September Favorites
In an attempt to keep better track of the things in my life that bring me joy, I’ve been keeping a short list of things that I really liked throughout the month of September and figured I’d share them here. This month went by so quickly — I can’t believe it’s fall already! Without further ado, on to the favorites!
Girlboss Radio is the podcast arm of Girlboss Media, Sophia Amoruso’s latest venture in being a completely kick-ass, go-get-them woman on a mission to redefine success. I absolutely love this podcast, and it’s turned me on to podcasts in general. On her podcast, Sophia interviews women of all different backgrounds and roles and has them share their life stories, motivations, challenges, and, in one of my favorite parts, asks them to redefine what success means to them. These are bad-ass women, and all of them have incredibly insightful, meaningful advice to share about following your drive to define a life that makes you truly happy.
ESLint plugin for Visual Studio Code
I’ll admit it — before joining High Fidelity, I was woefully under-educated in the art of coding standards. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by a lot of talented developers who feel passionately about making readable, consistent code, and one of my favorite things this month has been installing and setting up ESLint for Visual Studio Code. For those of you who have, perhaps, just been starting out with development (or primarly work on solo projects) and are unfamiliar with ESLint, it’s a customizable series of rules around formatting and code requirements that you can then have your editor of choice look for and warn / error about when they aren’t met.
Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change
It feels almost like cheating including this in my September favorites, since I’m only about halfway through the book, but for me, Reset represents a fundamental challenge and emotional journey through the tech industry and Silicon Valley. It is a must-read for those who claim to want to be an ally to women and underrepresented demographics in technology and venture capital.
Ella Brennan: Commanding the Table
If I didn’t love virtual reality so much, I’d be doing something with food. Several weekends ago, while searching for “Cooking” on Netflix, I stumbled across this documentary about Ella Brennan, the matriarch of a New Orleans family who helped define the culinary personality that NOLA is known for and influenced the restaurant and food culture so prominent today. Her story is an exceptional one of persistence, dedication, family, and food — I highly recommend watching the documentary, which is extremely well-done.
Grayscale Mode
This last favorite isn’t a product, but a phone setting. I heard about this a couple of months ago on Twitter- the idea, essentially, is to keep your phone in grayscale mode to make it less tempting and distracting. For the past several weeks, I’ve kept my phone in grayscale mode (you can usually find it under Accessibility > Vision settings) and it’s been amazing how much less time I spend mindlessly checking for novelty. I’d taken the Facebook, reddit, and Twitter apps off my phone, using the browser for them instead, and the combination of that with grayscale mode has reverted my thinking back to view my phone as a tool, rather than a permanent distraction, and it’s been wonderful. The only downside is that photos are harder to work with, but having a purpose to turn the colors back on my phone has made me value the photos I capture more. I plan on keeping it grayscale a while longer — for tasks that I do turn on color mode for, it feels like a candy shop for my eyes, which definitely makes me value the quieter color theme.
