My Life, 2016

Psychology tells us that humans are ripe for change at new beginnings: a new year, a new job, even a new season or week or day can be an opportunity to purposefully shift something in your life. But what are we ripe for at endings? Maybe endings are the best time for reviewing, contemplating, and planning those new beginnings that are about to happen.

I wanted to take a little space to review my whirlwind 2016, and I figured I’d do so in a public space for others to see. Not really for feedback or comments (although if anyone has a big insight I would of course love to hear it), but more for others to see what someone else is doing with their time and energy.

After spending time reviewing everything I did in 2016 and writing it all down, I’m honestly amazed at everything that can happen in a year. My friend recently told me this quote:

“We overestimate what we can do in a week, and underestimate what we can do in a year.”

(A very similar quote is often attributed to Bill Gates.)

I’ve found this idea to be a perfectly accurate diagnosis of my 2016: it seems like every week, I’m fighting a battle between buckling down on the same project or jumping ship to something totally new and exciting. Often, I jump ship — and after a few times of jumping ship, I find myself trying to simultaneously work on half a dozen different major projects with another half dozen unfinished strewn about my head and computer.

Part of me wonders if all of these projects and events are an indication of spreading myself too thin — a fairly obvious observation, maybe. Perhaps I could achieve truly amazing things by channeling all of my effort into one or two endeavors. Or, perhaps the flurry is necessary for beautiful innovative things to crystallize out of the hundreds of half-finished attempts. Maybe by keeping myself in different domains, I’ll be able to put together the right puzzle pieces when the time comes.

Or maybe I’ll just drive myself crazy trying to do too much.

(Related: I’m currently attempting to come up with a way of measuring the success of these little life experiments, so that in 2017 I’ll be able to efficiently try things, drop the duds, and keep working on the best ones. I’d say this past year I leaned a little too far in the direction of switching projects, and next year I want to lean the other direction towards perseverance.)

Before we dive in, some top-level stats. In 2016:

• I went to 11 concerts, 3 plays, and 7 big social events. 81% of these were with my partner Megan.
• Thanks to Spotify’s “Your Top Songs 2016” playlist, I can see that I’ve listened to “Real” by Years & Years and “UGH!” by The 1975 more than any other songs. (Both are songs that I listen to on repeat for hours while coding. Unfortunately I don’t have play stats for any of my top songs.)
• According to my Chrome history, I’ve averaged 4,433 pages per month over the last three months. (I don’t have local data before that because of a computer reset.) Extrapolating back, that’s probably over 50,000 pages visited this year.
• Some more rough data about my Chrome history (14,667 URLs total, mostly covering the last three months). Website Base URLs. About 5,700 of those pages were related to Google (40%), 930 were Facebook (6%), 450 were Wunderlist (3%), 410 were StackOverflow (3%), 360 were from this site (2%), 180 were Coursera (1%), 160 were Medium (1%), and 120 were Meetup (1%). Use of Google. 2,000 links were from Gmail (35% of Google use), 1,600 were Google searches using the Chrome “omnibox” (28%), 650 were Google Docs (11%), 500 were Google Maps (9%), 500 had a ‘url’ prefix (9% — mostly redirects, I think? not quite sure), and 400 were searches from the actual Google site (7%).
• I added 223 new Facebook friends in 2016, and went to 53 Facebook events.

• I organized and hosted ~65 events for the Boulder Data Science Meetup group, the vast majority of which were recurring Sunday morning study group sessions.
• I spent 0 days owning a car. (Being carless is awesome.) There were maybe 1–2 weeks worth of days where I drove a car, which were either rentals or a family car.
• There were ~260 days where I spent at least some time programming in Python. (Rough estimate: 5 days a week on average times 52 weeks in the year. I think I spent enough weekends coding to account for the weeks where I coded fewer days.)
• I sold 1 guitar (my Ibanez Montage), and I bought 1 guitar (a Martin LX1).

There’s a lot in this 2016 recap, so here are the major sections I’m going to look back on. Feel free to jump around to whatever you think is interesting.

1. Life Events — the major shifts in my life, and once-in-a-lifetime happenings.
2. Health — what a day in the life of Steven looks like, including my full routine.
3. The Arts — a music video I made, concerts I went to, plays I saw.
4. Date Nights & Social Shenanigans — soirees and shindigs.
5. Trips — jetsetting around the United States, and the things I saw there.
6. Animal Rights — ending animal exploitation one day at a time.
7. Coding & Data Science — programming, Meetup groups, and applications I built.
8. Wrap-Up — looking back, and looking ahead to 2017.

