Category Archives: Conferences

Corners of My Mind

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I haven’t really been blogging much, as anyone who takes a cursory look at my blog can tell. I know that this past year has been pretty terrible for a lot of people, but my issues have been going on far longer.

This is probably going to meander quite a bit. I will try to go back and edit so this isn’t a slog, but I am making no promises.

I got excited about programming because I wanted to make things. If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I bake a lot and that I do a lot of crafting, specifically cross stitch. I consider myself a creative professional. I have a degree in Video Production/Motion Graphics. When I got involved with iOS programming, I saw things like Core Animation and Core Graphics as a way to more fine tune my visual expression beyond making things in Adobe Illustrator or After Effects.

Two years after I started programming, Swift was announced. I love Swift and I think it’s an improvement over Objective-C, but it really changed the tone of the iOS community. All of a sudden, we were getting a bunch of journeymen language nerds coming in who all had opinions about the “right” way to do things. I don’t mean to be a NIMBY about any of this because I definitely was a part of the initial influx of new people flocking to the green fields of iOS development at the end of the gold rush. But no one was talking about how to use any of the core frameworks anymore because they weren’t new and shiny.

With the open sourcing of Swift, there was a large push towards talking about how to make it work on everything. After it became obvious that it would not work on everything, the influx of people began to be more interested in cross platform stuff like Flutter so that no one would have to write multiple code bases for different platforms.

I have a full understanding of why all these things happened. I understand that businesses would rather just employ a single mobile developer instead of needing a specialized Android and iOS developer who can’t make the apps look the same because of different frameworks. But this isn’t why I got into programming.

I have spent years trying to find some happy medium between what I want to do and where the rest of the community is headed. I have been fortunate to be allowed to come to conferences to talk about Metal and graphics, but it took a piece of my soul every time I would have a conversation with someone that went along the lines of “What you do sounds super awesome, but I really need to go to a different talk because I need to learn something I can use at work.”

I foolishly thought if I evangelized the things I cared about enough that other people would care about them too. About two years ago I determined that they really don’t. Again, I understand why. The market doesn’t put a premium on well designed beautiful apps, so trying to make interesting designs is a waste of money.

All of this has been very hard for me. I spent my life feeling like I would never find people who got me and that I would always be this weird person in the corner eating my hair. When I went to my first conferences, I felt like I found all the other hair eating corner dwellers who all banded together to do awesome stuff. As the years went on, it was increasingly difficult for me to accept that this initial group of people all went off to Apple to think different and were replaced by people who just needed to crush code. I went to college with a guy who has been attending for twenty years because he doesn’t want the party to end and I was starting to feel like that.

I decided even before the pandemic to take a step back from the conference circuit and the community to find myself. I wanted to figure out what I actually want rather than what I think people want me to be in order to fit with the current zeitgeist.

I spent a year trying to write another book. It was an unpleasant experience and I don’t think I will ever write another programming book ever again. (Or host a podcast or do any kind of video course…) But one thing that I learned from that experience is that I am approaching things wrong.

I think very visually, but my drawing skills have always been bad. Well, not quite. I learned to draw twice before, but I didn’t stick with it for various reasons and I was terrified to try doing it again because I didn’t want to be bad at it. I kept buying art supplies, thinking one day I would make time to work with them and figure it out but it was never the right time. Around August of last year, burned out from the pandemic, I decided that now was the right time.

I decided not to work with code for the rest of the year and to just focus on learning to draw and paint. A part of my mind opened at that point that I didn’t realize I was holding shut. I have a limited amount of mental energy to engage with stuff and the programming part of my brain had been hoarding it. After I knew I would not need to work with code for a while, a bunch of stuff came unstuck in my head and I felt more myself than I had in a few years.

I have realized that one reason I was encountering frustration in my programming life was because I was trying to use programming as a tool for everything I was doing. I was so afraid to suck at drawing that I learned GPU programming and rendering because I thought there was some magical knowledge in there that would unlock all the stuff that was stuck in my head. By letting it go, I realized that there was an entirely different approach I should have been taking that I had closed my mind to.

All good things come to an end, and the end of my code exile approached. I have made peace with the fact that the iOS community is no longer in synch with what I want to do, and that’s fine. I miss all my friends and hope to see them again one day, but what I want to do isn’t where everyone else is headed. So I made a transition.

I had been tentatively exploring game development for the last few years. I was avoiding it because I had an internship with a game developer that gave me PTSD. I know it pays terribly and working for a studio is probably impossible with someone who has the issues I have. But I can make my own stuff. I can scope projects to be small enough and limited enough that I can do them on my own.

I have spent the first part of this year learning Unreal. I tried Unity but I don’t like the interface or design patterns. It’s just a personal preference.

I hope to publish a game by the end of the year. That is the goal I set for myself. I am trying to scope it as a very limited thing so that I can get practice making goals and setting milestones. I have more ambitious projects I would like to do, but I want to make sure I can finish something without burning myself out.

One thing I had trouble with before was working in 3D space. Again, going back to programming, I always tried to place things in 3D space using programming rather than getting comfortable with the tools and learning to think in 3D rather than in code. It is definitely a context switch, which is something I have difficulty with.

I have felt mentally paralyzed since I finished working on the Metal book. It somewhat burned me out and I never really dealt with it because I didn’t want to admit that it burned me out. I feel bad because I know that people were depending on me to add the sample code I wasn’t able to create while I was writing the book and updating the open source project I had with my husband. I can’t change any of that. It wasn’t that I disregarded people’s need, I simply could not deal with it anymore and I needed a break.

I wish I was a different person. I wish I was super excited about parsing JSON and arguing about reference vs value semantics. I don’t even know what the hell everyone has been arguing about for the last two years. Probably SwiftUI. I wish I was interested in the same things everyone else seems to care about. But I’m not. I came at this from another perspective and I am too old to change it. All I can aspire to be is the best version of myself.

Bullying

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I have a bully.

Not a sexual harasser or a rapist or a men’s rights activist. A good old fashioned playground bully.

I have mostly kept this story to myself for over a year, but I don’t feel I can continue to do so. It is destroying my peace of mind and making me feel terrible. I tried to ignore my feelings about this, hoping they would go away, but they have not. I need to share my story in order to move on from this.

I’m not posting this because I want anyone to do anything about this specific incident. I just want people to listen and to understand.

The Beginning

My first interaction with my bully was back in 2015. 2015 was the first year I really got into conference speaking. I had finished up school the year before and conference speaking was the only way I had to network and get my name out there in order to find a job.

I was invited to speak at a conference in 2015 by a friend of mine. As many of you know, I used to be in an abusive marriage. My previous husband would not allow me to have money to buy textbooks while I was going to school for computer programming. My friend sent me books, watched my first shitty conference talk while it was being live streamed, and used his connections to try to help me find a job.

