Category Archives: Conferences

My Resolutions for 2016

Posted on by

I woke up on the last day of this year completely non-functional. I am used to having a day or two of non functionality, but I can usually target it for weekends so that I don’t have to tell anyone I don’t feel well or miss work. Wasn’t able to do that a few days ago.

I really tried to make it to the long weekend, but my body gave out on me before then. The wonderful people at my work told me to take off early and get some rest and not to do any work this weekend. It’s a good place and I am happy that I work for people who want me to take care of myself.

Since I am not supposed to code or do any work right now, I have been thinking about what my goals are this year. I know most people are resolving to work out more often or lose weight or whatever. My goals are going to be a little different.

  • I am not working on another book
  • I am going to release an app or an open source project
  • I am going to clean and organize my house
  • I am going to make more of an effort to entertain at my house
  • I am going to cook a complicated special meal once a month
  • I am going to make complicated special dessert once a month
  • I will go on a real vacation this year

I am not working on another book

I can’t do this any more right now. When I worked on my first programming book, I was between jobs and I was able to dedicate all of my time to working on it. There was a period of overlap, which was incredibly difficult. I wasn’t planning to work on one this year, but a series of events lead me to work on the Swift Apprentice.

Working on that broke me.

I would sit down to work on it and feel my head filling with white noise. Even thinking about going to work on my computer made me want to curl up in a ball and cry. I missed a lot of my deadlines and I felt horrible for not doing what I promised to do. I was supposed to do two chapters but I could only pull myself together enough to do one.

I don’t know why this project was the one that broke me. I had worked on other books and wrote articles for Objc-io, but this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I have been trying to recover from it ever since.

Everyone on the Swift Apprentice was incredibly supportive and understanding. I do not want this to come off in any way like I am blaming anyone there. I had no idea what my limits were until I went over them. I actually wrote a long pitch to Ray about a Metal book on the way home from 360iDev. I had only gotten about three hours of sleep a night for a week and a few hours after I wrote him that pitch my body gave out and I nearly passed out several times on my trip home. I slept for two days after that.

I think when I am about to crash I go into denial and try to add even more work to myself because I don’t want to admit that I am spent. It’s taking me longer and longer to recover from a crash and they are happening more and more often.

So I am not going to work on anything extra this year. I just can’t. I will keep blogging and doing other writing for myself, but I am not taking on anything with a deadline for someone else this year. I just can’t do it right now.

I am going to release an app or an open source project

Going along with the previous resolution, I need to do some work for myself this year.

Most job postings require you to have published an app to be hired. I have gotten around that by working on books and talks and working for very intelligent people.

So far in my career I have never done anything for myself or on my own.

I found it hard to justify working on my own things when I had so many opportunities presented to me. It astonishes me that I have written a book with Chris Adamson and worked for Brad Larson and have had the incredible privilege of joining the Ray Wenderlich team. I keep waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and tell me that I am living someone else’s life and it’s time to go back to my actual one.

It bothers me that I have not finished something of my own. I pushed it off to the side while I tried to establish my career. I know that doing something of my own would establish it further, but stuff kept coming up. I kept thinking I would work on it when this current thing was over, but then another thing would come along and another.

I know this is totally a first world problem that I have too many good opportunities. I took a lot of them because I found it hard to say no. I need to do that this year because I need to focus on what I want to do and be known for.

I did the writing and the speaking because I wasn’t super comfortable with my programming skills. I was a beginner and I needed to find a job to support myself. Doing things I already had experience with helped me jumpstart my career. It was the right move to make at the time.

Now I want to focus on showing that I can code. I want to find something that hasn’t been done before and I want to figure it out. I want to do this for me. I don’t care if an app I write makes a penny, I want to make it because I want to know I am capable of doing so.

I am not putting this off any longer. I am doing something for me this year.

I am going to clean and organize my house

I have written in the past about my house. I started organizing and cleaning it a month or two ago. I noticed over the last week or two that it’s been sliding back into chaos. That should have been a warning to me that I was heading for a crash.

One problem I have is that I don’t have an organizational structure. I can’t put anything away because there is nowhere to put anything away to. I have been boxing things up and storing them in the basement.

2015 was the first year where I had to actually pay bills and budget stuff. I was terrified of running out of money, so I didn’t really invest in things for my house for a while. I was also gone most of the time and it was easier to just not think about it. I had two rooms in my house I never went into because I was never home.

Now that I work from home, it bothers me to see how messy everything is. I have never gotten to decorate my home before. I didn’t think of this as my home until recently and I have started to become mentally unfrozen about it.

I am hoping to budge out an amount for shelves for my books and my geeky toys. I want to pain the rooms of the house in colors I like. I want to organize the kitchen and finally figure out what stuff my ex left for me.

I don’t want to sleep walk through my life anymore. I want to be actively engaged in world around me, including the place I call my home.

I am going to make more of an effort to entertain at my house

I live in the middle of nowhere. I also like to plan things and cook. I always wanted to have parties, but neither my father nor my husband would let me do that. It also wasn’t like I had anyone to invite over anyway.

I don’t want to get too isolate out here on my own. I would like to be able to have people come over here and enjoy themselves. The idea of being able to actually plan out a menu and feed people and have people come over here makes me really happy.

I don’t want to be ashamed of the place that I live. I would like to have people come here and enjoy themselves. I would like to have an excuse to dress nicely and have a good time with people. This also gives me an incentive to make sure I clean my house properly periodically and not let it slide into chaos.

I am going to cook a complicated special meal once a month

I wrote recently about having a subscription food service. I like to cook, but I find grocery shopping to be overwhelming.

My weekly subscription is really awesome for feeding myself every day, but the meals are by its nature simplified for busy people who don’t have a day to prepare a meal.

There are a bunch of things I want to figure out how to make that are complicated.

I want to actually organize myself by choosing one complicated thing a month that I will make. I will have a targeted list of ingredients so I don’t just randomly start buying things with the idea that I could make a lot of different things.

I think by planning a day, like the second Saturday of every month, to do something special and to have a targeted list of things I want to do, that I can organize myself enough to do something special.

I could try to coordinate this with the entertaining resolution. I would love to have a dinner party. I know no one does that anymore, but I want to do it and I think it would be fun.

I am going to make complicated special dessert once a month

One thing that has disappointed me as an adult is not being able to bake things. My ex took up the Paleo diet, which doesn’t allow for any kind of baking at all.

This sounds totally stupid, but I grew up thinking that I would be able to bring cookies and stuff to work for my co-workers. I haven’t had a job like that since I worked in the call center. Right now I work from home so I don’t have an office to bring things to. At my last office I was discouraged from bringing food in. I brought in doughnuts once and no one would eat them.

I am bothered by how touchy everyone is about food. Everyone is on a perpetual diet. Everyone thinks that if you eat a brownie you are a bad person with no willpower. It really fucking sucks.

So I am going to make something every month. Hopefully I can find people to pawn it off to. If not, I just want to make it for myself. Hopefully I can freeze it. Hopefully I can serve it at something.

It sucks investing time in making something to have people turn their noses up at it and feel virtuous because somehow they are better than you are because they don’t indulge in things that are bad for them. I made stuffed mushrooms for my parents for Christmas Eve and my dad would not keep the leftovers because I put bacon in them. He talked down to me about how I was going to die before I turned forty because I eat bacon a few times a year.

Life is short. Eat cake. Not every day, but sometimes.

I will go on a real vacation this year

The last vacation I went on was in 2013. I went on a cruise during my winter break between semesters at school. My ex and I spent most of the cruise drinking. He discovered that he loved scuba diving. I discovered that the idea of putting my head underwater threw me into a panic attack.

I wanted to spend the whole time laying around the adults-only pool area relaxing and reading programming books. I was forced off the boat at each port. I didn’t get to do anything that I wanted. I got screamed at at least three times. It would have been a wonderful vacation if I had been alone.