Alright, let’s do this. Here’s my life, 2016.

Life Events

I started 2016 living in the bottom floor of a house built in the 1800s, right across from the Mork & Mindy House in downtown Boulder, with two roomies: my brother Trevor and my partner Megan. I’m ending 2016 living in a smaller apartment (but with way more natural lighting — which was one of the biggest reasons for moving) a little further out from downtown, and my brother no longer lives with us.

At the end of August, I left my job as a Tableau consultant and Python web developer to pursue data science projects and animal rights community work. I discovered that even with a very moderate income, it’s possible to keep your personal life overhead low enough to save up money to live on for many months. (And save it up fairly quickly, at that.) In fact, as I write this I’m still living off of my savings.

I saw my little brother graduate from high school, and then later in the year I flew home to collect the rest of my things from my family’s house — the vast majority of it is boxes full of school papers from elementary school on. (I’m currently working on digitizing everything in all of those boxes. It’s taking forever.)

Speaking of those boxes, here are two of the greatest things I’ve found so far.

Classic day in the life of a 1st grade revolutionary.

All of my old artwork looks like this.

In November, I learned about the ballot issues and voted in the election. I attended the Boulder Theater’s election watch party, and felt the mood in the room shift over the course of several hours as it became clear that the impossible was happening. I binged on Facebook and news for the next week and attended multiple rallies and protests. I then cut myself off from nearly all news and social media in order to refocus on my waning health and productivity.

Protest in Boulder with ~1000 people

Summary

Periods of free exploration and development are always some of the most beneficial and most challenging in my life. In the past 4–5 months since leaving my job, I’ve had the challenge and opportunity of completely setting my own schedule and focusing on whatever I feel is most important. Some weeks, it’s been community organizing. Other weeks I hardly see anyone, spending all of my time coding in coffeeshops.

I’ve learned an incredible amount about coding in that time — web app deployments, databases, Linux — and proved to myself that I can power through any technical roadblocks when I need to.

I’ve also learned about the power of people and what my role in the local communities might look like next year. I discovered that I enjoy running meetings and helping groups dig into the roots of a problem, and that I can take a big idea from seed to completion if I really try.

On a national and global scale, things are a bit in turmoil. I’m not sure the future holds there, honestly, but I know I’m going to remain active in the community, and I’m going to constantly keep an eye out for how I can help.

Health

This might have been the year when I finally discovered what a consistent healthy routine looks like. I have to constantly strive to maintain it, but at least I have a benchmark to aim for. It looks a little something like this:

Morning

Wake up between 7 and 8. Eat breakfast (peanut butter banana toast, every day), drink black tea, and journal — sometimes answering a short question. No news or email at all, just start working at my standing desk on whatever the most important project of the day is. Snack and more tea after a few hours of work. Eat lunch sometime around noon, often leftovers from the previous day’s dinner. (It’s faster to do that instead of cooking lunch every day.)

Afternoon

After lunch, I’ll either keep working at home or walk to a coffeeshop. Sometimes I listen to podcasts while walking, like TED Radio Hour, the Tim Ferriss Show, or Talk Python To Me. I also use that time to keep in touch with my family with the occasional phone call, which I think has a very positive effect on my life. (And hopefully theirs.)

Pretty much the same work routine in the afternoon, working on projects using some variation of the Pomodoro Technique, and using this to keep track of the items for that work session. Another snack after a few hours of work, and lots of breaks for standing and stretching if I’m sitting down. (I try to stand as much as possible while working.) I usually aim to make enough progress on my primary project in the morning where I feel good about working on other projects in the afternoon.

Around 4 or 5pm, I stop work wherever I am and do some form of exercise: climbing at the gym, running, cycling, or sometimes weights. I try to do some form of cardio fairly consistently, because it seems to be one of the best things for keeping my head clear and my mood positive. Since I don’t have a car, I do a lot of walking and biking all around Boulder, which means even if I skip running or climbing I’m at least getting some exercise daily.

Evening

After exercising, I come home and make dinner — at least enough to eat for that night and the next day’s lunch. My go-to dishes are some combination of rice, beans, potatoes, pasta, and a massive amount of veggies sauteed in coconut oil, often with fresh spinach. Sometimes I’ll make soup (veggie, potato, or bean chili), and sometimes I make massive salads with fresh veggies, sauteed veggies, and avocado on top, and rice or pasta underneath. Often smothered in this dressing. For recipes this blog is my favorite, and for baking this blog really can’t be beat. If I’m going to be gone for a long time without food, I’ll take a couple bottles of Soylent with me so I don’t have to eat out. I cook with soy sauce and dried herbs a lot, and cayenne powder when I want it to be spicy. For a really easy curry, you can add curry powder, peanut butter, and a little coconut milk to the mix.

