter.

I don’t want to spend every waking moment of my life worried that someone out there is out to get me.

My personal experience with this community has been that it has been incredibly supportive. I wrote several blog posts recently during a bout of depression and I had at least five people reach out to me personally via phone and email to support me and give me helpful advice.

I know a number of people have been poorly treated by strangers on the internet and I empathize with them. I know that a well known female developer in Madison was stalked by another developer in Madison and that was completely not okay. She went to a lot of trouble to hide her address, which was not publicly available, and had it revealed by the police to someone who had presented a clear and real danger to her. I am not trying to discredit her experiences by saying that because nothing bad has happened to me so far that her fears are irrational.

I took down the photos because enough people seemed worried about it. But I just find it strange that a bunch of people acted like I posted my social security number and my credit card number on Twitter and just trusted people to not steal my identity or show up at my house and murder me. I have found 98% people to generally be decent and respectful. I would prefer to focus on that percentage rather than judge on the smaller number who make life difficult. If I am proven wrong I will be the first to admit it. But I would like to give people the benefit of the doubt that they are not planning to attack me just because they can find out where I live.

Self Destructive Tendencies

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I have a problem and I am writing about it because I want to know if anyone else has the same problem.

When I start a new project I get really overwhelmed.

My dream project for the last few years has been to write a synthesizer application. Every time I start to think about writing this application I get incredibly overwhelmed by a lot of things:

  • How much math do I need to know how to do?
  • What kind of synthesizer do I want to write?
  • Oh shit, everything is in C++. How much C++ do I need to know?!
  • Can I use this audio programming book that’s in C++ if everything in it assumes you’re using Windows?
  • How do I do the user interface?
  • How do I fit all these little elements on an iPhone? Can I lay it out differently?
  • Do I need to know OpenGL to do a decent user interface?

So I get super overwhelmed and I sit down to try to figure out one of these things.

I sit down to learn C++ so I can read the book on audio programming.

I figure out that I don’t understand the math and I get freaked out and I try to learn the math.

Then at a certain point I get overwhelmed, feel stupid, and curl up on the floor crying because I am stupid and will never amount to anything and I should just give up on programming because I am a failure and should just go back to working at Target.

This doesn’t just happen with my personal projects. Sometimes this happens at work too.

At my previous job I had to learn a bunch of stuff about network programming. I have never done network programming and I honestly never want to do it ever again. I had people telling me to play with Paw to learn network programming. I don’t know what Paw is supposed to do. If I don’t know what it is doing, how do I play with it? I have no context for anything I am doing, so I wind up in this creepy, paralyzing mental mode where I am grappling with a bunch of unfamiliar terminology that has no context and if I can’t do my job I will get fired and I can’t pay my mortgage and I will be homeless and it makes me curl up on the floor breathing into a brown paper bag.

How do I avoid this?

Learn by Doing

I know from my own personal experience that I learn better by doing.

For a really long time I learned by doing a lot of tutorials. The first time I would do a tutorial I would have the overwhelming paralyzing feeling of not knowing what I was doing, but then I would do the tutorial over and over again a few times until I got the feel for what I was doing.

Back when I was a full time student and had the luxury of time, I could do this 60-80 hours a week. It was kind of magical about how by the third or fourth time I totally understood what I was doing.

Then I went out into the job market and started to mentally feel like I couldn’t do this and have tried to find ways around it. I used to keep trying to do tutorials, but I would only have time to do them once and I would be stuck in the paralyzed overwhelming stage, so I stopped doing that.

The only way to learn and grow is to write code.

You start with a blank project and you ask yourself how to make something work. That gives you the first step you have to take to find your answer.

I know this. I have experienced this. So why does it always take me by surprise when I figure this out for the fortieth time??

Lazy Information Initialization

I noticed I tend to get overstimulated and unfocused when I have to start on something. I tend to shave yaks.

I think that I can read a book on math for 3D graphics programming and learn all about that before I start a project rather than going in and just learning what I need to know to do what I need to do.

I do things that seem like work but aren’t actually productive.

I know on some level that trying to learn this difficult way by reading math books in the bath tub is not helpful and actively causes me mental harm. But I feel guilty if I am not working and I have adopted a lot of destructive behaviors that feel like work and make me feel like I am being productive that are making me less productive.