My friend did this when I was nobody. I wasn’t an author yet. I didn’t have a blog. No one knew who I was. He helped me because it was a kind thing to do and he had no expectation that I would ever become anything. To me, the way someone treats you when they don’t get any benefit from it means a lot. I see way too many people who only network with people who are more visible than they are and tell anyone just starting out to fuck off. I don’t like those people.

I was invited to speak at a conference my friend was organizing, but I could not make it because I found out my ex-husband had put us significantly in debt. I felt very sad about not being able to go.

My friend also invited my bully to the conference. My bully could not go for different reasons than I had. They were very vocal about how unhappy they were with my friend regarding his handling of his conference. They started a Twitter mob against my friend and started a whisper network around him.

I felt some loyalty to my friend after his working to help me before I had a career. I kept hearing people at conferences say how terrible it was that he was being attacked, but no one said anything. I was probably dumb, but I put my neck out to defend my friend because no one else would. I understood that my bully would be unhappy about my defense and I really did the best I could to say this whole thing was probably a misunderstanding, as is wont to happen when people communicate online.

After I posted that post, the talk stopped. I thought I made a difference and got people to leave him alone. I now realize it’s probable that people were still talking about him, but that I had shown myself to be untrustworthy and thus no one included me in these conversations.

I knew there would probably be repercussions for my actions, but I figured I did the right thing and I would feel morally okay with whatever the blowback was.

2018

Four years passed and I didn’t feel the blowback. I noticed I was never invited to a conference my bully was speaking at, but that was fine. I didn’t really care to interact with them.

My luck ran out in 2018.

A talk of mine was accepted at a conference. I had to spend nine months working on it. It was incredibly labor intensive, but I was happy to have the opportunity to speak.

Three weeks before the conference, I saw that the conference organizers announced my bully would be a keynote speaker at the conference.

I wrestled with what to do. I hadn’t had any contact with my bully in four years. I half hoped my bully had forgotten the whole incident and found someone else to be mad at about something. I thought about approaching the conference organizers about the situation, but I thought that would be petty. My bully hadn’t done anything so what would I complain about? What could they even do about it?

I found out.

Six days before the conference I was contacted on the conference Slack by the organizers telling me that they had to talk to me and had set a meeting for 10:00 the following morning. I kind of joked that I hoped I hadn’t done something wrong. They repeated that I was required to speak to them tomorrow morning at 10:00. They would not elaborate what had happened or what we would be speaking about. I had a sinking feeling this was about my bully. I was right.

The organizers, looking like police interrogators, told me there had been a complaint about me. They said they did not want to hear my side of the story because they didn’t care and would not believe me. They told me they had stringent conditions I was required to follow if I was to be allowed to keep my slot at their conference:

  • I was not to be within 500 feet of my bully
  • I was not to be in the same room as my bully
  • I was not to speak to my bully
  • I was not to speak about my bully to anyone at the conference
  • I was not to attend a networking event my bully wanted to attend
  • I was not to tell anyone that this conversation happened

I was dumbstruck. I was not surprised my bully had complained about me. I was surprised at how I was being treated by the organizers. I considered them to be friends. I had had them to my house and they had slept under my roof. They met my parents and I had fed them food I made myself. I considered this to be a deep transgression of my hospitality and relationship with them.

My initial inclination was to tell them to fuck off and that I would not attend their conference. I felt that this would have looked bad professionally. I spent nine months working on my talk and it could not be replaced easily. I was also bringing my now-husband with me. He had bought a conference and a plane ticket. I didn’t feel I could tell him that he wasted that money because I was being petty.

So I swallowed my pride and faked my way through the conference. I spent most of the conference hiding in my room with my husband. I came out for my talks and for meals. I briefly saw my bully as I was taking my dog outside to walk her and I was terrified that they would complain about me violating the terms of my parole and have me kicked out before I could give my talk.

The biggest thing that bothers me about this situation is that I had reported harassment two years earlier, the first time I attended their conference. Someone at the conference touched me inappropriately and tried to get me to take them back to my hotel room to have sex. I reported the incident and they didn’t believe me. They told me it was a misunderstanding, the perpetrator was European, and that I had misunderstood his intentions. I had to physically demonstrate on one of the organizers how I had been touched for them to take it seriously.

So like sexual assault is just fine, but just make sure you don’t defend someone on Twitter? I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about that incident either. My bad.

Aftermath

I tried to tell myself that none of this is important and that I didn’t care. I felt deeply foolish for thinking these people were my friends when they clearly didn’t feel that way about me. I felt like I had been conned and was too stupid to realize it until it was too late. I was angry about the number of hours I wasted working on their projects and I wanted that time back.

I broke my agreement to not talk about this incident a few times with a few trusted friends in the community. Any time I tried to obscure the name of my bully, they always immediately knew who it was. No one I told was surprised any of this happened. They were always deeply sympathetic and told me that everyone knows how this person is.

Imagine my shock to see my confidants going out of their way to socialize and interact with my bully. I would see them having long involved conversations on Twitter or being asked to collaborate on their side projects.

I called one of them out about this. I reminded him about how I had been treated. His response was, “Yeah, but that has nothing to do with me. I can be friend with both of you and be Jonny in the Middle because I’m basically Switzerland.”

At first I tried not to let this bother me. I didn’t want to tell my friends they had to choose between me and a bully because that seemed shrewish. Also mostly because I know that my side would not be chosen. But the longer this goes on, the more this bothers me.

All of these people know this person is a bully. They know this person’s behavior is terrible. Conference organizers know that this person will ruin them on Twitter if they don’t do everything the bully says. So why do they keep giving my bully a platform? Why do they keep inviting the bully to speak and give them power and visibility? Why do they knowingly stick their neck in a noose and then punish anyone who threatens a situation where it might cut off their air?

I kept thinking that one day someone would catch wise to this situation and they would stop inviting my bully to speak, but it hasn’t happened. I realized that it’s not because people don’t know this person is a bully. It’s because people don’t care. They don’t care that this person treats people badly because they get something out of interacting with them.

That’s the piece that clicked into place that really made me feel I needed to talk about this. I knew my bully had mental health issues. Not that it’s an excuse for behavior. I don’t blame them for complaining about me to the conference organizers. I expected them to. I would not be surprised if my bully used their clout to keep me away from any conference they were at for so many years.

The people I do blame are the ones who know this is happening and do nothing.

I don’t know how I can continue to be friends with people who knowingly associate themselves with an abusive bully. I don’t know how they can feel that it’s okay for someone to ruin people’s lives as long as it’s not theirs.

I also keep thinking about how this was how I was treated when I WAS A SPEAKER!! I keep thinking of all the people this bully might have damaged who didn’t have the clout/visibility I do. What if I had been an attendee? A student? How many people have had their careers damaged or left the community because they ran afoul of this person? We’ll never know.

What Do I Want Out of This?