I want a real vacation.

I have gone on trips to conferences. I sing for my supper and they’re all working trips. I have gotten to see a lot of amazing places and met a lot of amazing people. It’s been great, but it’s also been exhausting. The last trip I went on I was awake for 24 hours straight.

I wanted to speak at conferences so I could afford to attend a lot of them, but most of the conferences I went to in 2015 were so overwhelming that the only session I attended was my own. I would spend long periods of time hiding out in my room because I was too spent to leave and see others speak.

I have thought about doing vacations before, but the effort for planning one and the cost have been overwhelming to me. I don’t know how people do cheap vacations. If anyone has advice I would be happy to hear it. The cheapest flights I have been able to book are $350. Then it’s hard to find a hotel for less than a hundred bucks a night. If you are gone a week, it’s at least a grand to just get there and be there. I am sure there are cheaper alternatives, but I have been too mentally exhausted to deal with it, so I haven’t looked into alternatives. I have just written off the idea that this is something I can do.

I would like to either do a cruise or an all-inclusive resort. I want to step off the plane someplace warm and not have to think about anything for a week. I want to not worry about feeding myself. I don’t want to worry about finding alcohol. I just want to be able to set somewhere I can relax and do whatever I want when I feel like it. I want no friction. I don’t want to feel bad that I am not going out and visiting historical places or going to museums. I don’t want to have to figure out where I am getting food. I just want to relax and do whatever I feel like.

If anyone has any suggestions for resorts or cruises they liked, I would appreciate it, especially if it’s targeted at singles. A cruise would be twice as expensive for me to travel as a single person. It might still be the best option, but I am open to suggestions that are different.

Rest and Renewal

I am figuring out the hard way that I can’t work all the time. I have been running myself into the ground for the last three years. I needed to do that for the first couple, but I can’t keep doing it anymore.

I have been afraid of backing off at all. I saw people who have been doing the same thing for fifteen years and have gotten complacent that things will never change. They think their jobs will always be there. They don’t try to push to move up or evolve their jobs.

I picked the handle Red Queen Coder because the Red Queen had to run as fast as she could just to stay in one place. If she wanted to get anywhere, she would have to run twice as fast as she was. I have been running twice as fast for the last three years. It’s time to step back to just running and staying in one place. I need to rebuild my energy for the next sprint.

Why Codes of Conduct Are Bullshit

Posted on by

For the last few years I have been watching people go back and forth about Codes of Conduct at conferences. I never really paid that much attention to them because I honestly didn’t care about them one way or another. I figured this would eventually go away, but it hasn’t.

There are a number of reasons I hate Codes of Conduct that I hoped I would never have to write about. I hoped that this would just go away or some other brave soul would address these issues and they would spoken about, but since it doesn’t look like that is the case, I am going to address the various elephants in the room no one wants to talk about.

Codes of Conduct are a Distraction

We are in the month of October, which, among other things, is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I also think Breast Cancer Awareness is bullshit.

All those little pink yogurt tops that people collect at work and all the braless days don’t do a fucking thing to actually help cure breast cancer or help survivors of breast cancer.

Everyone is pretty aware of breast cancer and the dangers associated with it. I have the nice breast cancer pink Kitchenaid mixer and had my first mammogram when I found a cyst in my breast the week after I filed for divorce.

People are acting like CoC are some magical talisman that will suddenly make people behave. It’s like they picture Douchebag McBro sitting at his computer looking at a conference without a Code of Conduct saying, “All right! I can go rape at this conference!” You might as well hand out a rabbit’s foot to every conference goer.

All of this talk about making sure the wording is exactly right on your CoC is talking that we are not doing about addressing the underlying issues that make conferences unsafe.

Doesn’t Address the Way Assault Actually Happens

We have a collective fairy tale we tell ourselves about how rape and assault work. Pure virginal girl gets attacked in the bushes on her way home from Bible study by a stranger who attacks her. If something does not fit neatly within that narrative, it tends to get called into question.

Fact: Most assaults happen from people that you know well.

Let’s explore this scenario.

You are a woman have been going to conferences for five years. There is a cute, funny guy that you are friends with that you have seen a couple of times a year for the last three years. You’re both married, but you’re always happy to see him because he is your friend.

Suddenly, one day, after all these years, your friend starts touching you. You look around and you realize that you are alone with this person.

Your first thought is, “Fuck, why is this happening now?”

Your second thought is, “Fuck, how do I short circuit this situation to avoid losing my friend?”

Fact: Women are trained not to give a firm no.

Story time: When I was in fifth grade one of my male classmates would go around at lunch and ask people if they were done with their food because he was always hungry. After he asked all of us, he would ask everyone else in the lunch room, including first and second graders. After he did this for a week, the principal sat him down and said that he was terrorizing the little kids who were afraid to say no to this big fifth grade boy asking for their food, so they gave it to him because they were afraid he would beat them up. He genuinely didn’t think about it that way. He didn’t think about how his age and size would intimidate little kids and he felt bad because it wasn’t his intention to be a bully.

This is why some men who assault women don’t understand that what they did was assault.

Let’s go back to our scenario. I am 5’4. Most of the men at my conferences are over six feet tall. If you’re alone with a man who is a foot taller than you are, you are in danger.

Over the years, most women are socially trained to give a soft no. We grow up inundated with stories about nice guys asking out girls who laugh at them and treat them cruelly. We don’t want to be a bitch. More recently, we see stories posted to Facebook about ten-year-old boys shooting girls who won’t give them their toys. If you were born a woman, there is a constant cloud of potential violence that follows you everywhere you go.

When I go to conferences I have to sit at the end of the table or near a door because I am constantly figuring out exit strategies. I have trouble being on planes because of the number of people I am trapped with. I started paying extra to sit near the front of the plane and get off first because being surrounded by people with no ability to escape triggers panic attacks.

The person doing this is your friend and you think that you can find a way to shut this down where you don’t get assaulted either physically or sexually. So you try to put them off by saying it’s late and you’re tired or you have a headache.

The guy does not hear no. He hears, “Oh, she’s tired, that means that we can go back up to her room. She has a headache. I have some aspirin in my room. I can fix this.”

When the guy does not hear the soft no, or they start pressuring you into going with them, bad things start to happen.

I have PTSD. I was raped in college by a guy who talked his way into my dorm room. When we get to this point in the scenario, I shut down. My brain cannot deal with defending itself from an assault, so I basically withdraw into myself. Sometimes I black out because my brain will not allow me to record what has happened.

When I get assaulted, I don’t scream or kick. I shut down. I lose control of my body and go into shock. I don’t report my assaults because I know that the person assaulting me probably does not understand that they are assaulting me. They are waiting for a firm no. They don’t listen for a soft no or an enthusiastic yes. They start touching me, I shut down, they don’t hear no, so they assume that what they are doing is okay. Sometimes I don’t remember things after a certain point and that I can’t be used as a reliable witness about what happened.

I know within our narrative I am not doing my part. I am supposed to say no before the guy rapes me in order for it to “count.” But that isn’t how most women behave when they are being assaulted. We are afraid, we are disappointed that someone we trusted is doing this to us, and we are paralyzed because we do not know what to do.

It makes me angry when someone puts me in this situation. It is not fair. It rips out a piece of my soul every time this happens.

Which brings me to my next problem with Codes of Conduct.

No Talk of Personal Responsibility

I feel like the people in charge of the current tech feminist bullhorn are adopting the “Pedestrians and Bicyclist” form of personal safety and responsibility.

I live in Madison, WI. We have a university here where the students who walk and ride bike will walk into oncoming traffic without looking. Sometimes they will purposely look away from oncoming traffic and trust that the cars coming will respect their right of way and not run them over.

You cannot put your personal safety in the hands of other people.