I try to keep my evenings fairly open, but they’re usually a combination of side projects, social events, animal rights community meetings, and reading. I like to finish all of my computer work by 9pm in order to give my eyes and mind a break a couple hours before bed, then I shower, plan for the next day, journal, meditate, and then read until falling asleep.

Social Relationships

Aside from my partner Megan, I generally only spend time with people in certain contexts: I see the same people at the data science events I host, and different people at a few coding groups I regularly attend, and I’ll see some familiar faces at the climbing gym. The main people I’m close to are within the animal rights community, and we all get together because we’re working towards the same goal.

So I’m not nearly as social as many people in the normal ways you might think of, which is something I’m fine with — I hardly ever go out to dinner or bars with people, and it’s only occasionally that we’ll have friends over for dinner or drinks (every other week tops). I can’t remember the last time I went to see a movie in theaters. But I have at least three regular events every week where I see the same faces, plus any special animal rights events which usually happen weekly or every other week.

My partner Megan and I have a really great relationship though, and I’m perfectly happy with our interactions being the majority of my purely-social life. (I.e., time that’s spent with people not in the context of any other endeavors.) For the most part, I want my time and energy to go to either investing in our relationship or in accomplishing my goals, which means turning down or off some of the other burners.

Of course, as shown by the rest of this recap, there’s still plenty of time in a year to do everything you want, including spending lots of time with friends and family.

Summary

I feel the best and accomplish the most in the long-term when keeping fairly strictly to my routines. It feels like I accomplish a lot when I deviate and stay up late, or shun exercise, but those usually only work in the short-term and end up negatively affecting my long-term focus. That said, it takes a lot of willpower to exercise or stop working when I don’t feel like it.

Sometimes I drink too much coffee, or too much alcohol, or I’ll eat too many carbs and processed foods throughout the week, and then I notice myself not feeling as good or as focused. But it’s nice to know where I need to get back to, even if I’m not always there, and I usually make it a priority to get back on my routine.

Overall I think I’m probably in very good health. Consistent exercise, pretty healthy food (a plant-based diet goes a long way in keeping out the really terrible stuff like fast food and many processed foods), a good amount of sleep every night, and healthy supportive social relationships — all of those things together mean that I’m not lacking anything major.

I feel good most of the time and rarely get sick, and that’s good enough for me.

The Arts

I’ve always had this tension in my life between the creative and the analytic, and I don’t expect that’ll go away anytime soon. First, I’ll talk about the various creative pieces of how I spent my time in 2016.

My Stuff

I wrote a short book in December 2014, a couple months after moving to Boulder. At the beginning of 2016, I decided to publish it page by page on Instagram, one day at a time, and then also publish it as a physical book on Amazon.

I finally filmed and edited together a music video for my song “Tie Me Down” that my buddy Nate and I recorded together in May 2015. (It had been on my to-do list ever since then.)

And because I’m a sucker for acoustic, I also recorded a lo-fi acoustic version and made another video with more of the meaning expressed through writing.

Earlier this spring, I was also having weekly writing sessions with my friend Courtney. I would spend those couple of hours working on my novel Time Paths, which I still haven’t finished. (In part because of those music videos. Then other things in life kicked in.)

This Thanksgiving, I played guitar at the local vegan Meetup group’s Thanksgiving potluck (my new Martin LX1), and throughout the year I also wrote several songs and recorded a million little ideas on my iPhone’s voice recorder app. All of those songs and ideas still only exist on my phone, for now.

Concerts

I saw a lot of concerts in 2016. On my trip to Arizona I went to Underoath’s reunion tour, where they played through both They’re Only Chasing Safety and Define the Great Line from front to back. (Two of their best albums.) I also saw my buddy’s band Never Let This Go play on the same stage as letlive., and I saw letlive. play again in Colorado later in the year with my brother Will. (The second concert was actually part of their new CD release tour, which I didn’t know until that night.) My friend Greg and I saw STRFKR and Com Truise at the Boulder Theater, which was a fun night of dance-y synth.

Megan and I went to a lot of shows together. We went to New West Fest in Fort Collins with her sister, where DeVotchKa played an amazing set. We also went to a small show by one of our favorite Arizona bands, Jared & The Mill, where true to form they played a great show and even unplugged and came into the audience for a song.