Here is what I DON’T want out of this:

  • I don’t want anyone who figured out who these people are to harass them on Twitter in any capacity. That’s their MO, not mine.
  • I don’t want to start a feud. This is about me talking about my feelings, not trying to start some kind of retribution against anyone. I’m not trying to damage anyone’s business/living because I feel slighted. I just want to be able to speak openly about how this made me feel.
  • I don’t want an apology. The organizers made a calculated risk that they could treat me like shit and have nothing bad happen to them because I have no power to make their lives miserable and they were right. That burns me up a little, but it’s reality. I don’t want a fake apology from anyone trying to make themselves look better. The bridge is burned and it’s not coming back.

I do want two things out of this. The first thing is I just want to talk about how this made me feel. I feel deeply angry and hurt by this situation. I have bottled this up for over a year and I am tired of it. I kept telling myself I had no right to feel upset about this because there are kids locked in concentration camps along the border and the world is slowly microwaving to death. Being slighted at a conference is the most First World Problem there is. Also, I may be in the wrong here. What if I did something terrible and I was told not to tell because it would look bad for me? I know I should get over this and if I just keep trying to be a good person and ship projects that in the long run this doesn’t matter. But I feel I have the right to my anger and my pain regarding this.

I want to be clear that I didn’t expect the organizers to tell my bully to fuck off. I was pretty sure my bully would complain about me, but I wish the organizers had handled their interaction with me differently. Instead of treating me like a pedophile caught next to a playground, I wish they had privately reached out and been like, “Hey, look. Someone complained about you. We know you’re cool. Do you mind just like avoiding them so that they don’t cause an incident?” I would have been like, sure, no problem. See you next week. They chose instead to completely burn our entire personal and professional relationship. It wasn’t necessary. They chose to do it. That kind of stings.

I want to get over this. This is a festering wound that never heals and constantly reopens over nothing. I don’t trust people who were my friends. I don’t feel comfortable or trust anyone anymore. I am consumed with a desire to become so powerful that no one can ever fuck me over like this again. I hate feeling this way. I want to build things that make me happy. I want this to not bother me anymore.

The second thing I want out of this is for people to realize there is no neutral position in a situation where someone is being bullied or harassed. If someone is being bullied because they disagreed with another person’s behavior towards someone else and they are being harassed, you don’t get to sit there and think, “Sucks to be them! Should have keep their mouth shut!” and still be a good person.

There is a somewhat large subset of people on Twitter who feel that any kind of disagreement with them constitutes harassment. It does not. Hating someone isn’t justification for complaining about their presence at a professional event.

How to Handle Bullying

Here’s a handy guide to dealing with bullying.

If you see someone being harassed, you gently insert yourself into the conversation and you tell the harasser that their behavior is inappropriate. The harasser must back off and apologize and the incident is over. There is no retaliation or blame from either party. It’s just over.

If you see someone try to step between a harasser and someone else who is also being harassed, you don’t sit back smugly and think they should have kept to themselves. You step in and also assert that this behavior isn’t acceptable.

This works even in the situations where people are afraid of being called out as creepy or socially awkward. If you are bothering someone and you don’t mean to, the person just wants the behavior to stop. Someone lets you know that you are bothering another person, you apologize, and you leave them alone. Kindergartners understand this. Had I been asked to apologize to my bully but be allowed free range of the conference, I would have been happy to do so. But the point was retribution not fear.

Bullies are allowed to act the way they do because most people sit back and let it happen because they figure it’s nothing to do with them. It is to do with you. If you sit back and let people behave this way, you’re contributing to a hostile environment. Your friends see when you sit back and let them be treated like crap. They remember. They pretend it doesn’t hurt them when you tell them later that what happened sucked but you didn’t want to get involved, but it does. You are hurting your friends when you let them be harassed.

We can’t do anything about the concentration camps along the border or the inevitable heat death of the Universe, but god damn it, we can make our community a little bit more welcoming and friendly place for everyone.

2019 Speaking Sabbatical

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I gave my first conference talk in February of 2014. It was on sound design for mobile applications. I didn’t practice it enough and didn’t realize how scary it would be to speak in front of 200 people I didn’t know. I have about twelve minutes of material and completely bombed my talk.

The organizers were very kind people and understood this was my first talk. They said I didn’t do that bad and that I could come back from that and do better.

As painful as it was to completely bomb the way I did, it really lit a fire under me to do better. I attended conferences and saw Daniel Steinberg speak and come away inspired, but also devastated because I didn’t think I could ever be as good as he is. Which is true, but still.

I told myself that I just needed practice. If I did more talks, they would make me less nervous. I would have more professional experience and my talks would be better. Even if I couldn’t do as well as Daniel, I could develop my own style and be a better speaker.

For a few years, that seemed to work. I did a lot more conferences, got more comfortable with speaking, and did much better. I personally feel the best conference talk I have ever done was this talk at CocoaLove. This was the height at which both my speaking and professional lives have been at.

Shortly after this talk, I had a complete nervous breakdown.

I lost my ability to code due to burn out and PTSD. I would walk into my office and break down in tears at the thought of trying to work there. I had to redecorate my office in order to begin to work there again.

I developed a speech impediment and became very shaky. When I would attend or speak at conferences I would have to hide in my room for most of the conference in order to not completely bomb the talk I was giving. This was around the time I got Delia certified as a service animal. She helps me tremendously, but I still have a lot of difficulty going to conferences.

One major reason I decided to write my book on Metal was because I could no longer work and I needed a placeholder in my resume. During this time I basically became a shut in. I couldn’t leave my house. I started a meal subscription service so that I would not starve. The once a month or so that I did leave the house to buy alcohol would completely exhaust me for the rest of the day.

I stopped feeling human. I would wake up at the same time every day. I would work until about 3:00 in the afternoon, at which point I could no longer function. Then I would take a bath, drink gin, and watch Project Runway while cross stitching. On days where I was too burned out to work, I have no idea what to do. I couldn’t leave the house. I didn’t have friends to visit. I couldn’t focus on anything else. Do I just start drinking gin at 8:00 in the morning? I got a lot of stuff done, but I didn’t feel good.

I am disappointed the book didn’t turn out better and that so few people have read it. I know that had I been given a little more time, it could have been what I wanted it to be, but I am not ashamed of what I produced in the time I had to produce it. Writing the book helped me recover from the burnout and PTSD I suffered from, but I was still not back up to where I was a year earlier and this bothered me.

I decided at the beginning of 2018 that I would not submit to any calls for papers this year. If people invited me to speak, I would accept. I had several offers. I accepted all of them, but had to back out of one that was too overwhelming for me to deal with.

I have not been happy with most of the talks I have given this year.

I have gotten so anxious about traveling and putting together my talks that I have procrastinated working on them. I have so many things I want to say while I am doing my talks, but I get overwhelmed and lose my ability to speak. I get confused and upset and have to soldier on. I feel I am letting down the people who come to see me. I worry that they are wondering why I keep being invited to speak at places when I suck at my talks and they’re not very good.

I have reached the decision that I need to focus on regaining my mental health.

I have a few conferences I would like to attend next year, but right now it is my plan to do a hard reset on my brain to see if I can go back to how much better I was two years ago.