In the case of the students, they don’t think about a driver that is distracted by their phone or their toddler in the back seat. They don’t take into consideration the crazy cab driver I had once who saw a student pull this and floored it and aimed the car at him.

Codes of Conduct talk about expected behavior. If you don’t behave the way you’re supposed to, you get kicked out. Seems fair, except it doesn’t address the damage done to the person being assaulted.

My understanding is that this recent push for Codes of Conduct are because of this incident.

In this incident, the person was assaulted in public. A bystander stepped in to break it up. The man lost his job. This is the best possible outcome that you can get from an assault.

Justine still is damaged by what happened.

It’s like the pedestrians and the car. Yes, you might have the right of way, but if someone is distracted and hits you, it doesn’t matter if they go to jail and feel guilty for the rest of their life, you are still damaged by their action.

Any conversation about safety at conferences must talk about what we can do to keep ourselves safe. No one fucking talks about this. Everyone wants to yell at men and tell them that everything they do could possibly be considered assault instead of talking to women about how to create our own safety net.

I want to see conversations where women exchange phone numbers to keep one another safe. I want to see women making their own network of people where you can all look out for one another. Girls do this in college when they go out, why aren’t we talking about doing this as adults?

The reason is that members of our community think we shouldn’t have to. They are not concerned about keeping women safe, they’re concerned with controlling the conversation and having this as a weapon to wield against anyone who isn’t completely on board with their cause.

Which brings my last point.

Shuts Down Open Communication

I recently read an article that says that boys going to college don’t know what rape is. I can believe this.

It is very difficult to give black and white, clear definitions about what assault looks like. I have tried to by explaining things from my own perspective and to give men an idea what to look out for. The fact that we aren’t having open conversations about this shit is one reason that it keeps happening.

Most men that I know are good guys who want to do the right thing. They don’t know how to do that. They are basically being told that everything they do could be seen as assault, so don’t do anything.

This leads to an environment where genuine predators can get sympathy for being rapists because everyone is secretly terrified that they will be falsely accused of rape.

There are very clear things people can do to make sure they are not assaulting someone. It’s not romantic, but ask if you can someone. If you’re a guy that I like and you ask if it’s okay to touch me, I will respect you for it. Quit following the “ask forgiveness rather than seek permission” shit. Also, if you are married and you’re trying to have an affair with me, I am judging you.

Alternatives to Code of Conduct

I was asked by Gem Barrett yesterday what I would suggest as an alternative to Code of Conduct. At that point I really didn’t know how to answer. I don’t think we should offload the responsibility of keeping ourselves safe to another person. I do not think there is much a conference organizer can do in the middle of the night if one of their attendees is being a dick. I can guarantee you that no conference organizer wants an assault to happen at their conference.

This is what I am going to do.

At every conference I go to, I am going to find all the women and any men that I trust and I will give them my number. I want to organize a support structure for the women attending the conference where they have at least one person they can reach out to if they don’t feel safe. If you go out, go with a buddy. Stick to your buddy. Both of you leave or neither of you leave. Call someone to make sure they got back to their room okay.

If you’re at a conference and you find someone who doesn’t have a support structure yet, be their friend. Introduce them to other people. Look out for them. I have yet to attend any conference where there was not at least one other woman. Stick together. Support one another. This should not be the responsibility of the conference organizer. It’s our skin in the game. We have the most to lose. It’s our responsibility to make sure that we are safe.

I am also saying on here that I will answer any questions that anyone might have about anything I have written here. I think people are too afraid to get information that they need and I would rather be asked than have someone live in perpetual fear that everything they are doing is wrong.

I love this community. One reason I joined this community was because people were tolerant of beginners. If I didn’t understand something, I could ask without anyone making me feel bad for not knowing something. This has been a friendly, supportive community and I want to see it continue to be so.

I am fucking sick and tired of seeing people argue about semantics on a form rather than having meaningful discussions about keeping our community safe for everyone. If this is going to devolve into a community where everyone is afraid of voicing their own opinion if it doesn’t correlate to whatever the loudest person in the room is, then I don’t want to be a member of this community anymore.

Thank you.

NSScotland Absence

Posted on by

Hi. I announced a year ago that I was going to be speaking at NSScotland. I had been invited to speak while I was still a student, but I was broke and couldn’t afford to go. I was incredibly sad about it and was really looking forward to going this year.

I have written on here about how I went through a divorce this year. I lost all the equity in my house and lost any savings I thought I had. I basically started out from zero this year. Honestly, it was terrifying. I have never paid my own bills or done a budget before. Having no buffer and not being certain that I would live within my means terrified the crap out of me. When we filed for divorce, we were $30,000 in debt. I was going to have less than half the money available to me to pay more expenses and I was honestly terrified.

I gave up a few trips this year to give myself some breathing room. I was told by a lot of people to go to Alt Conf when I didn’t get a ticket to WWDC, but I really couldn’t justify taking my buffer and spending it on that trip. I also couldn’t justify spending the money on Scotland, so I tearfully had to tell Alan that I couldn’t make it this year. He was very understanding.

I have been very troubled over many of the things I have heard about NSScotland over the last few months. I was at a conference where a friend of mine told me that Alan had gotten into a huge fight with Cate Huston over her attending NSScotland and had behaved rather badly.

This took me by surprise. I have not met Alan in person, but I have known him for two years and have not seen him behave this way. This friend of mine is very involved in the feminist tech community, which I am not, so I wasn’t certain what was going on. I didn’t defend Alan at that point because I felt it was necessary to hear all the sides of a story before I pass judgement.

I met Cate Huston at 360iDev. We spoke briefly. She mentioned not going to a conference because of a Code of Conduct issue. Having spoken to both Alan a friend of mine, I asked if she was speaking about NSScotland.

She became very hostile towards me and snarled at me, “How do you know about that?! I only told three people about that and one of them certainly wasn’t you!” I panicked a little and mentioned my friend who talked to me about it a few months earlier. She again snarled at me that she didn’t know this person. I was honestly a little frightened. This was, at this point, common knowledge among people in the iOS community and having someone act like I had hacked their email or read their diary was a little unsettling.

I thought all of this would die down, but it hasn’t. So I am going to defend Alan.

Running a Conference

Running a conference is a pain in the ass. People do not make money off of conferences. Conferences are a service that people do in order for our community to be an awesome place to be.

I have met a lot of amazing people at conferences and been able to maintain relationships that I otherwise would not because I get to see people a few times a year at a common gathering place.

I have become friends with people who run conferences and their selflessness always astonishes me. These are wonderful people who deserve to be treated with respect who are working to make the community a better place.

I really try to give the organizers the benefit of the doubt because of the work they do and the impact it has had on me personally.

I honestly do not give a shit about Codes of Conduct.

I attended one conference with a Code of Conduct where one of the keynote speakers made sexist remarks and insulted everyone in the audience. I live-tweeted what was going on and rather than taking my concerns seriously, the organizer pressured me into removing them rather than listening to the fact that he had hired someone to come and insult the people at his conference. I will never go to this conference again. I understand that he was under a lot of pressure, but the way he behaved was atrocious.

I know that Alan sometimes makes comments that could be considered inappropriate. I know that he knows that. We speak a lot and he is always worried about offending me. I am an adult and if he says something that crosses a line, I tell him. I have an inappropriate sense of humor and I don’t want people walking on eggshells around me worrying about offending me. If something offends me, I will tell you. If you don’t do it again, we’re good.

I only have problems when someone tries to exert control over me to manipulate me into doing something I don’t want to do. That is what happened and the previously mentioned conference, which is why I will never go back there.

I tried to get Alan to come on my podcast, but he won’t speak publicly about what happened. If Alan was a woman, this would elicit outrage and whoever was causing the issue would have a hoard of people spamming their Twitter feed yelling at them. I don’t think it’s okay for this to happen to Alan because he is a man. Bullying is bullying and it makes me angry that a member of our community doesn’t feel comfortable talking about what is happening with them.