We also saw a couple of throwback shows: Relient K and Switchfoot in the same show, and Saosin, Taking Back Sunday, and Dashboard Confessional in the same show (at Red Rocks, no less!).

Finally, we got the chance to go see Megan’s grandma play in a classical ensemble up in the mountains near Estes Park, which was a good time. (If I could only listen to one song for the rest of my life, it’d probably be something classical. Maybe a cello piece played by Yo-Yo Ma, or a piano sonata by Beethoven.)

Plays

Sometime in the Spring, I noticed a poster around Boulder that said a local theatre company called The Upstart Crow was going to be performing Our Town, one of my all-time favorite plays. The performance was incredible, so I decided to get season tickets to all of their upcoming 2016–2017 shows (they perform four shows a year). So far, we’ve gotten to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Crucible, both of which were great.

Summary

I don’t write or play music as much as I used to, but life goes in these kinds of phases. This year was mostly focused on technical, analytic work, with the creative stuff slipping into whatever cracks of time I had available.

I’m proud of finishing the “Tie Me Down” music video though, and I’ve also discovered how therapeutic music can be for me when I’m stressed out — it’s hard to be anxious while I’m playing guitar. That little piece of knowledge is tucked away in my brain now, and whenever I need to I pull out my little acoustic guitar and pick some notes for an hour or two.

Even though I still haven’t finished my novel Time Paths, it was fun working on it every week for a while. I’ve discovered that when I spend consistent time on the same creative project, there’s a kind of comfort that comes along with that work, a sort of familiarity and ease.

It’s always great to go out to plays as well. Our Upstart Crow season tickets have been wonderful so far, and I imagine that will become a tradition. I would also love to see more musicals — we saw The Book of Mormon last year and Rent the year before that, both of which were stellar, but didn’t get out to any this year. And I’ve got music in my blood, so I can’t help but go see a show every now and then.

Date Nights & Social Shenanigans

Sometimes you just need to party. Amiright?

First, there were the various nights with small groups of friends. Cooking dinner at our place, playing games at a friend’s house, the occasional heated debate over taxes. Plus all of the plays and concerts from the last section. The usual.

Then there were the big ones — Vegan Prom (the greatest event of the year, every year), the Luvin Arms 1-Year Anniversary Celebration (where the new location was revealed), Gentle Thanksgiving (where I played guitar), and my buddy Tim’s Christmas party (I think it makes the list).

There were the amusement parks — Lakeside for my friend Anna’s birthday (old as hell and fairly creepy, but fun — I recorded some video for a horror short), and ridin’ the big coasters at Elitch Gardens for free (thanks Kris!) with Megan.

We had some really unique events this year too, like Random Acts of Date Night (zero idea what to expect going in — it was kind of intense), Banjo Billy’s bus tour of Boulder (thanks again Kris!) where we learned about the weird people who used to live here and the weird people who still do, and the Happy Human Betterment Society discussions which we held at a local juice shop every Saturday for a few weeks. We also went to a “salon” in Boston with our friend Annalise, where a dozen social work grad students (and us) discussed the upcoming election (over snacks and beers, of course), specifically a certain Massachusetts ballot question about charter schools.

There were a lot of fun smaller animal rights community potlucks where I could recharge and talk with other people working on these issues. (And Zachary would blow our minds with endless fruit and various amazing lentil stews.) Add to this the occasional apartment meeting with the organizers, where we discuss visions and plans for the coming months.

And then there was Boulder Startup Week with a million different events, and Analyze Boulder with free beer and data science talks, and biking from Boulder to Precision Pours with my fellow vegan coder friend Adam.

Action shot of me asking a question (so exciting) at the ThinkTopic artificial intelligence event during BSW.

Last but not least, there were a few small but meaningful events that just Megan and I did together. The day after we arrived to Boston was our 3-year anniversary, so we took the morning and afternoon to walk around the city and spent some time just talking in the beautiful Boston Public Garden. Last week before Christmas we recorded a song to send to my mom as a gift (“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”). And finally, we try to set aside every Saturday morning to walk to a local coffeeshop, get a couple vegan donuts and some coffee or chai, and just talk about how life is going.

Sometimes it’s the simple, meaningful things that leave more of an impact than the shiny, glitzy ones.

Summary

It takes a while after living in a new city to really feel like you’re a part of it. I think this year was when that feeling finally arrived, and I felt more at ease attending local tech and animal rights events — more like a member of the community than someone who was trying to get into it.

