Year In Review 2015

I know that in the public sphere, 2015 was shit for a lot of people. For me, though, it was a banner year and, following the good example set by my secret tech-feminist cabal, I thought I should get it all down for posterity and as an antidote for feeling unaccomplished.

End of 2014

I spent the last few months of 2014 enmeshed at SFPC, which pretty much changed the entire direction of my life and my conception of the kinds of things of which I am capable. (And I almost didn’t even apply!) It feels like every week I discover another awesome opportunity, friendship, or insight with roots in those last ten weeks of 2014.

January
This was my month off between SFPC and Hacker School (rebranded Recurse Center halfway through my batch). During it, I:

• spent an intensive week creating a new personal website with my first static site generator, Metalsmith;
• finished my application to graduate school for the IDM program at NYU Poly;
• created first Relatables prototypes with the Tessel 1;
• wrote the keynote I would be giving at Forward JS 2; and
• participated in Art Hack Day: Deluge at Pioneer Works, where I met next year’s art-hustle accountability buddy, Jenn Schiffer.

February

At the start of the month, I flew to San Francisco to:

• give the Forward JS 2 keynote;
• hang out with my SF buddies; and
• pack up all our stuff from storage and ship it to Brooklyn.

I also:

• joined #makeupconf, the aforementioned feminist tech cabal, full of talented and supportive women;
• made my first npm package, Tessel-Calibrate, which wraps callback calibrations functions into promises or events;
• started Hacker School off by reading the Joy of Clojure and Functional Javascript; and
• wrote most of a basic a LISP interpreter, of which I am still very proud.

March

March was the month Hacker School really got into swing and I started on data-monster, my domain-specific language that transpiles to d3.js. It still needs more work, but has been sidelined since I started graduate school, which I was accepted to sometime around here.

I also met Pat Dubroy, who introduced me to Ohm and AST visualization and general compiler nerdery.

April

April was code and conferences. I attended

• OpenVisConf, where I got to catch up with old SF datavis buddies and also met Mariko, who encouraged to speak at BrooklynJS; and
• Empire JS, where I got excited about command-line tooling libraries and Etsy’s Front-End tools team (a someday dream job, perhaps).

I also did so much more data-monster.

May

This was perhaps one of the more bonkers months of my life. I:

• spoke on two panels at Facets, one on writing your own programming languages and the other on alternative education, like Hacker School and SFPC;
• finished Hacker School, but kept refactoring data-monster, using my new favorite draw a map of the code and see where you did stupid things technique;
• went to Pittsburgh for the p5.js contributors conference at CMU, my first big open source meet & work, which was amazing if also really overwhelming; and oh yeah, speaking of overwhelming, somewhere in the middle of all this
• Wes & I got engaged, leading to the most romantic response to a proposal I could muster: “Are you fucking joking? [awkward pause] Yes, of course yes!”

June

We decided we wanted to be married in October, a mere 5 months away, so in June, I really jumped into wedding planning. Meanwhile:

• we had our bed and desk pod built in the apartment — aka a week and a half of living in a construction site; and
• I started on p5bots, my Google Summer of Code project for p5.js.

July

In July, wedding planning continued and we made the wedding site and sent out invites. I also:

• spoke at Brooklyn JS on transpilation; and
• accepted part time position at Compstak to help pay for all this wedding and graduate school business.

August

In an attempt to give May a run for its money, August also attempted to win the record for bonkersness:

• I taught a two-day class at SFPC’s summer session;
• finished p5bots; then
• Wes had his appendix out, in one of the most terrifying two days I’ve yet to experience, after which we hopped on a plane to Denver for his sister’s wedding, so I suppose we can check off “learn how to fly with wheelchair-bound partner” from the bucket list.

I also

• started at Compstak and,
• wrote whenever.js, a Javascript implementation of the Whenever esolang, with Wes.

September

With September came the beginning of graduate school. For my first semester, I took:

• Media Theory, which was similar to my undergrad semiotics classes;
• Game Design Research, a CS class where we read papers on various CS problems in the games space, including procedurally generated content and automatic difficulty adjustment; and
• Augmented Reality Studio, where we learned various techniques for creating augmented reality works.

In the nonschool hours, I

• continued wedding planning;
• went to Philadelphia for Open Hardware Summit; and
• at work, made some cute widgets to understand our codebase, which led to some quality time with the Google Maps API.

October

The month of midterms & marriage! At the same time! Not actually recommended! After the wedding, Wes moved back to San Francisco for a Buzzfeed Open Lab fellowship. At work, I did some analytics concepts which never left the concepting phase, much to my disappointment. My favorite midterm project was the paper I did comparing the Futurist’s conception of life with machines to the postwar techno-optimists, like JCR Licklider and Vannevar Bush.

November

The excitement continued as I

• became a Real Artist with my first Real Group Show, MediaLounge;
• started working on finals pretty much immediately after finishing midterms, starting with research into taxonomies of fun that I may actually get to publish in 2016 (!!!);
• endured my first SF short weekend turnaround, where I saw the NEAT show at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, felt good about myself; and then
• finished up the month working on Smell-o-gram, my augmented reality final focused on embodiment and memory.

December

This past month has included:

• The final-final, a paper on Gothic Twitter and the Bot Aesthetic;
• LESS-webpack refactoring at work;
• a quick re-code of a Bridget Riley piece for [SFPC’s Day for Night piece;
• a new D & D crew;
• another trip to SF; and
• my birthday & Christmas, with the best presents of all: a 3D-printed mobile and straight As.

Into the Future: 2016

Looking at this, it is not surprising that I am kind of exhausted and a bit sick of computers. Fortunately, January is the month of our much-delayed honeymoon, which will be spent in museums and city streets, with (paper!) books and some analog art supplies.

Then when I come back, it’ll be time for a new semester, with exciting new classes: digital fabrication, interactive installation, shaders, and pre-thesis.

The word of the year is probably exploration: figuring out what it really means to be married; diving deep into whatever my thesis topic turns out to be (probably something around embodiment and non-fascistic digital objects); and investigating some potential post-school paths. This time next year my thesis will be done, Wes will be back in New York, and I hope to have a firmer idea of what’s next.