As I have gotten more and more burned out I have worked harder and harder on these self destructive tendencies because I haven’t known how to break out of them.

I have noticed at most of my jobs there is an implicit feel that working on code that does not directly go into a project is considered wasteful. Saying I am going to set up a sample project to learn a concept sounds unproductive and people would really rather that you work directly on the code base or read documentation. (Except when I worked for Brad. He did this stuff all the time and this is where I got this idea from and I finally started getting it through my thick head.)

In my experience, those things don’t work nearly as effectively.

I am trying to be better about asserting what I need to be a productive programmer even if it’s not what people want to hear. It’s not enough to just say “I need to do these things.” I also have to put them into practice.

And part of putting those into practice is to stop doing these destructive behaviors that make me feel like I am doing something when I am actually destroying my ability to function.

I think it’s important to understand how we learn and to stick to it even when other people don’t want to hear about it. It’s really easy to do a bunch of things that make you feel busy but aren’t getting you anywhere.

I am sick of feeling tired and burned out all the time because I am doing things that I know don’t actually help me. I am trying to figure out how to be a more productive person because my career and my mental health depend on it. This is too important to ignore and wait to resolve itself.

So I am not going to exhaust myself reading programming and math books with no context. I am going to do more sample projects and I will only learn what I need to know to solve a problem with my code. I am not going to expel a lot of energy on something that causes mental friction and generates heat that burns me out. I will only use energy on things that are actively productive. I will be less tired and less hurt this way.

Acts of God

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I am writing this post from an airport hotel in Irving, Texas, which is near the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. I have been in Texas for the last two days and I don’t anticipate being able to leave for another few days, at the earliest.

I am booked through American Airlines. I usually book through Delta and have found them to be very good and reliable, but this was a business trip. I did not pay for my flight and so I didn’t really get to complain about not getting on the carrier of my choice.

I arrived in Dallas yesterday evening. My flight to Madison was supposed to leave at 8:20 in the evening. 8:20 came and went. The passengers asked a lot of questions and they were not answered for a considerable period of time. The flight kept getting pushed back hour by hour.

After it was pushed back to 10:30 we were told that there was a maintenance issue with the plane and they were waiting for a crew to come and fix it. They said they were bringing a second plane in case the first one wasn’t fixed in time.

The second plane arrived and we were told that the second plane also had maintenance issues. We had two broken airplanes and no idea about when we would get to go home.

Around 11:30 the flight staff announced that if we wanted to rebook our flights for the next day, they would do it for free!! BUT… we would not get a voucher for hotel, food, or transportation if we chose to do this. Unsurprisingly, no one took them up on this offer.

At 12:30, our flight was officially cancelled. We were told that the first plane had been fixed, but that they didn’t have the right paperwork to certify it was fixed and so the plane could not be used.

The stranded passengers were scattered to three local hotels. Many of us were placed at the Super 8. We were told to call a number and a shuttle would come to get us. We called the number and were told that the shuttle stopped going out at midnight and that we needed to take a cab. Half of us were given cab vouchers and half were not. I was among those who was not.

After finally getting to the hotel, I had about six hours to sleep before I had to go back for my rebooked flight. When we got up in the morning the shuttle was actually working, so I didn’t need to line up a cab to get back to the airport.

When we woke up, it was raining cats and dogs (sadly, not men). It was seriously pouring outside. We all had a sinking feeling that we were not going to be going home on time today. We sadly piled into the shuttle back to the airport and hoped for the best.

We found a bunch of people from our flight the day before waiting around the airport. Their flights had been cancelled and they were rebooked on our flight.

Every hour or so for the rest of today we would hear that we had a gate change. We all picked up our bags and hiked from gate to gate so many times we lost count.

We finally settled down at the gate that we were at last night. We all hoped and prayed that things would be different this time.

Our flight got pushed further and further back. We watched hopefully as we saw planes landing and flying away. There were a lot fewer of them than we would have liked, but we held out hope that we would get home.

This was not to be.

