the week in me

Apr 8, 2019

I’m going to try to post a weekly summary of what I’ve been doing, making, seeing, reading, and thinking about. Let’s see how it goes! It’s not weekly until you do it twice.

arts

I’m so excited! Oncoming Productions – the horror theater company I’m in – will be part of Minnesota Fringe’s annual fundraiser, Five Fifths of Mary Poppins. It’s an honor to be invited, and we’re having a hilarious time figuring out how to make our spoonful of sugar scary, because that’s how we roll.

And my improv group I’m A Trio got selected for a run at Improv A Go Go! IAGG is a wonderful improv lab where the shows are chosen by lottery – which means Sundays are when you see the weirdest stuff at HUGE Theater. We’re playing late this summer – see my shows page for details.

If you’re in the Twin Cities this month, please go see Attenborough: The Improvised Wildlife Documentary. I’m not in it, I just like it a lot.

code

I mean, the big news? Your eyes are on it. I built this web site to the point where I was comfortable replacing my old sites with it, and telling my friends about it. It’s not finished – I want to make it more accessible, and usable, and mobile-friendly, and beautiful, and also finish writing it – but it’s the shape I want it to be.

Some other things I thought about this week:

Machine intelligence is built on human labor. Via Ethan Marcotte.
Web accessibility. Marcotte again. He suggests we “start small,” doing one thing a week, “and work together,” so I’m sharing. What I’ve done so far is read up on vestibular disorders (e.g., vertigo), and start figuring out how to improve navigation on this site.
Ramda. Since college I’ve loved functional programming from afar, or at least from adjacent rooms. JavaScript has now borrowed enough FP ideas to be dangerous, but Ramda is designed to encourage functional thinking. I’ve had my eye on it but this week I figured out how to use it for something in real life.
NativeScript. Thanks to Jen Looper’s NativeScript-Vue tutorial, I now feel 100% qualified to design and implement native mobile apps. OK, not really, but I’m itching to try.

I’m looking for work – specifically, part-time/freelance web development work. I am full-stack (esp. with Rails) but I’d love to focus on front-end (esp. with Vue). Call me.

life

I spent some time this week feeling like happiness isn’t possible. Of course I know it is – I mean, I also spent some time this week feeling happy – but that didn’t change the feeling. It’s a hard feeling to have, but it passes.

I’m trying to be less shy on Twitter. I’m pretty good with friends on Facebook, but Twitter is mostly strangers and I don’t know how to behave. I’m working on it.

I made a spinach-mushroom-tofu stir fry with soba noodles. Mealime is great.

What’s new with you? Just kidding, this site doesn’t have comments yet. Soon, I hope.