I got into speaking because I thought I could offer a unique perspective on various aspects of technology and give funny, interesting talks. I have been failing at this for a while now. I need more spoons to put together the kinds of talks that I would want to see. I need a break.

I have one single exception to this decision for 2019. I would be willing to speak about autism. If someone invited me to do a keynote about autism, I would happily accept that. I feel that there is a lot of misunderstanding about this in our community and I feel that this is a topic I could offer a unique perspective on. If no one is interested in hearing what I have to say about autism, that’s fine.

I have been afraid to take time off from speaking because I am afraid people will forget that I exist. I am afraid that if I leave and try to come back that everyone will have moved on and no one will care about what I have to say. I am hoping that when I am in a better mental state with better information to share that there will be people who want me back.

I have also been afraid that I have alienated people while I have been having mental health issues. There are several people who have blocked me on Twitter that have taken me by surprise. I had an incredibly negative reaction from someone I considered a friend that I knew for four years and I don’t understand what happened. I don’t know what I did to anger them to the point that they have cut me off. My overarching goal in my career has been to try to be a happy and positive influence in the community. If I am not achieving that goal, then I need to step back and recharge so that I can be the person I want to be.

Thanks for reading this post. I hope that when I find something I want to talk about that an audience will be there to listen. I also hope that my delivery of it will be worth listening to.

Late Summer 2017 Conferences and Availability

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A little over two weeks ago I finally was able to submit the final chapter for the rough draft of my book. I started the book back in October and it’s been a real trip. One thing I have not been able to do during the time I have been writing the book is have a stable full time job. Book writing is a full time job in and of itself, but it sadly doesn’t pay super well. One of my goals in the next few months is to line up a job so that I can start digging myself out of the hole I’m in.

I have two months to line something up. I am going to be speaking at a lot of conferences and doing a lot of traveling over the next two months. If you’re interested in seeing me, here are some of your options:

  • That Conference: That Conference is a spin off of Code Mash. It is a multi-platform conference that takes place at the Kalahari Resort in Wisconsin Dells. My talk on graphics programming will be on August 8th, which also happens to be the same day the final editing pass on all of my chapters is due. Busy times.
  • 360iDev: After missing the conference last year due to various work commitments, I am looking forward to coming back and seeing all my old indie friends. I will be doing a similar talk on graphics to the one I did at That Conference, but more tailored for iOS. That will be on August 16th in Denver, CO.
  • iOSDevUK: I get to take my second trip across the pond, both this year and in general, at the beginning of September. This conferences is in Aberystwyth, Wales and I will be presenting a two-hour pre-conference workshop on ARKit on Monday, September 4th.
  • Strangeloop: My final conference will be another multi-platform conference, but this time about cutting edge technology. I will be giving a talk on GPGPU programming on the iPhone using Metal and will try to talk a bit about CoreML. Strangeloop is in St. Louis, MO.

The book is set to release on December 4, 2017. I am working on the sample code that will accompany the book. My focus in writing the book was to provide more conceptual information about how Metal can be used rather than just cataloging the API. One of my frustrations in trying to learn OpenGL was the focus on the API with the assumption that everyone knows what a texture is and what Euler angles are. It is my intention that anyone buying the book use the sample code I am creating as canon since both Metal and Swift change so rapidly. I will maintain it and keep it up to date and I hope to add to it as new features become available.

I feel incredibly lucky to have had a chance to write this book. From the moment Metal was introduced in 2014 I felt like it was my thing. I worried I waited too long to get involved with it, but it seems like it’s been rather difficult for people to approach it due to the vast amounts of other concepts one must be familiar with before one can use Metal. I am hoping that this book helps open Metal up to other iOS developers.

I am planning my next steps right now. Beyond just finding a job and getting a paycheck, I have a few goals over the next few years that I would dearly love to fulfill. I will be sure to post more about them when they become more tangible. So far over the last ten years things have simply worked themselves out. I am hoping that this streak continues and that I know my next step when I see it. Until then, I am going to focus on the tasks ahead of me and do my best.

My Spring 2017 Conference Appearances

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It’s a new year, which means I am in the process of seeing if I can break my conference record this year. Not sure what that record is, but I think it’s around ten conferences in a year. Last year was pretty busy and it will be tough to beat, but it was also something of a furlough year because I was mostly talking about mental health and software architecture. This year I am going full on Metal for the work I am doing on the Metal Programming Guide.

Everything is coming up Milhouse!

GDC: February 27-March 3

This year I am working at/attending GDC(Game Developers Conference). I get to be a Conference Associate, so while I am not speaking at the conference, I still get to help participate in creating a great conference experience for everyone. I am looking forward to meeting some new people in the graphics programming space. I think it’s important to keep meeting new and different sets of people rather than staying in a bubble of people you already know. I’ve wanted to attend this conference for a while and I am super happy I got a chance to do so this year.

iOSCon 2017: March 30-31

I get to attend my first European conference this year, iOSCon 2017. Some old friends, like Saul Mora, are going to be speaking there, as well as some new friends I haven’t had the chance to meet in person yet, like Manuel Chakravarty.

I am incredibly excited about this conference because I am debuting a new Metal talk here. I have noticed over the last few years that a lot of people are interested in Metal, but they are not quite sure about how to approach it. They’re not able to break it down in the minds into manageable tasks and they wind up quitting in frustration. My talk here will focus on foundational structures and concepts that are necessary to work with Metal in a fun and approachable way.

CocoaConf Chicago: April 21-22

If you’re in the States and can’t afford a hop across the Pond, I will also be presenting my new Metal talk at CocoaConf Chicago. This will be my fifth time attending CocoaConf Chicago and my fourth time speaking! Holy smokes! Time flies when you’re frantically trying to meet deadlines.

CocoaConf Chicago was the first purely iOS conference I ever attended. The speakers and the Kleins gave me a community of people without whom I would not be where I am today. It’s always a great joy and pleasure to see all of my friends there that I only get to see once a year.

Please Say Hello

One thing I always look forward to when I go to conferences is meeting new people. It may not always come off this way, but I feel socially awkward. One reason I made friends with so many speakers in the Cocoa community was because it was easy for me to start a conversation with them because I knew something they were speaking about. When I go and sit at a table full of strangers, I don’t know anything to start a conversation with anyone. I am happy for people to come up and start talking to me and I am telling you to please take that first step, because if you don’t I assume that I am probably annoying you and to avoid embarrassment I keep to myself.

I am planning to have my service dog Delia with me at CocoaConf and GDC. She is an emotional support animal and it is okay for people to pet her. It was technically possible for me to bring her with me to London, but with all of the various travel SNAFUs and the unstable political situations, I don’t feel safe or comfortable bringing her with me. I am terrified that I will forget to do something important and she will be taken away from me and I won’t get her back. So might be a little emotionally fragile in London, but I will follow the old British saying of “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

Looking forward to a great Spring 2017 conference season!