I want people to lay off of Alan. He has been nothing but supportive of me since before I was anyone. He sent me a copy of “Smalltalk Design Patterns” by Kent Beck when I said I wanted to be a better programmer. He was very disappointed that more women couldn’t speak at his conference. I think he’s trying to make the community better for women and I am deeply disappointed that this is happening to him. He’s one of the good guys. I support him. I hope that this blows over and that his reputation isn’t irreparably damaged by this, but I don’t hold out hope on that front. I am saddened that this is happening in a community that I love and I hope that it can be cleared up and resolved without anyone being the bad guy.

I do not want to make this sound like a hit piece on Cate. I do not know her well and I do not want this to come off as me attacking her. I know that she has gone through things I have not. I can see a scenario where the two of them misunderstood one another and things escalated in a way neither of them would like. I am not saying that either of them are wrong, I simply think this is a situation that has grown out of control because no one has been willing to say anything about it.

I know this will probably earn me some angry responses, but I don’t give a shit. I will speak my mind. I am sorry if my opinion is different than yours, but it is my right to say what I think. I have become somewhat prominent in the community recently and I feel I have a responsibility to use that visibility to make this a better community for everyone. Making Alan’s life miserable doesn’t make things better for women.

Meaningful Relationships and the Art of Networking

Posted on by

Family

My father and I have had arguments about family for most of my life. My father keeps insisting that now that I am an adult I should make a pilgrimage twice a year to go to his family reunions. I don’t see the point in going to these because I had many of these events from my childhood where I felt kind of like we were the Anne of Cleeves juice glass in the collection of wives of Henry VIII. We needed to be there so that there would be a complete set of my father’s siblings and family, but once we were accounted for we were kind of ignored and forgotten.

I came to terms with this at some point in my early adulthood because, honestly, what do you say to people you only see twice a year? Most of my relatives were much older than I was. My cousins were in college and getting married when I was in Jr. High. We were at different points in our lives.

The advent of Facebook and the Internet has made it much easier to connect with my relatives and keep up with what they are doing. We’re also now all adults and it’s a little easier to connect with people when you’re at the same point in your life.

Yet still I fight with my father over the necessity to go there and see people in person. We would have incredibly heated arguments over this and I could never articulate why this bothered me so much until recently, and yes, it does has something to do with networking.

Meaningful Relationships

I guess the things that bothers me about going to various family reunions is that they are perfunctory and superficial. You go, you say hi to the host, you eat your sandwich, you go home.

I observed over many years that most people’s relationships with their families were much different than my own.

I grew up in a very small town where most people had a huge network of cousins and other relatives who were all around the same age. They were thick as thieves in school and continue to voluntarily spend time together as adults. People weren’t just cousins, they were friends as well.

My cousins were not my friends. I really think that they could have been.

I remember as a kid being hauled to the family Christmas brunch where I would usually find a nice corner to sit in and read my Babysitter’s Club books while I waited for presents to be opened so that we could go back to the hotel and go swimming. One thing that happened every year was that my cousins would all go out to a movie and I was always invited to go. My dad would tell them no, I wasn’t allowed to go with them.

After a few years they stopped asking and whatever relationship I had with them withered until I became an adult and reconnected with them on social media.

My mother’s family was closer in both age and geographically and I barely saw them either. I will now go on Facebook and see every cousin of my mother’s, except her, go on a week-long camping trip and other various adventures that we are never included in because we’re not really a member of the family.

I keep fighting with my dad because I think we have different ideas of what “family” is.

My dad thinks that family is people you are related to by blood who are obligated to take you in if you are in trouble. He sees them like Social Security. You show up once a year to let them know you are alive so that if you are at a point where you might not be you can show up with your hand out and expect to be taken care of.

To me, what I observed, is that family are your social circle and your safety net. Family is people you want to spend time with and who you want to help if they’re in trouble. My dad has no interest in a meaningful relationship with any member of his or my mother’s extended family and he assumes that the blood tie is enough to fulfill this goal.

So What Does this Have to do with Networking?

I’ve noticed that some people are taking the wrong approach to networking.

Many people think that having several hundred LinkedIn connections is a network. It isn’t.

Jeremy Sherman was talking at the mini-360iDev in Greenville last year about how he networked with a journalist he hoped would feature him in a piece for his magazine. The only reason this tactic worked was because Jeremy actually made friends with this person. They liked one another and it was a real, meaningful relationship. He made it clear it wasn’t a mercenary tactic, he just really wanted to befriend the guy and that it worked out because he treated the journalist as a human being and not an opportunity.

All of the opportunities I have had have come from having meaningful relationships with people in this community.

It means a lot to me that the Kleins, the Remsiks, and the Wilkers have given me the opportunity to speak at their conferences. I like all of them as people very much. If I didn’t get to speak at 360iDev in two weeks (buy your tickets!), I would still like the Wilkers very much and would have found a way to go (but I am glad I didn’t have to).

I made friends with Chris Adamson because I liked the work that he did. We hung out at Anime Central the last two years because we were friends and we both had a mutual enjoyment of anime.

If I had gone into my friendship with him with the agenda that I was going to get something out of him, our friendship would never have materialized. People can sense users a mile away. Don’t be a user.

I am at a point right now where if I lost my job this afternoon, I have a large number of people I would go to for help, not just to find another job, but just because they’re friends who I think can give me advice and comfort about what to do. I have a lot of people in this community that I consider to be close friends and confidants and it makes my life and career richer for having a meaningful relationship with them.

Networking is about building meaningful relationships with people. It’s about seeing them as people and spending time with them even if it doesn’t immediately get you anything. It’s about finding people you genuinely like and who genuinely like you. If you go to one conference and meet someone once and never follow up with them, then I am sorry, they are not a connection in your network.

If you’re going to go to the expense and time of attending a conference, make the most of it. Meet as many people as you can. Find people who like the same things you do and keep in touch with them. You can’t pick your family, but you can pick the people you choose to be connected to.

Soul Searching

Posted on by

January, 2014

I began my programming career in late December 2013. It started something out of necessity. Sometime around October I suffered from a nervous collapse that made it impossible for me to focus on my school work. I had dropped out. I was lying to my husband about dropping out of school because I was gambling on my ability to find a job around the time I was supposed to graduate. I was very lucky and something came through.

My only hope for my first job was that I would find something in iOS. In the Madison area, that was a pretty stiff order. Madison is a lot of enterprise Java, government, and health care.

I managed to find a job at a start-up where I was the oldest person by a decade. I was partially hired because my bosses were not old enough to drink and didn’t know any better about hiring people who have actual experience.

By January, I knew this wasn’t working. I didn’t get along with my programming partner and I knew I was going to be let go. I was okay with that. I knew it was a bad fit.

I did some soul searching at that point. I knew it was bad to lose your first job after two months and I did have some concerns with my long-term ability to be hired. I had a few choices. I could kind of fake it and find another, similar job where I would be equally uncomfortable, but possibly be able to fake it better. Or, I could acknowledge that I was in the weeds and I didn’t know what I was doing.

The people around me didn’t know what they were doing either, but I had enough training and visceral awareness to know that my programming sucked. I knew it could be better and I knew it would never be better if I continued to pretend like I knew what I was doing.

I sat down and started thinking about what I wanted from my career. There was only one thing I absolutely knew I wanted. I wanted to be Brad Larson.

Brad, for those who have not heard my enthusiastic ramblings about him, is the creator of GPUImage. Brad taught the Advanced iOS class at MATC the first year it was offered. The classes were, and are still, available to watch on iTunesU. While I was a student I heard a lot of stories about him. I heard about how Apple engineers told him that something he wanted to do with his Molecules app was physically impossible to do on the current hardware. He figured out a way around the limitation and he made it happen. He was the guy who did impossible things.