Seven hours after my flight was supposed to leave (and ten hours after others were set to leave) our flight was cancelled. We frantically tried to speak to representatives both in person and on the phone. When I called, I was told that the earliest they could fly me out was Tuesday morning, which is the day after tomorrow. I asked what I was supposed to do until then. The representative told me that she would help me find a hotel and give me a special rate, but that since the flight was cancelled due to weather that I would not be given another voucher. I asked if I could get my checked bag. I was told I could and to talk to the baggage service representatives. She said if I went to them they would have my bag brought out.

One reason I took the train a lot a few years ago was because I went through a similar situation to this in 2008. I was stranded at O’Hare because much of Wisconsin had flooded and no one could fly into any of the airports there. At that point I could take a bus from O’Hare to Madison. That isn’t really the case here. I knew at that point that I probably couldn’t get a flight into Wisconsin for love or money, so instead of flailing and trying to fight with everyone else to try and book the last flight to Wisconsin, I just accepted that my best option was to take the Tuesday flight and stay at the hotel. The hotel would be much cheaper than any other flight I would book before then anyway. I work remotely and I can work anywhere. I asked if the hotel had WiFi and since it did I was happy.

I was happy until I found out I couldn’t get my bag. I have been wearing the same clothes for two days. I didn’t take my contacts out yesterday. I had no toothpaste or deodorant. The idea of keeping my contacts in for another two days was unbearable. I grudgingly realized my best option was to get a Lyft from the hotel and pick up all the stuff I needed. I was pretty sure I could find clean underwear and hopefully another shirt.

I am laying here in my room after this ordeal and I wanted to go over the personal cost of this situation to myself and to the other people on this flight.

My Personal Costs

Here is an itemized list of my personal expenses incurred by this situation:

Hotel: $130

Since I can’t get on a flight until the day after tomorrow, I had to book a room for two days. Other people from my flight looked into finding flights on other airlines. One person found one for $230. Another friend said he found one that he cashed his loyalty points into that would have cost $730.

I work remotely and have people to watch my pugs. I would like to be home, but I can work anywhere. This was the cheapest option.

I do not know if this is a reimbursable expense. When my business trip was arranged this was not part of the budget. I am working under the assumption that I am responsible for this expense.

Lost Gift: $30

When they cancelled our first flight, we were taken to a nearby hotel. I forgot that earlier in the day I bought a gift for my mother at the San Jose airport. I found some vinegars that were from a local vineyard. I wanted to show her how much I appreciated her watching my pugs and I hadn’t had a chance to go anywhere to find something special for her.

I was super happy that I found something unique that I could give her that was thoughtful. I like to give people thoughtful gifts that I think will delight them.

I got pinged by the TSA this morning because I forgot about the bottles. I couldn’t put them in my checked luggage because it was trapped somewhere in the bowels of the airport.

I was told that I could check my backpack, but I don’t want to check a MacBook Pro and an iPad Pro just to try and save my vinegar. I was told that they are going to dump the vinegar down the drain. These bottles are hermetically sealed and still in the packaging from the airport.

I understand the issue with bringing liquids through airport security, but I honestly wish that I had been given some kind of option to save my gift for my mom because it wasn’t my choice to leave the airport and have to go through the line again.

I am hoping if I go back to San Jose I can find it again.

Toiletries: $40

When our second flight was cancelled and I called to find out when I could go home. They said the earliest I could get out was Tuesday. This is Sunday.

I figured it would be okay. I was told I could go get my checked bag. I packed too many clothes, so I had a few fresh outfits to wear along with deodorant and toothpaste. When I went to the baggage help desk (that I had been told would give me my bag) I was told that they would not give me my bag. I was told it was still on the plane and that it would not be taken off and would be at my destination.

Considering that my flight was not until Tuesday, I am highly skeptical that they are not going to have a flight tomorrow or before I am flying on Tuesday.

I have been wearing my contacts for the last two days. I can’t wear them for another two days. So I had to find a drug store near my hotel.

I had to buy the following items:

  • Contact lens solution and container
  • Deodorant
  • Toothbrush and Toothpaste
  • Another Shirt
  • Underwear

If I had been allowed to take my bag like I was told I would be able to do, these days would have been a lot less unpleasant.