CocoaLove and Indie DevStock

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I speak at a lot of conferences. I have spoken at around ten conferences a year since 2014. That’s a lot of conferences. I have had some not so great experiences and a few really awesome ones, and the awesome ones are the ones I want to talk about in this blog post.

The best conferences I have attended over the last twelve months were RWDevCon and CocoaLove. Both of these conferences went above and beyond to deliver a unique conference experience.

CocoaLove is in Philadelphia and really embraces the City of Brotherly Love vibe. Curtis and his team make sure the food at the conference is local, including an entire lunch activity around getting authentic Philly cheesesteaks.

RWDevCon has the advantage of name recognition because of the years of amazing tutorials that Ray’s team has put out. CocoaLove does not.

Another great conference that might not make it to its third year is a newcomer, Indie DevStock. Indie DevStock is being run by my friend Tammy Coron, a fellow Ray Wenderlich tutorial team member. She talked to me about running the conference with her, but I told her I was too busy. I was mostly too cowardly to actually stick my neck out and try to run my own conference. Tammy has bigger balls than I do and is making a go of it.

Both CocoaLove and Indie DevStock are in regions of the country that don’t see a lot of conferences. CocoaLove is in the Northeast and Indie DevStock is in the South.

Every week on Twitter I see people bitch and moan about the lack of diversity in tech. Everyone wonders what we can do about it. CocoaLove made a concerted effort to have a diverse lineup. Indie DevStock is run by a woman and 67% of their lineup is underrepresented persons in tech.

Both Curtis and Tammy have lovingly put a great deal of work into making their conferences special and unique experiences. People don’t run conferences to make money. These are labors of love. It’s really easy at a certain point to just kind of go, fuck it, and deliver a generic conference experience. We’ve all had our fair share of those. Both Curtis and Tammy really got creative and tried to set their conferences apart from everyone else.

Every year I hear of some really cool and special conference that has its last year because it’s just too difficult for the organizer to run it anymore. NSConf. Second Conf. C4. NSScotland. Everyone bemoans the loss of these conferences.

There are a lot of these conferences that I have been greatly disappointed in missing out on. I’m sure other people are disappointed as well.

I want to suggest that if you live in any area East of the Mississippi you strongly consider attending either CocoaLove or Indie DevStock. I am attending both (and only speaking at one.) Nashville is a ten-hour drive from Madison and Philly is thirteen hours. Supposedly I will be able to bring my beloved pug Delia to Indie DevStock. It’s wonderful to have a few conferences that are within driving distance from me where I don’t have to buy a plane ticket and deal with all the shenanigans I have dealt with this year.

You can use the code “HELLO” to get a discount on a ticket to Indie DevStock.

I know the face of iOS development is changing. We’re growing and evolving and becoming more corporate. I do hope that even with all the growth of the iOS community we don’t forget our funky, eclectic roots. The unique conference experiences that we have are in danger and it’s important for us to support them.

Anyway, I suck at selling things. There’s a reason I became a programmer and not a sales person. I want to help spread the word about these conferences and try to convince people to come so that iOS development doesn’t become just like everything else. Support indie development and diverse voices in tech!!

Streaming WWDC 2016

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I have never had the privilege of attending WWDC. Most years (including this one) I never bothered to apply to the lottery because I couldn’t afford to go. The one year I could afford to go, I didn’t win a ticket and I decided I would rather have the money as a buffer than go out to WWDC. This was the correct decision.

I attend a lot of conferences. I speak at a lot of conferences. Unfortunately, I have had some difficulty actually attending sessions at conferences. I have panic attacks when I am trapped in a room full of people and I can’t get up and walk around. This was one reason I was never super disappointed about going to WWDC the last few years. The idea of being stuck in a room for a whole week makes me feel like curling in a ball and crying. I go to conferences to network and drink with my friends. Now I am at the point where it’s just networking since I gave up drinking.

One thing I had forgotten about was discovering new things by attending sessions I hadn’t thought to go to. When I went to my first CocoaConf, I encountered a lot of interesting things because I wanted to watch Jonathan Penn and Josh Smith present.

When Swift was introduced two years ago, most of the conference sessions revolved around talking about Swift. I like Swift, it’s a neat language, but I am sick of talking about it. I am tired of hearing people talk about side effects and protocols and immutable state. I miss the first few years I was an iOS developer when people talked about frameworks and weird little nooks and crannies of the Cocoa architecture.

Taken together, this has created something of a perfect storm where I got burned out on iOS development. I got sick of talking to people about it because it always boiled down to Swift and arguing about code purity and a bunch of other bullshit.

I saw the Keynote this year and I had absolutely no enthusiasm for anything this year. I was irritated and cranky and didn’t want to deal with anything. But I noticed that this year Apple decided to stream most of the sessions live. The sessions were always available online later and last year they started showing select sessions. I watched the Swift ones because it was for my job and was still new and exciting. But I rarely watch the sessions afterward because when I watch the sessions, I sit there and pause every few minutes to try and process the vast amount of information that is being presented. There is a massive backlog of lots of sessions I think would be nice to watch but I never get around to watching. I did not think I would do anything this year.

I was wrong.

Streaming the sessions live has completely changed my life this week.

I work from home and so I just kind of threw the live stream on while I worked on stuff. I have it on in the background. I can’t pause the live stream, so I am not poring over every second of each video minutely. I am getting an overview of what they are talking about so I can go and research things later. I also have a team of people on various Slack channels who are watching it with me that I can chat with about the things we find new and exciting.

There were five whole sessions on Metal this year. The last two years I only got through the first Metal video because I felt like I didn’t understand it well enough to move on to the next video. This year, since they were just on, I could passively leave it on and get through all the videos. If this was a normal year, I would not have encountered the thing that has excited me the most this year, which is doing neural networks in Metal. That was introduced in “What’s New in Metal Part 2,” which was the fourth Metal video streamed. I did not need all the context from the first three videos to get excited about the new stuff in Metal.

I got to watch all the videos about GameplayKit, Photos, SpriteKit, etc… All of these technologies that I have been interested in but in a passive way were all just there for me to listen in on. I got introduced to so many things I didn’t know about in obscure frameworks that don’t get a lot of love because most people need to pay the bills and so they don’t do sessions on SceneKit.

This is what it was like at the beginning when I started going to conferences. I would discover so many new things that I would go home excited to get working on something. I haven’t felt this way for the last two years.

I worked for Brad Larson for a year. He told me that the reason he got into making Molecules and got into OpenGL and doing GPUImage was because he had a free period at WWDC and just decided, on a whim, to watch a session on OpenGL. It’s crazy to me about how things you do on a whim or by chance can completely change your life. By not being exposed to these sessions over the last few years, I have been cutting myself off from these chance encounters to find something truly special that I can learn and make my own.