I didn’t know if it was possible or how long it would take, but I wanted that. I wanted to understand the language well enough that I could figure out a way around the limitations. I wanted to be a great programmer.

I reached out to Brad and told him that I wanted to do what he does and asked him for advice about how to get started. He was very kind and wrote a nice email back. A few weeks later, a contract opportunity became available to work with him on an extension of his Molecules app. I knew I was on my way out at my current job, so I reached out to him. I told him that I didn’t know anything but that I wanted to. I really wanted to make sure I didn’t misrepresent myself because I wanted to learn and I couldn’t do that if I pretended to know things I didn’t.

After this contract job, I spent time working on a book with Chris Adamson and doing a lot of conference talks. I was trying to get my name out there so that I could find a job. I talked about GPU programming and Metal because they were new things. I didn’t really explain them as well as they should be explained because I didn’t have enough experience with them to fully understand them. I gambled on talking about difficult and obscure technology to try and differentiate myself from all the other new programmers out there.

To my shock and surprise, Brad reached out to me about working for him as my speaking obligations were winding down. I did it. I accomplished the short term goal I made at the beginning of the year to find a programming job with a great programmer so that I could get better and be a great programmer too.

January 2015

Let’s jump ahead a year.

At the beginning of this year I initiated a divorce with my husband. Things had been difficult for a long time. My goal for a few years had been to find stable employment that would allow me to end the marriage.

I do not want to badmouth my ex-husband. Our divorce was amicable. He was a friend before we were married and he continues to be a friend. We had a lot of trouble and I honestly wish him no ill will.

I am bringing this up simply to establish that the last six months have been very difficult.

I have never taken care of myself.

I lived with my parents until I was 27 years old. I was essentially a perpetual student because I didn’t really understand how to find a job or support myself. I moved from my parent’s house to my husband’s house. The first few years I was working I had my husband manage our money because I was earning minimum wage and I did not want to know what my weekly paycheck was because I was afraid if I knew how little it was, it would be easier for me to mentally justify calling in sick when I didn’t feel like going. I was unemployed from 2012 for most of the rest of our marriage. I have never budgeted my money. I have never paid my own bills. I never lived on my own. I don’t think I filed a tax return until I got married because I earned no income.

The last six months have been difficult. It’s been hard trying to learn things that most people knew when they were 16. It’s been hard being away from my pugs so much every day. My house is still a mess because I am simply too tired and demoralized to clean it. I don’t think I’ve put my laundry away since February. My ex-husband was actually so appalled by my inability to care for myself that he cleaned my kitchen one day when he was here picking up some of this things.

The last six months have been physically and emotionally exhausting. I have had bouts of depression that I have spoken about on this blog before. It’s been rough.

Because things have been rough, I have been letting a lot of things go. One of those things has been my focus on my long-term goal of being a great programmer.

I have barely been getting by.

I have had weeks where I have barely gotten anything done. I have felt a great deal of self-hatred and fear about losing my job and independence.

At a certain point it became easy to rest on my credentials. I wrote a book. I was invited by Saul Mora to interview people for NSBrief. I had lots of people who knew who I was. I was given some cache for being a great developer because I had credentials. I didn’t want to think about how little I actually knew because it was too fucking demoralizing to deal with. So I pretended. I even convinced myself that I was as good as I needed to be. I got careless. I stopped trying because it was just too hard to deal with.

Now

I am not doing this any more.

I am tired of what I have been doing for the last year.

The reason I told my long, rambling story at the beginning of this post is because I feel like I am back there now. I feel like I have two choices about how I can proceed from here.

I can either decide that I learned enough and keep hiding behind my credentials. I can learn fast enough to keep up with things, but I won’t ever become the developer I wanted to be. I will have to keep pretending like I know more than I do.

I don’t want to do this anymore.

I want to be very clear about a few things.

Chris wrote most of the book. My name is on the book and I wrote three chapters from the book. I wrote the Debugging, Testing, and Photos chapters. Two of those chapters didn’t really require me to add much to the code base. When I had to tackle the Photos chapter I had to fly out to CocoaConf Boston to work directly with Chris on that chapter because I was not familiar enough with the code base to write the chapter by myself. I needed help with the Core Image code.

Chris worked on the book for two years before I was brought on. I think my presence played an important role in getting the book done. I contributed to the book. But, I feel that I have received more credit for the book than I am due. I haven’t read the book all the way through. I am not comfortable with most of the concepts in that book.

I am tired of waiting around for someone to figure out that cut to the front of the line. I am going to be proactive and admit that I don’t really know that much. I have never written an app of my own. I have focused on some very obscure and esoteric low level programming. For a developer who has only been working for a year and a half, I am fairly advanced. However, I have a long way to go.

I have realized that I have been squandering my opportunity of working with Brad by being too proud and afraid to ask him for help. I have been ignoring things that I don’t understand. Yesterday I asked Brad about what provisioning was. He could have explained it in a sentence. Instead, he took an hour to show me Instruments and how it could be used to analyze one of his projects. I felt like my world went from 2D to 3D. I realized that there was a whole dimension of being a programmer that I used to be aware of and wanted to explore that I had abandoned because I was tired and demoralized and didn’t want acknowledge how little I know. I felt exhilarated and deeply, deeply ashamed.

I do not want to be afraid anymore.

I am working on my own personal application. I am going to do my best to write about that process on this blog. I will be talking about concepts that are probably covered in the book that has my name on it. I will talk about things that most people who have been programming for five years already understand.

I want to go back to the spirit this blog was created in. I created it to document my progress as a student to a professional. True to my roots, I am a perpetual student.

I am going to ask more questions. I am going to delve deeper and try to understand better. I made time for what was important for the first half of this year. Now I need to get back on the track I decided a year and a half ago. I need to stop worrying so much about my exposure or my reputation and worry more about my skills. If my reputation suffers because I want to shore up my weak points, then I probably deserve it. It’s painful to admit that you don’t measure up, but if you won’t accept reality then you can’t change it.

I hope that Brad will continue to be patient with my questions and continue to go the extra mile to expose me to things I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. His commitment to excellence pushes me to be better and even though it is painful sometimes, it is something I asked for that is rare in this day and age.

Zen and the Art of Analog Synthesizer Maintenance

Posted on by

2014: The Year of Magical Thinking

You can take a picture of something you see
In the future where will I be?
You can climb a ladder up to the sun
Or write a song nobody has sung
Or do something that’s never been done

Last week I was in Atlanta for CocoaConf Atlanta. That conference was the cap on one of the craziest years I have ever had.

Exactly a year ago I had dropped out of school because I was having a nervous breakdown. I knew I needed to find a programming job but I had no idea where or how I would do so. I was completely broken and I had no hope that anything would get any better. The only thing that got me through that period of my life was the faith that something would happen.

I spent a lot of my time in 2013 sowing seeds, hoping one or two of them would take root. I attended several conferences and met a lot of people. Two of the people I met were Jonathan Penn and Chris Adamson. Jonathan mentioned he was writing a book and wanted to know if I would tech review it. Being a tech reviewer is an unpaid task, but I like and respect Jonathan, as evidenced from this blog post.

The editor for Jonathan’s book is Rebecca Gulick, who also happens to be the editor of my book with Chris. When he was looking for a coauthor and he mentioned me to Rebecca, she already knew who I was.

Before I was approached about writing the book, I reached out to Brad Larson about learning OpenGL. I knew I wanted to be a graphics programmer, but that it takes a long time to learn, especially for someone like me who didn’t have any programming experience until two years earlier. My reaching out to him resulted in me having the chance to work with him on a contract project for Digital World Biology. Even though we were working on this project, I hadn’t met Brad in person.