It feels good to have a little bit of history with new friends, too, even if you don’t spend a lot of time together. Social occasions aren’t my top priority, but after seeing the same faces at several different events through the months, you get to know each other a little better and feel more comfortable in each other’s company. If I feel the urge to reconnect a little bit with my social side, I have some friends who I can call on. (Friends who, like me, are usually inclined to only hang out every now and again, which works out well.)

It can be hard to remember to slow down and take a break just for the sake of a change, but the flow of the year tends to put opportunities in the calendar right about the time I need them. Having a few mainstay routines has been a really helpful way to remember some of the important things in life, too — like getting donuts with Megan on Saturdays, or cooking dinner together at night, or weekly potlucks with the animal rights community, or my coding group (mentioned later) with the same people every Wednesday morning.

People are important to me, and especially a few people.

Trips

2016 was a good year for trips.

I went to Arizona by myself for two weeks, mostly to revisit my old college haunts and remember my friend and bandmate Zach Booher. It’s always good, and bittersweet, to feel nostalgia for those different chapters in my life that happened during my time at Arizona State.

Flashback to a music video shoot we did in 2012 for Zach’s capstone project. (And for the band, of course.)

In May, Megan and I flew to Georgia for my brother Will’s high school graduation and to see the rest of my fam (like my adorable niece Chloe) and hit the Charleston beach, and then I went back to Georgia at the end of August to get some old boxes of stuff from my family’s house.

The Atlantic ocean looks like a novel about the sea.

Being in Georgia reminds me of how different the culture can feel in various parts of the country, especially when contrasted with Boulder: the accents are different, the food is different, the religion and politics are different, and even the general philosophical approach to life is different. Being back in the dense, ever-present greenery and trees of the South does remind me of that piece of myself, even if since then I’ve lived in the scorched desert of Arizona and at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. There’s just something about those rolling hills, and all of those endless miles of trees.

In the fall, we traveled to Boston to visit our good friend Annalise and see a new city that we’d heard such good things about over the years. Boston definitely didn’t disappoint — from the Freedom Trail, to the apple picking, to the endless vegan food we stuffed ourselves with, it was a great week.

There were some smaller trips too, like heading up to Red Feather Lakes in the Rockies (with a climbing & swimming stop at Horsetooth along the way), or a business trip to San Fran (Blue Bottle Coffee, reading The History of the Peloponnesian War at Actual Cafe, and exploring West downtown were some highlights), or busing to Denver a couple dozen times to explore coffeeshops (Crema, Black Eye, Little Owl, many more).

Summary

It’s said that “the world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page” — I think that travel in the age of the internet and globalization isn’t quite the same, though, and what’s found there can often be found here as well. To truly get away to something different requires a very purposeful straying from the path, and the path is wider than we think it is. (Which is also a sad reminder of the destruction of culture we’ve facilitated through the “Westernization”, “modernization”, and “commercialization” of everything. One example I discovered from this past year: the building that housed the oldest bookstore in Boston is now a Chipotle.)

Perhaps what travel gives us these days is a chance to look at ourselves through fresh eyes, to disconnect from information overload, to reconnect with other people. And, of course, a chance to remember.

So now we get into the heart of my endeavors: animal rights and coding.

I’m really interested in technology both as an intellectual pursuit and because of the potential power to use it for good. As far as animal rights, I believe ending animal exploitation is currently the single biggest moral imperative humans have. (Or, to give credit to other important issues, it’s absolutely one of the most important.)

Thus, these two topics occupy the main points of focus in my life.

Animal Rights

(For a crash course in animal exploitation, watch The Ghosts in Our Machine on Netflix. It’s a beautiful documentary that covers a lot of ground, and is one of my favorite films.)

There were two major turning points for me this year: one was the Animal Rights National Conference; the other was my re-introduction to Direct Action Everywhere (DxE).

Before these, at the beginning of the year, my animal rights activities consisted mostly of (1) donating 10% of my income to AR organizations, (2) co-hosting a book club where we read various texts related to animal issues (like this and this), and (3) attending some local social events, and maybe some activism here and there.

Re-Introduction to DxE

On June 20th, the two local DxE organizers hosted an introductory community meeting to revitalize the activist community. I’d been introduced to DxE before, about a year earlier, and wasn’t particularly drawn to the disruptive tactics they used, like holding protests and demonstrations inside of grocery stores and restaurants. (Of course, I don’t know many people who are actually drawn to that kind of thing. All of our social conditioning rebels against it.) After the meeting, I still had reservations about the socially disruptive tactics, but there was one part that really stuck out to me. One of the organizers said something like “no matter what you want to do or what you’re interested in, everyone has a place here — we would love to help you find your place in the community.”

