weeknotes 6

trans liberation

I read this really powerful article by Harry Josephine Giles calling for “trans liberation” over “trans rights”. It neatly summarizes the struggles trans people face in the UK and offers practical suggestions of what to do about it. Highly worth reading, cis or trans! They posted a follow up thread on Twitter about it.

It reminded me that I’ve been meaning to do something about wealth redistribution, particularly around trans healthcare. I’m fortunate enough to be in a well paid job with relatively low outgoings, so I can afford to import medication from the Pacific and see private medical professionals. Not everyone can do that, so I’d like to set up a system to connect people with resources to people without. If you’d like to help, please get in touch!

the managers path

I’ve been reading The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier, and I’m struggling to put it in the context of an agency like dxw. We don’t have fixed teams that people join for years on end, and someone’s manager rarely works with them on a project directly, so managers don’t get to directly see the impact of the work of the people they manage. Maybe that’s actually a fault in our approach, though. Maybe managers should work directly with the people they manage sometimes. :thinking_face:

new mac

My new MacBook Air arrived and I went for convenient cruft migration over a more manual fresh clean install, which was mostly painless even if it did take a few hours. I got in a bit of a catch-22 needing to install Rosetta 2 to run zsh with my default shell set to zsh, which meant I couldn’t run softwareupdate --install-rosetta like I needed to. That took a minute or two to work out (I configured iTerm to run with a custom shell of /bin/bash) and installing an update blew it away, so I had to do it again. I hope that’s not going to be a feature of every update…

Turns out, that meant I was running in x86_64 mode instead of arm64. The real fix involved starting the terminal into bash, installing a fresh copy of Homebrew, uninstalling the old copy, and reinstalling all of the packages.

Other than that, I needed to add my Alfred licence key in manually and fix the keybindings, but the rest seemed to transfer fine. I was expecting to need to hold on to the old MacBook for a while in case I needed things from it, but I don’t think I’ll need to this time.

The keyboard is a bit squishier, but it’s also a lot quieter, which I appreciate. I keep missing the left and right arrow keys since they made them skinny, though.

nqr

Apparently, not only does the software I built when learning to code still run, it runs for months on end with daily use, not a single issue, and next to no maintenance. How is the first thing I ever built also the most reliable? Without any tests as well!

First commit was in July 2010. Have I really been programming for 10.5 years?!

mortgage

It’s progressing and the Habito team have been really accomodating of my name mess, which is a breath of fresh air. I feel well looked after so far.

Last minute update: my name doesn’t conform to the digital systems for online application (who’s surprized?), so they can’t do it. They did give me some advice for my own way forwards, which probably involves going to an actual bank and talking to an actual human. :sigh:

equity by design

Today was the first day of training with Rooted by Design on designing equitable services, particularly focused on racial equity.

There are two more sessions next week.

vaccine

Just booked my first dose for next week!

head of development?

dxw is doing internal hiring and I just had an interview for the role. I feel part way between :crossed_fingers: and are_we_the_baddies.gif. Might find out today, but probably on Monday (if I get the promotion, that is - it’s going to take longer to work out if it means I’m a baddy).