Transportation: $60

The first night I got a hotel voucher, but I was not given any transportation vouchers. I was told the hotel would send a shuttle, but the hotel we were placed at did not send shuttles after midnight.

We were told that we could not share cabs with people who had been given vouchers. We were told it counted as a separate fare and would cost $48 a person to go to our free hotel.

I said fuck that and contacted Lyft. I was able to bring three other unfortunate people without vouchers for one fare. Even with a large tip, it was only about thirty bucks. I tried to just cover it, but people gave me cash.

Since I wasn’t allowed to get my checked bag, I had to get a Lyft to and from a drug store to pick up necessities for the next few days.

Higher Costs Paid By Others

This situation has been an annoyance to me. I don’t get to be home with my pugs or cook my own food.

But I have a lot more flexibility than most people do. I can work remotely. I can work tomorrow as easily from my hotel as I can from my house. Even if my current contract doesn’t reimburse me for this situation, it’s not going to affect me financially that much. It just means I dip further into my savings and I will be annoyed.

There are a lot of other people on my flight who were affected far worse than I was.

The pilot from the first cancelled flight didn’t get paid for the time he was at the airport. He only gets paid if he flies. Since neither plane was flight worthy, he didn’t get paid last night. While the rest of us passengers got varying degrees of vouchers, he was on his own for providing his own hotel. I heard him calling around trying to find a hotel room and negotiate a better rate.

There was a man there who was missing his parent’s 50th wedding anniversary. He kept looking at his watch saying around 4:00 that the party they were holding was wrapping up about now.

The absolute saddest story I heard the last two days was from a soldier who is stationed in Korea. He was taking 17 days of leave to come home and see his wife. He hadn’t seen her in six months. Today is her birthday. We was supposed to be home last night. If he is in the same situation that I am in, he won’t get to go home until Tuesday. He potentially has burned a quarter of his leave hanging around a fucking airport/hotel trying to get home to his family.

If he had known that he would not be able to fly out until Tuesday, he could have rented a car this morning and been home tomorrow. He could have driven to another airport and tried to get home sooner that way. Instead, he was given false hope that home was just around the corner. It’s just another hour, then you can go home.

The man whose parents had their 50th anniversary will never get to see it because it only happens once. The soldier will never get those days back. This man is representing our country and I felt he was treated very badly.

Acts of God

I know that airlines don’t control everything. Stuff happens. I just feel that things could have been handled better and they were not because of the desire by the airline to try and not spend money.

The regional carrier model of transporting people from smaller airlines like Madison to regional hubs like Atlanta and Dallas is a cost savings measure. Regional carriers are usually owned by companies other than American and Delta. I have read a lot of bad things about this business model that I can’t directly cite and therefore do not feel comfortable referencing. Based on those things, I was not really surprised that there were maintenance issues and I was honestly a little worried about the plane even before they told us that it had broken.

Rather than telling us that we would not be able to fly out last night, they tried to con the passengers into rebooking the flight on their own rather than being up front with the fact that we were probably not going home.

Had we known that we were not going home earlier in the day, we could have found other ways to go home. Once people determined that there were no American Airlines flights until Tuesday, people scrambled to find another way home. People could have rented cars to try and get to other airports outside of the affected area.

It would have made a huge difference to me to be able to have access to my checked bag while I am stuck out here. I have no idea why I didn’t get access to it, but I think there should have been a way for me to get it.

Most of all, I think it’s terrible if we can’t do better by soldiers who are serving our country. I am incredibly upset that this man missed his wife’s birthday and possibly won’t get to go home until Tuesday. I know that we all feel like our own personal perspective is the worst, but I would like to think that someone could have taken a few extra steps earlier in the process to make sure this man got home.

All day yesterday and today, I felt like we were collectively treated like cattle. We were herded from one end of the airport to the other. We were seen as a collective herd and treated as such by the airline.

We’re not a herd. We’re people. We all have stories. A lot of people have been inconvenienced this weekend, but a number of them missed precious moments of their lives that they will never get back again.

Signal Flow and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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Last year I worked at a hardware company where our primary product was robotics and not software. This is an experience I don’t think most software developers get to have. Most of us are stuck writing esoteric applications communicating with a server or a cloud where you’re not programming something you can touch and feel.