I was sold.

I was interested in doing some videography, so I said I’d video the next event that — a Whole Foods disruption to raise awareness of the Yulin Dog Meat Festival and draw parallels to animal exploitation in the United States. Even though it was uncomfortable (naturally), there we about 40 activists there making a strong statement, speaking out against violence towards animals. Despite my inherent emotional response, it was incredibly inspiring. I hadn’t seen people leave an event that empowered in a long time. Maybe ever.

So I cut together a video, and we got a couple thousand views.

A few weeks went by without much else happening there, and then I flew to Los Angeles for the Animal Rights National Conference to meet up with some other Boulder vegans and students from CU Boulder’s animal rights group.

Animal Rights National Conference

The conference was, without a doubt, one of the most inspiring events I’ve ever been to. There we were, a couple dozen people from Colorado, surrounded by almost 2,000 other animal rights activists from around the world, some of whom have been working for animals for decades. One of the primary organizers of the conference, Alex Hershaft, is an 82-year-old badass who not only started “the nation’s oldest organization devoted exclusively to promoting the rights of animals not to be raised for food” (FARM), but he also survived the Warsaw Ghetto in WW2, had a decades long career as a scientist, and was involved in other social justice movements before animal rights. (Right?)

During the conference, I heard from Ingrid Newkirk on why we need to advocate for all animals and from Kevin Kjonaas (who now works with the Beagle Freedom Project) on the need to take a strong, uncompromising stand against animal exploitation. Wayne Hsiung presented DxE’s plan for the 40 Year Roadmap to Animal Liberation. I immersed myself in a virtual reality tour of a pig slaughterhouse. I saw old friends and met dozens of new ones, spending more time talking to organizations and networking than I did in the talks.

And every evening, DxE folks would meet in one of the medium sized rooms of the convention center, talk about what differentiated them from other groups, and invite people to ask questions. We learned more about the power of media, the notion of aiming to inspire people to activism through community, and how DxE was going to be pursuing open rescues in the coming months, actually entering farms and liberating animals. We also learned a song over the course of those few nights together, and the last day of the conference over 100 activists went into a Whole Foods and sang it.

I left the conference with contacts, resources, and the knowledge that other people were working as hard as they could on these issues. I left feeling the acceleration of a social movement.

Denver Burger Battle

Everyone was inspired after getting back, and we worked to keep that momentum going. I did more videography for a disruption of the Denver Burger Battle, a video that currently has just under 10,000 views and over 100 comments.

We also flooded the Facebook page with activists and won a poll asking what the best part of the event was. (We ended up winning by a huge margin, about 200 votes to 100 votes, and then they took the poll down.)

Beginning of the Semester

All things considered, disruptive events like these make up a small percentage of the activity I do. One of the largest projects I took on this year was in organizing a big outreach campaign at CU Boulder at the start of the Fall semester. For four days, I was on campus for eight hours a day with members of the student animal rights group Vegan Justice League (VJL). We had a table and information about the group’s first meeting, and the idea was to specifically find people who were already vegan or vegetarian.

We had about 200 people sign up, and around 80 came to the first meeting. Even though many of those people haven’t been back much since then, through that initial effort we found about a dozen new dedicated activists.

Flowers For Animals & Zombie Crawl

In September, the monthly DxE action was a solo disruption challenge. This was definitely out of my comfort zone, but I decided I should be willing to push myself to do non-violent actions that bring animal issues to light.

In October, the P’s of Happiness organized a big event at the Denver Zombie Crawl. Some people handed out information and Halloween candy at a table, and others tried this approach started by some Australian activists where you show the movie Earthlings on laptops. I interviewed some people after they watched clips of the movie, and held a laptop for a bit.

Liberation Pledge

This fall, I decided to take the “liberation pledge”, a personal commitment to not be at a table where animals are being eaten.

It’s a strong statement that can be controversial and difficult in practice, but more often than not it provides opportunities to talk about animal exploitation. Animal rights is about justice, and the pledge is another way to force the issue into public dialogue.

And, honestly, it’s partially for my own emotional health as well. When you’ve seen baby chicks ground up alive, pigs stabbed and writhing in their own blood, thousands of turkeys run through a slaughtering conveyor belt, and dogs blow-torched and sliced into pieces, you can’t just sit at a table where people eat corpses anymore. It gives me the same reaction to see someone eat pigs or chickens as it would if they were eating a dog in front of me, because there is no difference except for what country you happen to live in. It’s something we all grew up with, through no fault of our own, but something that we need to reject outright.