It has been a great gift to get to participate with WWDC from home. Being able to get up and walk around during a session and cuddle with Delia while listening to people give their talks has helped me tremendously. I can talk to people on Slack from all over the world about the sessions as they happen so we can all be excited together. I know that people get something out of being there and getting to talk to the engineers, but for someone with mental health issues that prevent them from being able to be comfortable with massively large amounts of people, this has been a godsend.

I am planning in the future to go back and watch all the videos from previous years that I never watched because they took too long. I can have them on in the background while I work on other things. I can pick out the parts that interest me and look into them further.

For the first time in a really long time, I am excited about iOS development. Thank you Apple for giving that back to me.

Non-Alcoholic Experiments: Iced Tea

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I recently wrote a blog post about giving up alcohol. I had an incredibly frustrating conversation with another developer on Twitter:

I love the smell of bullshit in the morning.

I love the smell of bullshit in the morning.

There is a great deal here that is wrong with our conversation here. This person clearly didn’t read my blog post because I mentioned not being able to drink without becoming violently ill. The issue also isn’t about telling people how to drink in moderation, it’s about the fact that alcohol is incredibly pervasive in the programming community. Would love to see this person telling an ethical vegetarian to just eat meat in moderation or avoid places that refuse to accommodate them and see how well that goes.

I have had multiple official conference events and activities that take place at breweries. It isn’t just deciding you’re not going to go hang out at the hotel bar. There are mixers and parties that are officially parts of the conference. I have worked in places where there is an office liquor cabinet.

At conference parties there will be a clear sign explaining all the wine and beer selections and nothing mentioning anything non-alcoholic. Sometimes you get lucky and they will have Coke, but lots of times there is just water.

Later this developer basically told me that you can’t please everyone. I am not talking about “pleasing everyone.” The fact that it’s assumed that everyone drinks and things are geared around that is quite troubling. There are people who have religious objections, health issues, or are, god forbid, pregnant, that don’t allow them to drink and casually talking about it like it’s a choice, like deciding you won’t eat mushrooms, is incredibly insulting. Also suggesting that if you don’t drink that you should just avoid conferences altogether is yet another example of how we as a community are phasing people out and excluding them. Yay diversity.

Twitter2

Another specious argument was that all non-alcoholic options are more unhealthy than “good” alcoholic options. In spite this person’s claim to the contrary, scotch is not healthy. I agree that juice and soda are full of sugar and no one would claim that they are health food, but neither is scotch. What do you think alcohol is? It’s sugar! Making a claim that having a soda or a glass of cranberry juice at a conference is a less healthy choice than having scotch is bullshit. They’re both unhealthy, but I can drink the juice and I can’t drink the scotch. A glass of juice is not metabolized through my liver. I can drive after drinking a glass of juice. I can take an ibuprofen the next day without jeopardizing my liver. Also, no one is healthy 24/7. We occasionally indulge in something and it would be great to be able to work with people to have less damaging indulgences rather than just saying to go drink water. Telling me what I can and can’t have because you have personally deemed it to be unhealthy is arrogant and presumptuous.

We are programmers. We brag about how great we are at solving problems. We talk big about being disruptive and trying to change the world. I call bullshit on this community that we somehow are helpless in the face of trying to figure out ways to be inclusive to people who do not drink alcohol. There are a lot of ways this problem can be dealt with and just shrugging and saying you can’t please everyone, stay home is not the right response.

Trying to Figure out Replacements

One of the big things that I miss about drinking is not the actual drinking part, but the stuff around it. I miss picking out wine and different flavors of vodka and mixing drinks. I miss using my cocktail glasses. I miss having a process of making things.

IMG_4523This last part has somewhat been replaced by learning how to cook, but I still miss being able to make stuff for myself.

A number of people suggested I replace my wine with tea. I was resistant to this switch because I already have tea keyed in my brain to work. When I get up in the morning, I go through a ritual where I brew my tea in my cast iron tea pot and pick out my mug and sit down to start work for the day. I don’t want to drink more tea at night when I have been drinking tea all day because it will not let my brain relax and realize that work is over.

I did, however, forget about iced tea. My dad was from Tennessee and the only tea he ever drank was iced tea. He did unsweetened Lipton iced tea, but I have realized this is a possible solution to some of the issues I have had with finding a replacement for alcohol:

  • There are a lot of different teas on the market
  • I can mix and match teas to make different flavor combinations
  • I can add in different flavorings like lemon juice
  • I can use a special glass

IMG_4522In order to avoid polluting my mind by confusing it about the teapot, I use a different cast iron teapot for iced tea. When I used to work out of the house I bought a second tea pot for work and kept one at home. I stopped using the work teapot because it’s capacity was a little too large and the tea would go cold before I could drink all of it. It brews about four cups of tea.

A while ago I invested in a tea water machine. One of my bosses had one at a previous job and it was always great to be able to just get up and brew tea any time I feel like it. My house’s electric system is wired badly and I can’t heat water for tea if I am using the toaster oven or running the dishwasher. This heater resolves that issue and has resulted in me drinking more tea because it removes a step and makes it easier to do it.

Since I am watering down the tea with ice, I want it to be strong. I have been using three tablespoons of tea. I want to have my tea be fruity, but I also want it to have some of the health benefits of tea. I brew this for at least seven minutes to try and extract as much flavor from the tea as possible before throwing it out. I usually reuse tea that I drink hot, but when I am making iced tea or chai I use the tea once because the second brewing is too weak.

I know it’s terrible, but I have a number of herbal teas from Teavana. They are very strong and if you blend them with a green tea, they add a lot of flavor. I have been using one part herbal tea to two parts green tea. This gives a distinct fruit flavor while retaining the health benefits of the green tea.

I want this to be something of an indulgence without being too unhealthy. I added an ounce of lemon juice and a quarter of a cup of sugar. I check and that is about 190 calories of sugar, which is about fifty calories per cup of iced tea, which gets watered down significantly. For comparison, an ounce of scotch is 64 calories and a glass of red wine is 125 calories.

Trying to do Better

I consider this experiment a success, but I know this doesn’t translate as a solution to the larger problem of having better non-alcoholic options in the programming community.

Cheers!

Cheers!

One of the reasons I am trying to do these experiments is to eventually figure out bette solutions that can be implemented within the confines of the system. I know that if I go to a bar with people I can order non-alcoholic beverages, but I would like to figure out a solution for catered events where there is generally wine and beer but not any other creative non-alcoholic options.

Most people don’t do something unless it’s easy. Right now it’s easy to drink alcohol because it’s the default. It easier to just drink wine and beer because they’re the most prominent options and everyone else is doing it. I think if it were easier to make non-alcoholic choices more people would do them and it would make more people feel welcome at these events.

The Pervasiveness of Alcohol in the Programming Community

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Several months ago I decided to cut back on drinking. Basically I woke up in the middle of the night and just kind of decided I didn’t want to do it anymore.

I have been going to therapy for the last few months to try and work through some issues and sadly my self medication with alcohol is one of those issues. My therapist keeps telling me I am a recovering alcoholic. I dislike that characterization. I think I had a rough couple of years and I drank to numb myself and escape my problems. That might be the definition of an alcoholic, but I still dislike the characterization.