When I was in school I never got to take any shop classes because they scheduled them opposite the college prep classes. My grandfather was a builder and I remember growing up wandering around building sites watching people pouring concrete. Even with that experience, I still had a mental block that working with hardware or power tools was something for other people.

I don’t think that working with your hands has to be divorced from working with your head. I think if you physically touch and see the things you are working with, it helps you think about what you are actually doing.

When I was going to school for audio engineering they made us write signal flow documents for how the sound travels from the microphone to the recording device. I found it incredibly frustrating because I just wanted to go and play with the sound board and I didn’t think it mattered about how things worked under the hood.

That experience really helped me a lot with programming. When I write a program I think through the signal flow of my code. I think about the sequence of events that happens when things are triggered. I don’t know if other people do this too. I know that I have trouble dealing with code where people ask me about something that happens in the middle of the signal flow. To me, it’s almost a narrative thing where a story happens between when the user interacts with the app, or it launches, or whatever the triggering event is and the events that happen afterwards.

I really want to do more with hardware. I find just working with software to be very existential. I feel like I am not doing anything. But I also know that I don’t have the requisite skills to do the things I want to do.

I have enough skills to have a good career as an iOS developer, but it isn’t just about money for me. I want to work on things I find emotionally fulfilling. People keep telling me that jobs are supposed to be soulless and boring, otherwise people would do things for free. I don’t think that’s the case. I think there are a lot of unexplored avenues with iOS that require specialized skills. I think that working with Bluetooth and micro controller devices has a lot of potential, but that requires knowing stuff besides Swift.

How I Learned Programming

I have been incredibly disorganized about trying to learn electronics. I bought a bunch of electronics kits partially to learn soldering. I have a good handle on soldering, but I didn’t do the stuff I intended by figuring out the signal flow of the projects I was working on.

I bought the Make: Electronics book, but I didn’t work through the projects while I read it. I was reading it in the bath tub and before bed, like I was reading my programming books.

I burned myself out reading technical books where you’re supposed to work through a project or look at code while you are working through it.

I know, but keep consciously forgetting, that code, like anything, is a skill. When I learned programming, I sat down between 60 and 80 hours a week working through the Big Nerd Ranch iOS book over and over again.

My teacher Eric Knapp told us that programming is like playing the piano. You need to practice a lot. The first time I typed a project in the book, it would make no sense. It would just be something that worked like magic. The second time I typed it, things wouldn’t be much different. By the third time, I would start to make mental connections about how the project worked. I was starting to form a signal flow document mentally about how an object I created in one place would pull information from another object and result in an output. By the fourth time I understood how the whole program would work.

One thing I had to get over was the idea that somehow doing a tutorial wasn’t really programming. I thought if I didn’t create the code in my head then I wasn’t really learning.

That isn’t the case at all.

It’s like practicing scales on the piano. If you do something over and over again and you do it a lot, your brain starts to make mental connections that it wouldn’t if you didn’t work with something a lot.

It’s like how if you play through Mario Brothers for the first time, you probably die in the first world. If you watch someone who’s been playing since 1987, you think they’re a genius because they know where the short cuts are and where they keep dying. They didn’t start out that way. Either they found them by playing it a lot or someone clued them into where the short cuts were.

How I Want to Learn Electronics

One thing I keep hearing from people is that you need a project to really learn something. I would agree to that to some extent. When I was trying to learn GLSL I didn’t make any progress until I found a project I wanted to do. I found a filter I wanted to write and it gave me enough focus to go in and write the code and add it to the framework.

However, I was only able to do that because I had enough of a base of knowledge about basic programming in order to do that. If I tried to jump in and write that shader before I wrote “Hello, World!” then I would have been hosed.

I think there are two levels of learning a new skill. There is the grunt work of learning the basics, like terminology and “signal flow”. You have to have a good grasp of these things before you can move on to doing your passion project.

I was trying to jump into my passion project without putting in the grunt work I put into learning programming. I have to work through a bunch of basic electronics projects like making an LED light up before I can design an analog synthesizer or a beacon to find my dog when she runs away.