Other Events

A lot of other things happened in 2016: we held community events every month; I fasted for 24 hours in memory of farmed animals trucked to slaughter; I helped construct a barn at the new Luvin Arms Sanctuary location; I saw Will Tuttle speak (and met some cool new vegan friends who recently moved here from Iowa); I organized a Colorado Animal Rights Roundtable for all the local organizations to come together and work on collaborative events; I started (and quickly let fall to the wayside because of being busy) an “Activist Care Squad”; I attended the meeting where The Silver Seed food truck announced they would be opening the first fully vegan physical restaurant in Fort Collins; I scraped and analyzed some leafleting data from Vegan Outreach; Megan and I attended a non-violent direct action and civil disobedience training in Denver (mostly attended by environmental activists); I started work on a centralized animal rights social media dashboard, pulling and analyzing data from Reddit to start; I created some metrics data visualizations for DxE international; and I helped turn the weekly “DxE discussions” into podcasts, which will start airing on January 1st.

Whew.

Summary

If I had to make only one mark on the world, it would be to help end animal exploitation. I have many other interests and passions, but this is the one area where the moral imperative to take action outweighs nearly anything else I could be doing.

Which, selfishly, is kind of sad. I would much rather be working on other things like music, writing, or throwing myself completely into analytic topics like machine learning or other big problems like global development. But when we as humans are committing horrible violence against millions of other animals on a daily basis, with absolutely no good reason to do so, and the ability to stop at any time we desire, it demands our focus.

I’m proud of the efforts I put into animal rights work this year, and I will continue pouring my time and energy into building the smartest, hardest-working movement for animals.

Coding & Data Science

At last, we reach coding and data science, the sexiest things to do in the 21st century! If I had to look back at this past year and pick the one activity I did more than anything else besides sleeping, it would probably be programming in Python. (Which, honestly, I’m totally happy with.) Maybe it’s best if we just do a little show-and-tell.

VIZbot

At my previous company, I almost-single-handedly developed an application called VIZbot that lets clients automate email distribution of Tableau data visualizations. (What?) Basically, let’s say you want to send Graph A to Person A every Wednesday — I built a thing that lets you do that.

From idea to deployment, and (almost) everything in between.

It’s amazing how much work goes into a web application, and I had to learn at least the basics of all of it. Databases, Linux tools, web frameworks, HTTP proxy servers, WSGI servers, task queues, ORMs, MVC, on and on and on. Turns out that just knowing Python only gets you about 15% of the way there. It was a good journey — and really difficult — and I learned a ton.

Boulder Data Science Meetup

At the end of last year I got this crazy idea to start my own Meetup group. So I did!

I really put effort into organizing meetings at the beginning of 2016, and we held a decent number of big events. We held a series of Python tutorials for data science at Twitter / Gnip Boulder, a few presentations at Spark Boulder, an intro to neural networks at the library, and of course our recurring Sunday morning study group meetings where the same core group of people show up week after week.

I’d say the most successful part of the Meetup group so far has been the Sunday morning group, for one simple reason — commitment. The people who come there show up pretty much every week, and they also go to any other events I organize. Because of that, these people have gotten to know each other the best, and they’ve also probably developed the most in their data science skillset because of just showing up every week and having some accountability.

This fall, I also started organizing a Monday evening group where we’ve been working through Andrew Ng’s seminal online machine learning course, and that’s been really successful for the same reason — people show up every week and a sense of community is slowly built.

I’ve noticed that maybe 90% of the people who have come to events in the past don’t really know what “data science” is, and many people are there just because they heard it was a good field to get into. The vast majority of them don’t come back, which is totally fine. The hype around all of this right now is massive, and there are going to be a lot of casually interested people who either don’t want to put in the work or find out they aren’t as interested as they thought they’d be.

My group is here for the people who want to work hard in a community of others, no matter whether they’re beginners or experts. And if we can inspire some others along the way, that’s great too.

Where I Left Off & Rapid Prototyping

A few weeks ago I had an idea for a small productivity tool that I wanted, so I built it. It’s very simple — all it does is keep track of a list of projects, what you did last on each project, and what’s the next thing to do on each project. The idea is to reduce the lag time between switching back to a different project and actually getting into the heart of the work.

I built most of the functionality in a day or two, which I was able to do because of some experimentation with rapid prototyping — I want to get to the level where I’m able to come up with an idea and prototype it in hours or days instead of weeks or months.

