Wow, lots happening in the last month! An optimistic re-cap:
- Learning about discrete math, specifically graph theory (this was a good tutorial) over the past few weeks. I built a graph in JS of a map-like drawing I did in college, and was thinking it could be the underlying content structure of my book, but now I’m now so sure.
- Finished Women, Race, and Class by Angela Davis which was excellent and helped me understand why white-led feminism is historically problematic.
- Started reading From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor which is great so far.
- Attended the Pittsburgh Racial Justice Summit which was FANTASTIC, so inspiring and energizing (Youtube playlist here). The workshop from Alexandra To on Critical Race Theory and Technology was especially 🤯 for me (you can read the paper she presented here – on my near future to-read list).
- Listening to Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation by Rev. angel Kyodo Williams, Lama Rod Owens, Jasmine Syedullah on audio book, which I learned about from the keynote at the Summit – also great. I definitely recommend the audio because the authors read it!
- Making gradual polishing updates to this site, including new layout for Monsters, Reading page, and the Now page.
- Reading more of Dr. Amy J. Ko and her labs’ research – specifically A Theory of Instruction for Introductory Programming Skills
- The book I’m working on is morphing into a series of books, a possible PhD track, and basically a lifetime of work, so I need to narrow this down. My mentee & friend has helped me see some perspective about what’s important, and it is the last 10 minutes of my talk, so I’ll be focusing on that, and hopefully getting back to writing (and incorporating monsters). It’s also looking like self-publishing will be the way to go.
- Thinking a lot about the future, but when I do this it often detracts from the present and causes me to feel disatisfied, so I’m trying to figure that out.
- Exciting developments in the WordPress Core CSS Chat!
- The Gutenberg project at work is chugging along nicely, and a new engineer joined us who I am super excited to work with. I am working on scoping the rollout of Larva, our design system, to all brands which is scary and exciting! I did make a nice architectural diagram with PlantUML that will hopefully help with communication.
- Still working slowly through Español En Uso. I am feeling inspired to start learning Nepali sometime soon, but want to get a little further with Spanish before I switch over.
- My BF and I watched The White Tiger on Netflix which was very good – 10/10 recommend. The themes of that movie paired well with a Bollywood movie we also watched, Dil Chahta Hai.
- Thinking about trying to have more control over my addition to delicious coffee…it would be nice to be able to skip a day now and again…
- Runner’s knee issues are somewhat resolved! I’ve been doing some leg strengthening exercises every morning which seems to have helped. I picked a few from this video.
- Ran the first of my personal Dirty Dozen Hills 2021 running challenge, Ravine St. / Sharps Hill in Sharpsburg – it was long, but very doable at my slow and steady pace. No sidewalk, however:
Bottom of Ravine St. 
Top of Sharps Hill