I want to start the Make: Electronics book over again, but I want to do it properly. I have an electronics workshop in my basement, but like everything else in my life, it’s super disorganized.

I bought the component packs for that book. I want to organize my space and learn electronics the same way I learned programming. I want to set aside a decent amount of time and actually touch components and build things. I am not going to skip over the grunt work and “scales” of electronics because if you don’t build a good foundation of knowledge, you won’t get anywhere.

What I am Not Going to Do

I am going to stop trying to read programming and electronics books for fun. I felt guilty for the last few years doing anything that was not related to programming. I burned myself out and created a lot of frustration trying to force myself to learn in a way that was unnatural.

At RWDevCon, James Dempsey talked about the importance going away from keyboard. If I am not in front of my computer actively working on a programming project, I am not going to read a programming book or tutorial. I want to be fully away from the computer.

There is a Buddhist concept of ”Be Here Now”. Don’t worry about the past because you can’t change it and don’t worry about the future because it hasn’t happened yet. The only thing that is important is the moment that is happening right now. If you’re off the clock, be fully off the clock. Disengage. Don’t check Twitter and email. Don’t read programming books. Don’t feel guilty about not working.

I am hoping to document my progress on the blog. I am not going to be inventing the wheel here. I am doing my scales and working through my programming tutorials over and over again. It’s going to be some basic stuff and figuring out how everything works together. I want to get back to how I worked in my audio engineering classes by understanding my signal flow. You can’t build a castle on a swamp, and you can’t generate great innovations without a strong technical foundation.

Hobbies and Hand Grenades

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One of my goals for 2016 is to try and be more mentally healthy.

I have written before about the guilt I feel when I am not working, or doing something that feels like work. I take programming books to the bath tub. I haven’t taken a vacation in three years. I have a panic attack if I don’t check my email once an hour.

I deleted Twitter and Facebook from my phone about two weeks ago. I was going to try and stay off of Twitter completely for like a month, but my blog was hacked and enough people expressed concern about it that I felt it was necessary to explain on Twitter what was going on. I am now checking it periodically, but I am trying not to be on it for more than five minutes at a time and no more than three times a day. BTW, the battery life on my phone has increased to three days from about twelve hours, so #winning.

I am starting back up with reality in a week. I was hoping to get some things resolved during this break so that I could get back to work all refreshed and recharged. I always had this idea that if you took like a day off that it would undo all the damage you’ve done to yourself for the last three years. It doesn’t quite work that way.

Wanted to do an assessment of where I am at before I start my last full week of being AFK.

Tired

I am exhausted. I was still running on some nervous energy before I went to RWDevCon, which explains why I have actual programming posts on my blog from that time.

I tried to make some attempts at working on a project so that I would not just fall off the wagon while I was off, but I gave up on that last week Wednesday. I found myself staring at my screen not able to do much, so I turn off my work computer and left my office and decided to try and find something to do that was relaxing so that I could really make an effort to recharge. It’s been really hard.

Today I woke up for a few hours and then had to go back to bed. I have people who want me to go and do things with them, but I know if I do that then I’ll be completely worthless in the following days.

I feel horrible for not taking this time to deep clean my house or drop all the stuff I have boxed up to give away that is cluttering up my basement. I also feel guilty for not working on anything. I feel like I have this opportunity to do something for myself that I am squandering by just sleeping all the time because I am exhausted.

I tried socially drinking at conferences and I just don’t think I can do it anymore. Drinking makes me feel sick. I feel like I am being poisoned. Eating food I didn’t make for myself makes me sick too. I am slightly worried about the business trips I need to make over the next month and I am hoping I can find a way to maintain some physical health while I am away from my house.

I am giving up alcohol completely for at least six months. At this point it doesn’t feel like much of a sacrifice. I feel lousy all the time. I was treated for migraines about a decade ago and they’re coming back and being persistent. My therapist told me that a lot of the abuse I have put my body through doesn’t just resolve itself overnight. It takes time for my body to detox and recuperate. I am hoping that the steps I am taking right now are a step in the right direction so that I can go back to feeling okay again.

Bored

So since I am not programming and it’s too tiring to leave my house, I have been trying to find something to do with my day.

I picked up some of my hobbies that I haven’t done since I started programming.