I happened to meet Brad in person a week after I signed the contract to work on the book with Chris. I didn’t know it at the time, but the book I was working on used to be the textbook used for the iOS programming class at MATC. That definitely made an impression.

Six months ago, I had a couple of conferences that I knew I would be speaking at. I wound up doing twice as many as I thought I would. My first conference talk was less than a year ago. This year I spoke at ten conferences total.

Between writing a book, traveling all over the United States, and getting a job with one of the best programmers in the world working on robots, my head is spinning. There are so many things I thought I might get to do a few years down the road. I just wanted a job to get some experience so that maybe one day in like five years I would be able to work with someone of Brad’s caliber. I hoped that maybe I would be able to work on a book in three years.

I looked back at the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year. No, I didn’t wind up starting a podcast or buying my MIDI wind controller (however that is on the horizon). I set out six long-term goals that I wanted to do in the next 3-5 years. I have knocked half of those off in 2014.

Depression

Oh brother I can’t, I can’t get through
I’ve been trying hard to reach you, cause I don’t know what to do
Oh brother I can’t believe it’s true
I’m so scared about the future and I wanna talk to you
Oh I wanna talk to you

I am going to be honest. I had absolutely no idea how to proceed from here. Part of being alive is to strive to go further and do better. Once you get to where you want to be, what do you do? I always feel a bit of a disappointment when I finish my cross stitching projects because I keep feeling like I will feel a sense of accomplishment, but it’s always a letdown. I enjoy the process of making the thing more than the joy of accomplishing them.

Part of my excitement about these long term projects was the anticipation of all the neat things I would get to do between then and now. I was really looking forward to all the neat stuff I would get to do and all the time I would get to spend working on my craft.

None of that happened.

Things happened so fast that I haven’t had a chance to enjoy anything I have been doing. I haven’t had a chance to stabilize the ground under my feet. I haven’t had a chance to really dig deep into something than interests me because I am running around like a chicken with my head cut off rushing to the next thing.

I have honestly been depressed. I feel like I shouldn’t be depressed and that I am a terrible and ungrateful human being because I got everything I ever wanted. Not only did I get everything I ever wanted, I got it way faster than anyone else. I have it made and I have no idea how to get up each day and deal with my life. Plus I feel like I can’t talk about it because I know that there is absolutely no reason for me to be unhappy.

I had a lot of conference talks lined up for 2015 and I was thinking about doing a lot more stuff because I feel like I worked my ass off sowing these seeds. I hoped that one or two would take root but twenty did. Last year I had nothing but my stubbornness and refusal to quit and now I have the situation of having too much. It feels wasteful to me to squander opportunities I would have killed for a year ago.

But I have to.

It has been a tremendously difficult decision, but I am not doing any conference talks for at least six months. I do not plan to attend any conferences during that time either.

I love this community. I have made so many friends in so many places. I spent a lot of my life feeling like a freak who never fit in anywhere. Being welcomed into this community and treated with respect has meant more to me than I can ever express. One reason it took me so long to make this decision is because this community means so much to me and I want to make sure other people like myself have a chance to join and be welcomed as well. The Klein family has changed my life and I can never express to them what their kindness has meant to me.

I feel like my life is moving too fast and I need to take a step back. I need to focus on getting my feet back under me. I need to focus on doing my job well. I need to focus on sharpening my tools. I need to find something that gives me back the joy and meaning I had in my life back when I was struggling to break through.

The Zen of Sound

Are you lost or incomplete?
Do you feel like a puzzle, you can’t find your missing piece?
Tell me how do you feel?
Well, I feel like they’re talking in a language I don’t speak
And they’re talking it to me

Last year I felt like I had to spread a wide net to catch one opportunity. I spread myself very thin doing a lot of different things to try and get myself enough exposure to find a job. I am pulling back on a lot of these things.

Looking back at my long-term goals, the half that were not fulfilled all had to do with audio programming. I love sound. I wanted to be a sound designer before I became a programmer. Last year I wanted to write a synthesizer app as a portfolio project, but I had too much noise in my life that I couldn’t focus the way I needed to for this project.

Now that I can pull back on a lot of the things that are taking up my time, I can focus my free time on projects that personally interest me without worrying if they will get me a job.

I spoke to Brad when I began to feel overwhelmed about what I should focus on for the next year or so. He advised me to think of something that doesn’t exist and to try and make it happen. He talked to me about taking an impossible task and breaking it down into small, discreet parts that can each be accomplished individually.

Audio affords me a lot of opportunities to explore things that interest me. I became interested in electronics after I began working with physical hardware at my job. I also became interested in math after I started working with GLSL. Additionally, Apple introduced not only Swift, but AVAudioEngine. There have been audio programmers on Twitter who do not think you can do audio programming in Swift because Swift is not built on C.

When I tried to tackle this last year, I had no idea what I was getting into. I also placed a lot of chips on me being able to pull this thing off that caused me a tremendous amount of anxiety.

I am not going to make that mistake again.

I know it isn’t necessary, but I want to build a physical synthesizer before I tackle a software one. I want to get a feel for how all of the pieces fit together.

I also want to spend more time making music with my tools. You can’t really create a piece of software for a group of people if you don’t understand how they are going to use it. I used to play around with this stuff all the time years ago, but it’s been too painful to work with until recently.

I am not going to disappear. I am going to catalog my journey here on my blog. I hope that I can figure out how to do some things that will be helpful to the community at large. I plan to take everything I am learning over this time and present it at NSScotland, which I am still going to speak at. I could not let down Alan Francis again.

I hope that anyone reading this can understand and respect my decision. I hope that I am not the only person who has felt this way and that reading about my depression can help someone else. I am in this career for the long haul. 2014 was a sprint. The journey is a marathon. I can’t keep going the way I am because I won’t make it to the end. I am going to miss all of the amazing people I have met over the last year, but I need to take care of myself and focus.

Thank you everyone for an unbelievable 2014. I am looking forward to coming out of my self-imposed isolation a happier and healthier person. God bless and keep all of you. Don’t have too much fun without me.

Mono No Aware

Posted on by

Over the last year we in the iOS community have had a mass exodus of our best people back to the Mothership. There was a period for a while on Twitter where like once a day I would see someone tweet “I have an announcement to make. I just made a really tough decision, but I have accepted a job at Apple.” My favorite response to this phenomenon that I saw was from Jeff LaMarche, who tweeted: “Last one to go work for Apple turn the lights off, okay?”

One day a few months ago I go on Twitter and see a tweet from Jonathan Penn. “I have an announcement to make.” Oh no. “I just made a really tough decision…” Oh please, dear god, don’t let this be what I think it is. “…but I have accepted a job at Apple.” NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

The Breakpoint Formerly Known as Jonathan Penn

The Breakpoint Formerly Known as Jonathan Penn

I honestly can’t tell you why losing Jonathan Penn to Apple affected me so profoundly. I met Jonathan back at my first CocoaConf in Chicago 2013. It wasn’t like I was as close to him as I eventually got to Chris Adamson. We weren’t best pals or anything. I don’t think I had a closer relationship to him than anyone else did and I actually think I probably wasn’t as close to him as other people were. And yet.

I think Jonathan has a biological mutation that causes him to secrete nitrous oxide because whenever you are around him, you can’t help but feel happy. I don’t think I have a picture of Jonathan without a big goofy grin on his face. Watching him crack up during the CocoaConf game show was a joy to experience. Additionally, Jonathan is wicked smart. I would go to his talks and feel like the village idiot because I would be blown away by his rapid fire delivery of concepts that sailed right over my head.

I guess I got used to the idea that he was always going to be here. I figured when I go to CocoaConf there are certain things that are always there. There will always be an amazing keynote by Daniel Steinberg. There will always be a Breakpoints Jam concert. I guess I thought there would always be a Jonathan Penn.