It started with this crazy idea I had to build a full web app every day, in two hours. I only did this sprint half a dozen times before the rest of life kicked back in, but even in that short amount of time I learned a lot and built a little tool to help myself with the process.

State of AR

I believe we can use technology for good, and I want to help bring it to the animal rights movement. One project I started this year was the “State of AR” data dashboard — an effort to collect information from the around the web around animal rights and veganism, analyze it, and present it in a centralized place. (The project originally started as an effort to analyze some press releases by Mercy For Animals, but I switched to this after seeing more potential.) It’s still in the very early stages, but I have hopes that it’ll grow to be something useful.

Portfolio

It’s been on my to-do list for forever to get back around to my personal portfolio site, and so one evening I finally buckled down and just did it.

It’s simple, but it’s at least a start. And now I have a centralized place to put my projects for others to look at, and to remind myself of the things I’ve done.

The Rest of It

I dabbled in a lot of other things throughout the year, from working my way through a few different books and courses, to meeting with my Code && Coffee group every Wednesday morning, to building out a quick leafleting data analysis from Vegan Outreach’s data. I discovered Free Code Camp, which is an awesome resource for full-stack JavaScript development (something I haven’t gotten into, but would like to be more knowledgeable about in the future).

I also had the opportunity to interview at Google, which was an experience by itself. I wasn’t actively looking for a job, but a recruiter reached out to me to interview — and when you have the opportunity to work at the best job in the country, you take it. So I studied my butt off a few weeks, essentially trying to give myself an undergraduate degree in computer science, learning all about data structures and algorithms and doing endless coding exercises. I passed the phone screening and made it to the on-site interview, but didn’t end up getting an offer — which is totally fine, and honestly my computer science and software engineering chops aren’t at Google level yet. I was just happy for the chance to learn and go through the process.

Last, it’s not technically in the realm of coding and data science, but I attended a “Startup Essentials” workshop through the Boulder SBDC. Regardless of whether or not I start my own business (I do have some aspirations there), I think the knowledge can only be beneficial since business is such a large part of our society.

Summary

Coding is simultaneously fun, addictive, and massively difficult. The rabbit hole of computer knowledge only goes deeper the more you get into it, and after another year of diving in I find myself having even more I want to learn. For example, the Three Easy Pieces book, or this beautifully done Linux Jouney site. And that’s just on the computer science side — there’s also machine learning and web app development.

I’ve been glad to have the Meetup community (which is one of the main reasons I started it), and want to keep finding ways for solo learners to work together. It’s fairly easy to get a bunch of people in the same physical location, but facilitating collaboration after that can be tricky. Analytically-minded people often have their own interests, projects, languages, etc. that they’re working on, and many don’t want to totally switch to something else for the sake of working together. (Myself included, sometimes.)

I want to continue developing the tension in my life between the technical and the human, the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of social change — taking the lessons from one domain and applying them in the other. Technology can be used for good, but only if we engineer things that way.

Otherwise, it’ll just be games and ads.

Wrap-Up

Woo. That was a lot. A year is a long time full of a lot of activities, if you’re doing it right.

So what I see here is someone with many interests and ideas, and an often-too-short attention span when it comes to sticking to the same idea. The main reason for this could be a constant fear of not working on the best thing, which causes a lot of starting-then-switching. My list of dead and abandoned projects vastly exceeds the ones I’ve actually finished.

There is a positive spin to this, though — if “all of life is an experiment”, then I’m conducting a hell of a lot of experiments. The problem is that I’m not following them all the way through to the end and conducting a proper analysis. With a lot of these, I can only guess as to where I would have ended up if I’d kept at it longer. That’s partially why recently, I’ve been trying to focus on the idea of being a finisher — making sure that when I start something, I’m finishing it, or at the very least making a conscious decision to kill the project instead of just jumping to something else without really thinking it through.

As far as worrying about not having enough time to do creative, technical, and animal rights projects, I think I’ve shown that I can do all of these things in the same year. I just need to strengthen my focus within each of these domains, rather than trying to do all of my ideas within all of these areas.

Another area of continual development is incorporating others in my projects. The easy thing is to hammer away at something by myself for months, have a marginally useful product come out of it, and then call it done and move on. The difficult — but much more effective — thing is to collaborate with others to create something viable. This is a big reason for my interest in business as well, which is fundamentally a pursuit of systems and organizations, rather than individuals.

2017 could go a million different ways, and my next step is to figure out which of those ways I want to pursue. I think a good place to start is with this document, looking at the best pieces of this past year and figuring out how to create more of those in the future.

But for now, let’s wrap this thing up.

The End.