I picked up cross stitch again. I brought out a project I have been working on for years because I just stopped doing it a while ago.

It was really weird to pick it back up again. I felt rusty and clumsy and slow. After a few days it got better. The things I learned over two decades of doing this came back pretty quickly.

I also started reading non-programming books again.

I have a box of random science fiction books that a friend lent me. I pulled a few books out of that box. I also read through a few books that I had been meaning to read but didn’t get around to.

One reason I got off of Twitter was because I would bring these books to the tub to read but I would only get a few pages in before getting bored and then going on Twitter for hours. By removing Twitter from my phone and just not having it near me when I am reading, I have been better able to stay focused and actually get through books.

I have been doing this for the last five days and it’s getting kind of boring and repetitive. There is only so long that you can do something until it gets boring. I don’t really know what to do from here. I am taking my dog for a walk most days because I need to get out of the house and she needs exercise, but I don’t know what to do to alleviate the boredom. All of the other hobbies I have, like working with electronics, are all very mentally intensive. I talked to a person about helping them build an airplane, but after I went out for a day to see what it involved I was spent for several days.

It’s very aggravating and frustrating to want to do things but not being able to do them. I am trying to continue to rest because I know that exhausting myself at this point is counter productive, but the temptation to just mindlessly graze on Twitter is great.

Lonely

The last bit is that, since I am not on Twitter, it gets somewhat lonely.

I am living alone. I have my pugs, but they’re not people. I know that I have a lot of friends who would love to see me and do things with me, but I can’t make myself do anything with them right now.

It’s weird. I am lonely, but the desire to be with people is far less than the desire to just be left alone. I didn’t think it was possible to feel both things at once.

I am hoping that the fact that I have nothing to do right now is the source of many of these feelings. I am hoping that because I have nothing else to do besides dwell on all this garbage that when I am actively engaged in a project again that a lot of this stuff will go away. Part of me is terrified that it won’t.

My goal in the future to avoid this is to try and figure out how to disengage and do things that help me relax mentally. I would like to find a way to incorporate my hobbies back into my work life. I want to set up my electronics workshop in the basement so that when I can’t deal with being in front of my computer for a while I have something I can do. When I get done with work I don’t want to just leave my desktop computer in my office to go to my laptop computer in my living room. I don’t want to fritter away my time on worthless Twitter drama. I either want to be fully engaged or fully disengaged.

My goals for 2016 are to begin learning electronics and C++. I need to structure projects for those so that I can be engaged with them, but I will not do that until I am done with this coming week. This is the last time I have to do whatever the hell I want, and right now I just want to be left alone to wallow in my own sense of self loathing and apathy.

Elementary

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I have been taking some time off recently and catching up on some much needed rest. Part of my regime has been finding a bunch of TV shows I have been meaning to watch and going through them.

One of those shows is Elementary. I am a huge Sherlock Holmes addict. The recent versions with Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Jr. have been interesting, but Jeremey Brett will always be my Sherlock.

Besides updating to modern times, one of the big selling points of Elementary has been gender switching several of the more prominent characters in the Holmes canon, namely the role of Dr. Watson.

I want to talk a bit about something I feel that they did right with this that I would like to see more of in the future.

Mentorship

In the original Holmes stories, Watson is Sherlock’s roommate and side kick. He acts as the reader’s eyes and ears reporting what a “normal” person would see and generally most of the resolutions in the crimes come as a surprise because Watson does not observe what Sherlock does, which makes it difficult to guess what the resolution of the stories will be.

CBS_ELEMENTARY_406_LOGO_IMAGE_702765_640x360In Elementary, Watson starts out as a sober companion for Sherlock, but eventually transitions to being his protégé. He sees potential in her and he helps her cultivate it.

This Watson is a dynamic character. Her skills grow and evolve. This is different than the static Watson character in the original stories who is purposely kept somewhat dumb to allow the reader to enjoy the story.

A lot of this dynamic spoke to me on a personal level.

