Reflections on the last few months

plus a pic of my cat for good measure

I’ve had a really hard time mustering up the desire to write over the last couple of months.

There’s lots of easy responses to this. Most of them should have been curative for me. Writing is good for you! Creative personal writing will help your brain! Writing is about discipline, not about inspiration! Just show up! Write the bad stuff, the good stuff will come!!

All that stuff is true, and is stuff I believe. It should have cured me, but it hasn’t.

I’ve just had no hot takes. No new learnings (barf at that word) to share, and not a whole lot I can talk about from work without violating confidentiality agreements. Ain’t that just the funnest?

Plus—most of what I have been doing at work…is writing! I am now a professional Google docs enjoyer. I stay in Google docs all day every day. I’m in these streets, writing curriculum day in and day out.

So like, when I get to the end of my work day, I don’t exactly want to continue to write, especially not about work.

There’s also the heartburn-inducing first few months of the Trump administration 2.0. There’s also the associated stress of my Google docs job being a recent development, one that comes with a lot more responsibility and autonomy, and a prophylactic, significant surgery coming up in April…I am feeling the stress! Writing on my silly little blog about my silly little side projects and silly little feelings about the working world is feeling pretty dumb!

But, unfortunately, my earth sign energy never quits, and I eventually return to practicality above all things. I do know that writing makes me feel better. It’s always been the art form closest to my heart, and the one I’m the best at (you don’t want to see my paintings, or my knitting). I want to maintain centeredness in the face of a difficult presidential term ahead, a couple of years that are going to seriously challenge my health, and a new phase in my career where I’m working in much more undefined waters. If I want to avoid total insanity, I need to be writing. I think my therapist will personally put out a hit on me if I don’t.

In the spirit of trying to get back into it, here’s a bit of what I’ve been up to.

Amuse-bouche: I’m an improv person now

I made a blood pact promise with the Game Master of my last Dungeons & Dragons campaign that I would try out an improv class before 2024 drew to a close. I did that! I’m currently in a level 2 class, and my level 1 class was just too much fun to be legal. My brother is a stand up comic and I texted him after the first show I did, breathless with excitement.

He goes “Yesssssss. Do you geeeeeet it now????? Isn’t it adddiiiiiicting?” I texted him back an equally long-lettered message of agreement.

Improv is pretty amazing. For me, doing it with zero intention of trying to monetize it is critical. I want and need space to be creative with other people. I need my silliness to have a place to be celebrated rather than tolerated.

Working adults can be so overly serious, and I have little patience for it. Would it kill you to ride the silly goofy mood for a bit, Chad? Does everything need to be hyper-professional all the fucking time?! Was high school so decidedly the peak of your life that you still have a depraved need to talk down to the silly people in your life as if they’re dumber than you? Yeah okay, circle back with you later. Whatever. Enjoy your unseasoned chicken and rice for dinner, king.

Improv is the place for the silly goofy creative mood to ride and to play with others. There is no greater gift to this world than sharing human creativity.

First course: I wrote a course!

My first big task in my new role at work was writing an online course about an upcoming feature launch! I can’t say more than that. It’s still in a closed beta period, and won’t be available to the public until May.

I can talk some about the experience of it though! It’s been a fun process. I waded through our company Notion instance like a spelunker, pulling out PRDs and roadmaps and RFCs and Slack conversations to figure out what should be included in my course and what should be left out. It gave me flashbacks to the one time I actually went caving, also known as the one time I believed in the hollow earth conspiracy theory 🤪.

I started haunting the Slack channels and DMs of the people working on this feature like a chittering ghost. “Hey!!” I chirped into the ether. “This thing’s not working quite like I expect it to!”

“We’ll get that fixed up today!” the ether spoke back to me, smashing bugs with the speed and agility of a thousand tiny spirits.

I wrote the beta version of the course in about 6 weeks, complete with discussion questions, homework-style activities, summary sections, and around 15 or 16 videos. I also built a course library in Notion to track updates and revisions needed to different course items, for a hyper-organized experience. It wouldn’t be me at work if it wasn’t tracked to the absolute nth degree.

My boss even called me a Notion Guru once she saw my course project hub and its associated modules, and I have to say, I was really flattered by that. I like Notion a lot, it’s where I’m drafting this post and it’s how I manage a lot of my life these days. I even pay Notion for my own instance of their product. I actually prefer to pay over the free version!

My husband and I tracked all of our tasks related to getting married and buying a house (two tasks we did at the same time, God help us) using Notion projects. I keep an (almost) daily work journal in Notion. I keep receipts from our home projects in a Notion database. It’s great.

I don’t often get to have fresh love affairs with softwares, but Notion is one where I do just feel a bit in love with it. It’s delightful to use and fun to experiment with, and if you’re reading this—this doesn’t count as vendor content! I don’t work at Notion, and they wouldn’t hire me anyways because I don’t live in the Bay Area, don’t want to move there (too expensive), and they’re hybrid. So there!