I thought I could just cut back to a normal amount, but since I gave it up I can’t drink without becoming violently ill. I blew a conference talk because I was suffering from severe illness after a night of drinking with my friends. At NSNorth I drank wine at dinner (and didn’t even go through all my drink tickets) and was so violently ill the next day that I had to spend several hours curled up in a ball on the floor in the corner because I couldn’t stand up without a great deal of nausea.

I have somewhat accepted that I probably can’t drink anymore. I am trying to adjust to a life without alcohol. Since I have abstained from it, there are a bunch of things I have noticed that I wanted to share.

Identity

When I was younger I wanted to be Marion Ravenwood. I loved the scene from Raiders of the Lost Arc where she drinks the guy under the table. I loved that she didn’t put up with anyone’s shit. I thought she was awesome.

I found a lot of alcoholic role models in my young adulthood. Lucille Bluth. Dorothy Parker. The characters in Mad Men.

I'm fabulous and will not put up with your shit.

I’m fabulous and will not put up with your shit.

Alcohol, especially whiskey and other hard liquors, is very masculine. I would try to impress guys by ordering scotch and whisky drinks. There is some feeling of power that comes with ordering whisky. You feel like Don Draper or Peggy Olson. Laymen drink beer. Executives drink scotch.

It can also be very feminine ala the emergence of the Cosmo from Sex and the City. It was fun to go to the bar with friends and hold a pink drink and be girly in a large group of men.

I felt like I could adopt a personality based on what I felt like drinking. I would relax and other people would relax too. I would have deep conversations with people who would let their guard down and tell me things they would normally not say out loud in front of other people. It felt like an intimate experience where you could be with someone who would let their inhibitions down.

I miss alcohol.

I feel like I lost part of my identity. I know that it was not good for me. I gained twenty pounds since I started programming and most of it is from alcohol.

I keep getting emails from cruise lines trying to get me to book a cruise. If I can’t spend the whole cruise drinking then what’s the point? Why does anyone else even go on a cruise if not to have an excuse to drink at 8:00 in the morning??

For a long time I had no idea how to spend the hours between when I finished work and when I had to go to bed. I realized how boring nearly all of my activities were.

I miss the taste of it. I miss the relaxed feeling I got when I had the first drink. I miss going to the store and looking at all the different options I had for wine, liquor, and hard cider. I miss trying new stuff. I miss the glassware. I miss feeling like a grown up sophisticated person and not just a hermit from rural Wisconsin who hides in her house with her pugs and her programming books.

Which leads to my next observation.

Community

It’s weird to me about how big of a part of my life it became. I never drank in college. I went to one beer party and drank soda and didn’t even process that I should want to drink alcohol. Considering I went to a party school in Wisconsin, that’s rather remarkable.

I didn’t have any sanctimonious reasons for not drinking. I just didn’t like the way it tasted. I saw my classmates drink whole bottles of vodka in an evening and black out and not remember what happened the next day. One friend broke her ankle and didn’t remember how it happened and I had to try and help drag her to the campus medical center while she tried to keep herself from throwing up from alcohol poisoning. I didn’t understand what the appeal was of doing this.

I also wasn’t really social in college. I spent most of my evenings in my dorm and later my apartment watching DVDs and doing cross stitch projects. I never really had friends or a community, so I just kind of kept to myself and it wasn’t part of my awareness.

It was probably telling that the first time I ever got drunk was at my bachelorette party. I didn’t drink until I got married. Most of my social activities with my husband revolved around alcohol. We went to dinner at hipster bars with Prohibition-era cocktails. We would go camping and drink around the fire.

I am not totally placing the blame on him. I embraced this lifestyle. I would push to go to certain restaurants over others because I liked their drink menu best. I kept drinking after he moved out and we got divorced. I just remember that most of the good memories I have about being with him revolve around drinking.

I also noticed that most of my social activities are severely curtailed without drinking. Most of my friends brew beer and make wine and mead. They spend their nights at bars playing games. A friend of mine keeps telling me I should move to a more expensive place downtown so we can randomly go to the bars on the spur of the moment and go out drinking with him.

There have been a lot of conferences I have gone to that have social activities at breweries. I was always annoyed that most of these places didn’t have wine, but they also didn’t have non-alcoholic options either.

Me at my heaviest. I would prefer not to stay here.

Me at my heaviest. I would prefer not to stay here.

I am thinking back on all of the conferences I have attended over the last two years. There are open bars with wine and sometimes cocktails but I have no idea what, if anything, they had that was non-alcoholic. They probably had mixers like cranberry juice and Coke. I am not blaming organizers. I know that it’s far more common for event caterers to just have wine or beer packages for events. I am not going to be pissy because organizers don’t make sure there are things like mocktails or better dry options. I am just saying it’s something that has been so pervasive in the fabric of the conference scene that it is like oxygen. It’s just there. You don’t think about it or notice it until you can’t do it anymore.

I have never been pressured into drinking. I have been the one pushing the whole “let’s all drink right now!” bandwagon. That was wrong. I would like to try and rectify some of the passive damage I have contributed to our community.

A lot of the conversation we have in the programming community about alcohol abuse tends to revolve around the possibility of sexual assault. It is an insulting argument that puts pressure on women to abstain from alcohol to avoid being raped. It also is like a parent who will take the ball away from everyone just because one person is being a jackass.

We’re getting better about talking about mental illness and I would like that to also include how we talk about and deal with alcohol. I would like there to be better and more prominent choices for non-alcoholic beverages at conferences. I would like people to think more about what they are doing rather than just grabbing a beer because it’s there and it’s what everyone does.

We’re all self medicating from punishing crunch times and crippling impostor syndrome. It’s an escape from the pressure we’re putting on ourselves to avoid having to confront any of the very real problems that we have with how we deal with stress in our community.

We, as young adults, don’t seem to have healthy social outlets for socialization that don’t revolve around drinking. I understand that it lowers inhibitions, but I feel like I can’t go out and do anything socially because I don’t want to drink.

I am not trying to be sanctimonious and tell people not to drink. I just would like people to have some awareness of what they are doing rather than just treating it like oxygen. Now that I can’t drink I am seeing lots of things I never noticed before and it worries me.

Why I am Trying to Give Up Drinking

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Anyone who follows me on Twitter or knows me in real life knows that I am quite fond of my evening glass of wine. It’s at a point where it’s almost a personality trait, along with my pugs.

I am vaguely aware of the fact that it’s not really a good thing to be known as the person who drinks a lot. I had the problem of thinking that people like Dorothy Parker and Lucille Bluth are super cool and have lead me to attribute this as a positive personality trait.

I wasn’t always like this.

How I Started Drinking

The first time I ever got drunk was at my bachelorette party. It was a very interesting experience for me. It felt like having a migraine only it didn’t hurt. It put me into this weird, almost meditative state that I found very stimulating.