Back when I had my life changing trip to Boston, I started thinking about what kind of a person I want to be. I wanted to be Jonathan Penn. His passion and his energy were absolutely amazing. He is such a warm and giving person. He adds so much to the iOS development community. I wanted to be like Jonathan Penn.

I am being slammed this year with a lot of instances of impermanence. We got a new programming language from Apple. Many prominent actors and comedians who I grew up with passed away. I feel change happening around me everywhere I turn. The phrase I have as the title of this post, mono no aware is a Japanese phrase that talks about the ephemeral nature of existence. Everything we do has meaning because nothing lasts forever. Life is precious because we have a limited amount of it. Each and every moment we have will never come again and no matter how lousy it might seem at the time, it is special because it is transitory.

Everything in life is transitory. As a member of the generation that came during the internet boom and the Great Recession, that is painfully obvious. People don’t work for the same company for forty years anyone or have the same job their entire career. This is doubly so for computer programming. I have only been programming for the last two years and I am already gearing up to switch from imperative programming to functional programming. Before I left for my conference on iOS programming I got a bunch of help from my boss setting up iHaskell notebook to learn Haskell. I can already feel the ground shifting under me and I am trying to adapt before it is too late or too difficult.

Jonathan going to Apple felt very much like he had died. We can’t talk to him about what he is doing anymore. He is too busy to waste a bunch of time on Twitter. I don’t reliably have an event ten times a year where I can go and absorb all of the joy he radiates. He’s still here, but he is now sharing that joy with other people.

I guess I was also very upset when Jonathan left because I didn’t know that the last time I saw him might literally be the last time I saw him. Had I known that he would be moving on to another stage of his life I would have savored the time with him more. We always feel regret when it is too late to do anything about it.

Jonathan leaving makes me think about the fact that I am going to leave someday. Right now we have this amazing community in iOS, but this is ephemeral. Something else that is going to be really cool is going to come along. All the top people are going to get tired of what we are doing and are going to move on to the next thing.

Yuri Nakamura is my spirit animal

Yuri Nakamura is my spirit animal

I worry about my ability to let this thing go. I don’t want to be the person who graduates from high school and keeps hanging around because they can’t move on. There is an anime series, ”Angel Beats!” about a group of teenagers who had terrible lives and died young who spend time in an afterlife that looks very much like a normal Japanese high school. The point of this afterlife is to get the people in this afterlife to resolve the unresolved issues they brought with them in their previous lives and to help them move on, which in this series is called “graduating.” (My twitter avatar is of me dressed as one of the main characters from Angel Beats, not Sailor Moon.)

Sometimes it is hard to move on. You have a snapshot in your brain of this fixed point in time where things were really great or terrible. In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Captain Sisco is trying to explain linear time to the wormhole aliens. The aliens point out to him that he has frozen his linear existence. His life was trapped in amber at the exact moment when he lost his wife. He can’t figure out how to live his life after this tragedy happened.

Life doesn’t stop just because you want it to or because you have been so incredibly damaged that you can’t figure out how to cope with your new paradigm.

Imagine my surprise and delight to actually have a chance to rectify all of this, Jonathan made a cameo at CocoaConf Las Vegas this weekend. Jonathan’s parents live right outside of Vegas and he brought his whole family to CocoaConf to watch him rock out at the Breakpoint Jam.

Thanks to Solomon Klein for making me look thin in this picture with Jonathan.

Thanks to Solomon Klein for making me look thin in this picture with Jonathan.

Having the chance to sit in the audience one last time with Jonathan being a Breakpoint was a fantastic gift. James Dempsey asked me how the concert was and I told him it was the best one. He thought I was pandering to him, but I wasn’t. Jonathan brings this energy to the performances and being able to sit there and enjoy this performance knowing that it would be the last one was truly meaningful to me. The crowd was a smaller, more intimate crowd. The concert wasn’t a super rousing concert, but it felt more like hanging out with your friends goofing around, which was really nice to have.

Jonathan, if you are reading this, I hope you are not creeped out by my writing a whole post about you. I hope I didn’t bother you by hugging you a few times. I wish you the best of luck at Apple. I will try to stop talking about you like you are dead, but I make no promises.

Culmination of a Dream

Posted on by

Two years ago, I didn’t know Chris Adamson existed. I was taking my first semester of the iOS development degree at Madison College when I first found out about him. I was taking the Objective-C class mostly because I needed to have a full load in order to continue to collect unemployment benefits. I was planning to follow the Java track, get a job for a health insurance company, and lead a normal mundane existence. That all changed when I heard two words that would change the course of my life: Core Audio.

In my previous life, I went to school for audio engineering. I learned Pro Tools and Logic. One of my teachers was talking about the extreme guys who programmed those pieces of software and they fascinated me. I had no idea how anyone would program a digital audio workstation, so I kind of forgot about it.

When my teacher Eric Knapp mentioned Core Audio, he said it was one of the hardest things to learn in the Apple development environment. It was a toss-up between Core Audio and OpenGL. Me being the good little masochist that I am, I decided I would learn both of them. (Having tried my hand at both of them, I am awarding Core Audio with the trophy for being harder to learn.)

Trying to read "Learning Core Audio" while cruising and enjoying the ocean.

Trying to read “Learning Core Audio” while cruising and enjoying the ocean.

I bought Chris’s book on Core Audio and made the incredibly stupid decision to take it on vacation with me for beach reading. After seeing the unfamiliar and deprecated “NSPool” object, I freaked out and realized I had to work a lot harder in order to learn enough to understand what the hell is going on.

In February 2013 Eric told me that Chris would be speaking at a conference in Chicago. The conference was in two weeks. I was a poor, unemployed college student, so I had to scrape together enough money to be able to go down and attend this conference so that I could meet Chris.

I saw him around the conference, but he was a big important author and I didn’t really know what to say, so I didn’t approach him. On the last day of the conference, Chris did a talk on audio on iOS. I sat in one of the front rows and peppered him with a lot of impertinent questions about audio programming on non-iOS platforms. Having been on the receiving end of questions like this in my own talks, I commend Chris for his patience and restraint at not shoving my Ravenclaw scarf down my throat.

Kyubey and I grokking AV Foundation video.

Kyubey and I grokking AV Foundation video.

We wound up talking after his talk and having lunch together. He was one of the first people I have encountered that I felt completely in synch talking to. I wore a Doctor Who shirt trying to bait someone into talking to me about it. Chris saw it and commented that he would ask about it, but everyone and their brother was into Doctor Who. I pulled out my phone and showed him a picture of my pug, Delia Derbyshire. When I said her name, his face lit up and he got really excited. He was the first person I met who knew who Delia was without me having to explain it. Eric asked who Delia was and we were talking over one another explaining who she was. I was so happy. I was grateful to him for hanging out with me and talking about my stupid geeky audio stuff.

Several months later I got to attend CocoaConf Boston and spend a whole day with Chris doing Core Audio. That day was one of the best days of my life. I was having a lot of problems at that point in time and I felt like my life was falling apart. Spending the summer working through the Core Audio book knowing I would get to do this workshop in the fall gave me focus when I needed something to get me through my life.

Chris giving his penultimate Core Audio workshop at CocoaConf Boston 2013.

Chris giving his penultimate Core Audio workshop at CocoaConf Boston 2013.

Chris and I were able to work our way through our initial awkwardness due to both of us having some social anxiety issues to become friends. I stopped worrying that I was bothering him by commenting on his tweets and I began to feel comfortable asking him for advice.

Earlier this year I was again trying to figure out what I was doing with my life. I had a contract job that was ending in a few weeks and I had to figure out what I wanted to do. I applied for a QA position at a company in town whose employees I knew and liked a lot. Something in my gut told me that I didn’t want to do this job. I knew I needed a steady paycheck, but I just had a gut feeling that I wasn’t supposed to take this job.