Anyways, the course has been fun. I like getting out of my lil team bubble and entrenching myself with other teams at work, learning how they do things, and adapting what I need to get done to how they do things. And, project managing my own damn self has been challenging but fun—real growth moment for your girl.

Second course: Ski season has been litty, baby

I know what you’re thinking. Those Colorado people! All they care about is skiing, camping, and smoking grass. Well—you may not be wrong there. As much as I’ll take the dig about Coloradoans (and I will—we can be so annoying), I always find the dig to be a little silly. I’m like dang homie you don’t like outdoor time and unwinding with friends??? That’s super sad.

Colorado people appreciate being outside and are often really connected to the landscape. Is there anything more special than that? Colorado people understand that seeing the Rockies on a flight home is like getting hugged. Colorado people understand the bone-deep relief of being above 8,000 feet and letting yourself spread out in the thin air between peaks. All we care about is skiing and camping because nothing is better than feeling connected to the Earth. Feel free to enjoy whatever it is you like to do instead, though.

It’s been a truly excellent ski season. We’ve been lucky to get several huge storms in the high country, and while snowpack is struggling in some areas, it’s a bit above average in others. Good snowpack is key to us avoiding the worst of fire season, which has only been getting worse.

But every time my husband and I have been up, the snow has been pretty darn good. Not to mention we’ve been able to ski quite a few blues together this year, another huge improvement.

Third course: I think it’s time to separate writing projects

I’ve played around quite a bit with different themes on this blog. I’ve written a lot of technical posts, a lot of posts about my ⭐ opinions ⭐ about working life, and then some that are just…personal. I have mixed feelings these days about putting those 3 clashing genres on the blog.

And, those three things are just getting harder to write about. My job is still quite good!! But for the time being, it’s not really appropriate for me to write about it because I’m building curriculum so close to a feature release. I’m also not working on a super technical problem at the moment.

My opinions about working life have also been totally upended in the last couple of months. This has largely been a good thing. My new role is really different than the old one, and I’m still getting used to it. I’m still trying stuff out, piloting ideas, and carving out space for myself. I don’t want to write about those things as they’re happening, because I don’t know where they’ll ¹.

And, my personal life has started to be pretty focused on my health again. It’s something I really would like to write about, because it feels weird being vague about it. But it’s not lost on me that this blog does function a little bit as a living resume, and I’m not sure I want to give future employers the chance to discriminate against me based on whatever preconceived notions they have about health conditions. I suppose the obvious solution is to stay at my current job forever! That would be tight—but I know the startup landscape is always shifting and I’m not naive enough to think I get to have a traditional 30-years-one-job sort of career.

Hopefully you’re seeing the issue I’m having. My 3 main subject areas have all been complicated a bit, and the one I would like to write about the most doesn’t feel that appropriate for a work-y blog.

I think what will end up happening is I’ll start writing what I want to write about my 🤢health journey 🤢 in a separate blog. I’m fine with readers of this blog reading that one as well, if they want to. I just don’t think I’ll share it on LinkedIn or anything like that. Which means my views will take a hit, but that’s alright, I need to train my ego out of the numbers game anyways.

Aperetif: What’s next?

I’m hoping to get this blog back to a regular cadence of posts. I think that’ll take some time. I’ve got a toy dbt project in the works where I’m just collecting random data from all over the internet and messing with it. I decided, you know what? Fuck it. I want space to practice my data skills to answer interesting questions, and I’ve been hamstrung for too long by the worst advice the internet has ever seen about side projects.

You know what I’m talking about. Advice like:

• Make side projects that solve REAL BUSINESS PROBLEMS, not the Titanic data set!!!

• Your side projects should be end-to-end pipelines, complete with a BI layer hooked up.

• Make sure to incorporate Spark and also DuckDB and Dagster and Metabase and Airflow even though it does what Dagster does because tool proficiency is important!!

Damn dude, anyone reading that shitty advice would never make anything. Where in the ever loving hell is a random person going to find publicly available data that will solve a real business problem, when the majority of business’s data is fucking proprietary?? Be so for real, y’all. Any practicing data skills is good practicing. It still counts as practicing even if you’re just stringing up some dbt models based on a CSV. Not every API is free and not every data you want has an API.

Plus—folks on the internet love to believe everything is black and white. Either your side projects get you a job, or they’re total trash. There could be a middle ground of just playing with some data for funsies. But if we do an activity for fun, how will we monetize it?!?!?!?!?!?!

Anyways. I’ve collected some very fun data into my vault, including my Spotify listening history, my Apple fitness data, and random government data sets I panic-downloaded when RFK got confirmed. I plan to write about what I’m doing with that.

As far as the health stuff goes, I have some shit to say there that I think deserves to be heard, I think it just needs a different forum. So we’ll see about that.

Times are a’changing, man. My mom always used to say ‘that’s the most distressing thing about life. It goes on.”

It does, man. It just keeps going. I’m trying to capture some magic here and there and I’ve got a little. I think I’ve got some to share.

1. I mean, write from your scars is pretty good advice. I think that applies to work stuff too.