I never partied when I was in high school or college. I used to spend my Saturday nights watching public TV with my parents. When I was in college I would spend all night alone in my apartment doing cross stitching while watching Law & Order marathons.

I felt kind of like I missed out on my youth and I wanted to make up for lost time. I figured I would get tired of it and I didn’t worry about it too much.

I went back to school to learn programming. I had a lot of anxiety about how I was going to find a job because I knew that the tech industry was very youth-centric. I knew as a woman in my 30’s with no experience it would tricky to break into the industry. I knew my best chance was to work my ass off and try to increase my skills as fast as possible. I stopped cross stitching and doing all the things I used to do to relax. The easiest way to get myself to relax was to drink. I half heartedly tried quitting a few times, but I was so stressed out that I figured I would deal with it later.

Then my marriage started falling apart.

The last year I was married I gave myself alcohol poisoning five times. Two weeks into my first job I was out for New Year’s and I drank so much so quickly that I could not keep water down for a few days. I didn’t want to tell any of the young guys at my job that I got so drunk I couldn’t keep water down, so I just kind of got through it.

After I left that job I worked from home and worked on a book. I used to keep boxes of wine outside where they would freeze overnight. I would bring them in and by the time noon rolled around the wine was thawed enough for me to drink it.

After the divorce I went through a massive depression that I did not expect to go through. I had to commute sixty miles a day to and from my job. By the time I got home I was so spent that all I could do was open a bottle of wine and drink in the bath tub. I deluded myself into thinking I didn’t have a problem because I stopped giving myself alcohol poisoning.

I am painfully aware that these behaviors that I am describing are really unhealthy. But I was stressed out and depressed and this wasn’t at the top of my list of things to worry about.

Why I Am Going to Stop

I am honestly trying to remember what triggered this most recent decision.

The last few months I haven’t been able to go for walks because of the weather. I used to walk 45 minutes a day. It was therapeutic. I wasn’t doing it to lose weight, it was just to get away from the computer and try to clear my head.

I hit 34 and started noticing things like lines around my eyes. I feel like I have put on a bunch of weight over the last few months. I bought larger jeans that used to be loose that are now not anymore.

I recently was able to start doing my walks again recently. I realized that even though I was jogging two miles a day I probably wasn’t going to lose any weight because of my drinking habit.

For some reason, this really bothered me. I don’t want to be a person who is obsessed with losing that last ten pounds, but I am at the point where a bunch of this crap is really bothering me.

I have cleared out enough other emotional baggage from my queue that I now want to deal with this.

I don’t want to feel this way anymore. I have had enough periods of my life where I was out of shape and not feeling particularly well. I know that inevitably at some point I am going to be old. It will be harder to lose weight than it is now. My joints will bother me. I can’t keep this from happening, but I can push it off a while longer by making changes now. It’s better late than never.

What I am Trying To Do

My initial thought was that I would do things in moderation. I would limit myself to one glass of wine a night. I then realized that was not going to work. I always think I will have one, but then after the first one I feel really good and the evening is still early, so I have more.

I also decided not to try and replace alcohol with another sweet beverage like fruit juice. I want to be healthier and lose weight, so replacing alcoholic sugar with non-alcoholic sugar was not a great idea.

I am trying to go cold turkey on most sugar.

I did this a few years ago. I drank nothing but water for like two weeks to retrain my palette not to expect everything it encounters to be sweet.

I am restraining my beverage intake to just water, sparkling water, and tea. I am putting some honey in my tea in the mornings because I am also putting lemon in it and I need something to ameliorate it. I know honey is sugar and sugar is bad for you, but I am confining it to that one thing and I have no allusions that it’s healthy, so don’t lecture me.

I am taking this one day at a time. I know from watching people fail at diets that I am going to have bad days. I will have days where I simply can’t deal with it and I will drink. I will not throw in the towel and give up on the experiment. I will just try to do better next time.

Things I have Notice So Far

I am only on my third day of this, so in a few weeks this might be a laughable blog post. But I have noticed a few things so far.

Nights are Boring

My routine used to be that I would finish work, take a bath with a glass of wine, get warm and comfortable, then go to bed.

I can’t do that anymore.

I used to think that after I got done with work, that I was spent for the day. I would basically drug my brain to get it to relax and calm down so I could sleep and work the next day.

The last few days I have realized I can take a bath and be refreshed enough to work on something else that I actually want to do.

It’s really disconcerting. I know I am tired and I need to sleep, but my brain gets a second wind.

This might be a temporary thing and I will probably crash in a few days. At that point I need to figure out a better way to relax. I never thought I would forget how to relax. It was so hard to do any work when I was younger that I never thought I would be stuck in the mind set that I had to work all the time.

Sugar Withdrawal Really Sucks

I think part of the reason I was drinking as much as I did was because I trained my brain to associate sugar with work being over.

I knew that alcohol had a lot of sugar in it, but I didn’t think about the fact that I was slowly increasing my intake over the last few years.

Yesterday I wanted to stab someone for a drink, not because I craved the alcohol, but because I craved the sugar. I ate a few pieces of dark chocolate and I felt better and the craving went away.

The long term goal isn’t to replace one source of sugar with another. I know that cutting back on all sugar is the goal, but it takes some time to get there. At least the chocolate provides some satiation. Alcohol is an appetite stimulant. I will not be hungry, but then I will have a glass of wine and suddenly be famished. Cutting back on the alcohol not only cuts those calories, but also all the ones I would eat after getting the munchies.

I am hoping the cravings get better the longer I stick with this.

Not Exercising Bothers Me

My Apple Watch got pretty passive aggressive with me over the winter because I wasn’t going on my walks. It was annoying, but I didn’t feel super compelled to do anything about it.

The last few days I have been crawling the walls if I can’t do some kind of exercise.

I wanted to go for a walk yesterday and I almost jumped out of my skin trying to find a time I could get out of here. It was too cold to walk, so I did a strength training exercise for half an hour and even that didn’t feel long enough.

Sitting at my computer today drove me crazy. I am going to try to find a way to do a standing desk of some kind. It’s harder to do with the retina iMac than it was with the laptop and the robotics boxes.

Moving Forward

For me, the biggest test of how this will go is when I got to my first conference this year in two weeks, RWDevCon. I need to decide if I am going to forgo drinking altogether at that event or try to limit myself to one drink. If it were right now I would forgo it completely, but I will see how I feel then.

I wish I could see this in an optimistic light. Yay, I can work on side projects after work. I can work out and lose weight and be healthier. This is going to be super awesome.

But I can’t think of it that way. This is going to be a huge and difficult adjustment. I know I used to live quite happily not doing this every night and I can probably do that again. But it’s going to take some time and effort to relearn how to relax so I don’t burn myself out. I feel like I have taken the fail safes off of myself that kept me from doing too much. I knew I could force myself to relax by basically drugging myself. Now that I am choosing not to do that anymore, I am not sure how I am going to function. I guess I will find out.