Programming is a rather new field that is primarily male-dominated. All of my mentors have been men. I often wonder if men ever get to be mentored because there is an inherent social dynamic that seems to make it easier for men to mentor women. Our society assumes that women take a subordinate role and it’s simply easier when you are a woman to approach a man and ask for help and for guidance. This can have a pleasing feeling for both people because the man feels important because he gets to instruct and train a subordinate and the woman feels important because someone she respects and admires has chosen to take time out of their life to pass on knowledge and wisdom to them that they aren’t passing down to anyone else.

When you’re first starting out, this can be a very comfortable and emotionally rewarding relationship. However, like all things, this can’t last.

Partnership

At some point, the protégé starts to bump up against the edges of the relationship. The protégé wants to be acknowledged. They want to have their new skills be recognized and leave the nest and be seen as an equal.

This can make the mentor very uncomfortable. Their entire relationship is predicated upon being the source of knowledge. Once the protégé catches up to the mentor, it can cause a lot of issues.

Elementary-season-3-promo-watson-holmesIt can make the mentor feel very upset because they feel they’ve lost their identity as the person who knows everything. Sometimes the mentor succumbs to the urge to try and cut their protégé down to keep them in the subordinate role because that is where they feel comfortable.

Other times the mentor can become upset that the protégé wants to be seen as an equal. The mentor has spent decades honing their craft and this upstart person wants to be seen as an equal without putting the work in.

This relationship is very reminiscent of a parent/child relationship. At some point you realize your parents don’t know everything. Our relationships with our parents change as we get older because they must. Sometimes our parents cut us down to try and maintain the control over us that they have gotten used to. They want us to succeed, but not too much because it threatens their sense of self worth.

A mentorship relationship is more fragile than a parental relationship because of two reasons. One, our parents will always be our parents. As much as we might argue and fight with them, there is a blood tie that can’t be broken. The second is the one I mention at the beginning of this post, the gender thing.

Professional Respect

One thing that I respect Elementary for is the fact that, as far as I have gotten, there has been no effort to force Sherlock and Watson into a romantic relationship. All of their conflicts have been able to explore the mentor/protégé relationship without having to stoop to the cliche of putting them together in a romantic relationship.

I greatly admire the fact that the writers have been able to craft a compelling story about the mentorship conflict in a completely platonic context.

1355273194905.cachedAs the person who has been in the protégé role, I want my mentors to see me as an equal. I want to show them that they were right in sharing their wisdom with me and I would like to show I can manage on my own without being dependent on them. Joan Watson is similar. She wants to be a detective in her own right.

Sherlock doesn’t want her as an equal. He wants to keep her as a subordinate. They fight over her need to be her own person and not an extension of him.

Both characters have had romantic relationships with other people, so this isn’t a generic, Aspie asexual stereotype. The relationship between Sherlock and Watson is based on professional admiration and respect. Watson gets frustrated when Sherlock won’t give her the professional respect she feels she has earned.

I have found it incredibly compelling to watch this relationship being explored. It’s a painful situation for both Sherlock and Watson. Both of them are right. Both of them have been hurt by their evolving relationship. But it’s a necessary pain for them to experience so both of them can grow and change.

Lessons From Sherlock

I spoke about mentorship at CocoaLove 2015. I wanted to give advice to both mentors and protégés. I want to reiterate some of it now.

If you are a protégé, at some point you need to step out on your own. It’s comfortable and safe to be under the wing of someone with a lot of experience, but at some point you need to succeed or fail on your own. You will stumble a lot, but that is how your mentor learned. They stumbled and have given you advice about how to avoid the same stumbles they took. You will learn best through your own stumbles than you will hearing stories of your mentor’s stumbles.

If you are a mentor, please understand that this is a temporary situation. Don’t become so attached to the idea that you have to know everything that it creates a situation where you lash out at your protégé when they want to be seen as an equal. Your protégé has a lot of affection for you that can quickly turn into a toxic situation if you put them down in an effort to keep them subordinate to you.

The best way for a mentor/protégé relationship to go is if both parties go in wanting the protégé to become independent. If you’re a mentor and your protégé doesn’t seem to want to walk on their own, try to push them to take risks and fall and learn from their experiences.

Above all, remember that part of the reason you both entered into this relationship was because you like and respect one another. Just because your relationship changes as the protégé grows in experience doesn’t mean those feelings go away.