I went to Chris and explained my situation. He patiently read through my long rambling email and responded back, “I should tell you to take the stable job with the decent paycheck and the nice coworkers, but I have an ulterior motive. I need a coauthor for my book and I would need you to start after your contract is over.” I immediately wrote back to the company and told them I was no longer available.

Like all recovering journalism and English majors, I always wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write books and stories. I have absolutely no idea why I wanted to be a writer. I don’t remember if I actually liked writing or I just liked the idea of being a writer. I sort of gave up on the idea of being a writer in high school when I realized everything I wrote was crap. I realized if I wanted to be a writer I needed to have some actual experiences. I had to get out of my comfort zone and change my perspective of the world. Sometime in college I just sort of decided not to think about writing for a decade to give myself a chance to actually find something to write about.

The Boston Breakpoints

The Boston Breakpoints

I began writing again last year around the same time I met Chris. I had another developer recommend starting a blog and I have written at least one blog post a month since I started my blog. I know a lot of people do podcasts because they are “easier”, but I have always found that writing really helps me get my thoughts out of my head.

Back in March at CocoaConf Daniel Steinberg had a session called “Book Chat.” It was for anyone who had written or wanted to write a book. The only other person there besides Daniel and I was Chris. Many people over the last year have tried to talk me out of writing a book. I heard the usual arguments that books take a long time and they don’t generate any money. Daniel asked me what I wanted to get out of a book. I told him I wanted to be able to type my name into Amazon and have a result pop up. I also wanted to take the cover of my book, frame it, and put it on my wall. That was all.

Today marks the culmination of a dream for me. I have a book I wrote being published. We are on a public beta and there is still more work for me to do on the book. But it is real. It is happening.

OMG! I got a shout-out in Chris's "Stupid Video Tricks" talk in Chicago!

OMG! I got a shout-out in Chris’s “Stupid Video Tricks” talk in Chicago!

I am thinking about where I was a year ago. I had weathered several failures and I felt broken. I had no idea what the following year would bring. I had the single-minded determination that I had to finish the Core Audio book and go to Boston. I didn’t know how or why, but I knew that it was a turning point in my life and I threw everything I had at that.

Going to Boston changed my life. It changed my perspective of who I could be. I was pitched by several companies there that I didn’t imagine would even be interested in me. None of those leads worked out because I was just too messed up to take advantage of them, but they made me realize what kind of person I could be if I wanted to. Josh Smith had me talk to Dave Klein about speaking in Chicago this year. I didn’t think I could be a speaker until that happened. I applied for another talk that happened a few weeks before CocoaConf Chicago, which wound up being my first tech talk, but that would never have happened without Josh Smith.

Mad props to Mark D for throwing Greek and trombone playing at us at 8:00 in the morning.

Mad props to Mark D for throwing Greek and trombone playing at us at 8:00 in the morning.

I love this community. I love that I came here from a really crappy background and that I found people who were willing to accept me for who I am. I am happy that I haven’t been discarded because I am damaged. My damage could even be considered an asset because I bring uniqueness and experience with it.

All of these people keep talking about the importance of teaching young girls to code, like somehow my generation of women is too old to learn new things and we are a lost cause. Meeting someone like Chris whose experience was so like my own and knowing that I could have another chance at life gave me hope, which gave me the tenacity to endure all of my various disappointments. He gave me strength to accept all the broken, dirty pieces of myself and accept that they are part of who I am. He woke me up and made me think about all the parts of myself that I had numbed because they were too painful to deal with.

I went from a world of “No” to a world where anything is possible with enough work and tenacity. These last two years has been a miracle.

“iOS 8 SDK Development” is my first book. I hope there will be many more where this one came from. I treasure this book because it represents something I didn’t think I would ever have. It is also a project I got to work on with a great friend whose presence has enriched my life.

I wish I could go back two years and tell the earlier me that I would meet these people who would change my life. But I can’t. Spoilers, sweetie.

Approaching the Speakers at the Tech Conference Zoo

Posted on by

I am traveling to CocoaConf Las Vegas tomorrow. This is my second CocoaConf of the “season.” The first CocoaConf of the season was in Columbus, OH.

Since I am a member of Eric Knapp’s gang of iOS disciples, I was able to car pool with some of the other members of that group. On the way home, one guy in the car asked me if I had spoken to a certain person at the conference. I had not. I didn’t know this person.

I was told that this guy really wanted to talk to me but he was intimidated by me because I was speaking at the conference.

This made me feel really bad.

"No, I never thought about working at Apple. Why are you asking?"

“No, I never thought about working at Apple. Why are you asking?”

I am in this weird transitory state at the moment. When I first started going to conferences I really wanted to meet all the speakers, so I would aggressively and strategically make sure I was sitting next to them for meals. I made a lot of great friends and found a lot of advocates for myself this way. I would not be where I am today if I had not done that.

Now that I am a speaker, I don’t really know how to act. I don’t want to aggressively sit next to all my fellow “speakers” and make people feel bad because somehow we are an exclusive group of people because we really aren’t.

I feel bad about CocoaConf Columbus because I basically spent the entire trip hanging out with Chris Adamson. He’s my friend and coauthor, but I felt like I really should have made an effort to meet other people. It was kind of hard for me because I had no opening line to start a conversation with a stranger. That was one great thing about talking to speakers at programming conferences. There was a way to start a conversation. You could read their bio and ask about their job. You could ask them about their talk. I used to tweet people during their talks and come up to them later and explain who I was.

I am asking anyone who wants to meet me at a programming conference to please just come up and say hi to me. Tweet at me so when you introduce yourself I have an idea about who you are. Believe it or not, I am a somewhat socially awkward person and it is a lot easier for me to talk to people if I have some idea about what to talk about.

Unless a person is really putting off “stay the heck away from me” vibes, most of us are really approachable. We like to geek out about technology. That’s why we are here talking about it. If you want to geek out with us, just pull up a chair and say hi.

Hope to see a few people do this in Las Vegas. Looking forward to meeting you.

Carefree Highway

Posted on by

I was asked today to do a talk in South Carolina next month. I got so excited about doing the talk that I really didn’t think about how to get there.

I like to avoid flying when possible. When I went to Denver last month I took the train. That turned out to be a terrible idea, but it was an interesting experience.

South Carolina is about 900 miles away. When I was a kid we used to drive to Nashville. Driving seems doable.

The reason for this post is I want to talk about my car.

Two for the road.

Two for the road.

I have owned one car my whole life. I got a brand new Subaru Impreza back in 1998. I have had this car for half of my life.

This car has been through hell. I crashed it three times in the first few years I owned it. It had a nice respite for a while, but I crashed it again back in January. Since the car was sixteen years old, my husband decided it wasn’t worth getting the body fixed.

I have been pressured by my family to replace my car. I am being told it is no longer reliable and that it is going to be hard, but I need to let it go.

My car has been absolutely reliable for sixteen years. I feel bad for not treating my car better when I was first learning to drive. I am a superstitious person and I am afraid if I replace it before it dies that I will have bad karma. (Pun intended.)

I am willing to accept that I need to replace the old girl, but I would really like to have one last adventure with her. I would like to drive her to this conference in October.

I plan to do whatever I need to do to make sure the car is reliable and won’t break down in the middle of nowhere. I plan to make arrangements to make sure I know what to do if the car breaks down on the side of the road.

I know this is an incredibly stupid thing to do, but I love my car and I want to have this time to remember my time with her and to let her go.

I will have the car looked over before I go. If there is any question of the car’s reliability, I will not take it.

I know I am being overly sensitive about an inanimate object, but I would really like to be able to control how I let my car go. I accept that it needs to be replaced, but I want to be able to have a say in how I spend the last of my time with it.

And now, the end is here
And so I face the final curtain
My friend, I’ll say it clear
I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain
I’ve lived a life that’s full
I traveled each and ev’ry highway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way