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Reflections on another year gone by
I haven’t posted much this year. I didn’t read many books, falling far short of the weekly cadence I’ve maintained for years running. I didn’t go on a single proper holiday, making this the first year in decades in which I had no real break to reset. I tried to keep up with new music releases from the genres and artists I enjoy, but didn’t succeed—my “to listen” list is dozens of albums long. I hardly saw or spoke to friends, didn’t text back, didn’t reach out. In a lot of ways, it feels as though I didn’t do much at all. Even compared with 2020, an intense year by any standard for damn near everyone, I did a poor job of staying on top of the things I usually try to stay on top of.
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Remembering Martin Andert
Content warning: death, psychological trauma, and thoughts of self-harm
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Your Hiring Process Is Probably Biased
Hiring is hard and important.
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2020 in Books
I read an average of a book a week. I use LibraryThing to catalog my reading.
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2020 in Music
Just a whole bunch of music released in 2020 year that made me feel some type of way. If I’ve missed anything you think I’d love, feel free to get in touch.
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Chex Mix: A Family History
Always small for my age, I was never a gluttonous child. I was greedy, yes, undeniably so. By —the kind of bratty big sister who would cut the cake into two vastly unequitable slices and intimidate my little sister into selecting the smaller one any time my parents defaulted to the hypothetically fair and balanced “one child cuts, the other picks” approach to dessert distribution. But I was simply too small and too picky of an eater to ever veer into gluttony.
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Tech-Related Books I've Known and Loved
Given that I started my career (lo these many years ago) as a research librarian, it’s not much of a surprise that books are my favourite way to learn new things or dig deep into a specific subject. Sure, I spend a lot of time reading blogs, documentation, and academic articles—it can take years to write a book, and I like to keep up with things before they get to the multi-year mark—but for an in-depth exploration of pretty much anything, books are my go-to.
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One Year of Going For It
Today marks one year since I walked into General Assembly’s fresh new Aldgate East campus for the first time, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to throw all of my money and three months of my time behind one singular goal: Get a decent job in London.
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Switching to Netlify
This site had been using GitHub Pages for hosting for the past N months. I use Heroku for most of my projects, so paying for a hosting service just for this simple static site felt like a waste of money. Plus, I wanted to give GitHub Pages a go and see how it all worked. It was fine, mostly, except for one massive, glaring issue: If you use a custom domain with GitHub Pages, it’s really not a simple matter to add an SSL certificate and force connection over HTTPS. This has been low-key irritating me for ages, but all of the solutions I’ve found require you to use Cloudflare as a CDN, and I’m trying to avoid relying too heavily on their services.
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Visiting Barcelona
I travel a lot. Exploring new places and breaking up my routine has been the best way for me to cope with anxiety and depression, so any time I’m feeling overwhelmed my first instinct is to hop on my bike, or a train, or an airplane.
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Some Thoughts on Body Image
Here’s another old piece of writing from me. This was originally shared on my personal mailing list under the title “No. 4: The Physical, the Conceptual, the Tattooed Body” in July 2015, but after a long, dark winter, I needed to revisit it. If you’re in a similar place, I hope this helps. The original content warning still applies: body image issues can be triggering for many people, so please give this a pass if you’re not in a good place to consider that sort of subject matter.
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Four Simple Rules for Men
I published this quasi-misandrist manifesto on my now-defunct Tumblr a few years back, under the title “4 Simple Rules for Men Not To Be Garbage Humans.” I wrote it in a fit of pique and frustration after seeing some men I regarded pretty highly do and say surprisingly discourteous things in my presence, posted it up online, and promptly forgot it existed… until a few days ago, when I got a notification about a reply to the post.
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Welcome to Jekyll!
I started out following the quick-start guide on Jekyll docs:
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