Weeknotes, 17 May 2024

A 3rd week of remembering to write weeknotes (albeit typing this at 1800 having only just realised I hadn’t) is still something to celebrate; I’ll take it. Another pretty good week, albeit a heavy one.

Monday was all-day training, attending the first Remote version of the 1st day of Made Tech’s “Clean Code” course. Having been doing this work for over half my life now (!!), I was hoping that I wouldn’t learn anything super groundbreaking for me, which made it a bit more low-stakes for me, which helped me relax into it some. But the course was driven using a Socratic method, where the trainer posed questions for us to discuss. I’ve not experienced that before and, while I’m open to the idea that the question → think → answer → question cycle will be frustrating, the thing I found frustrating — almost intolerably so — is that I spent most of the time feeling unsure that I had understood the question and wanting more context. Also, trying to imagine class structures without the context of how it would be used, with only the minimum information needed to the current question part was really hard! A useful course and some good discussions, but not a learning method I’m keen to get back to very soon.

Tuesday was a bunch of more productive time, getting my head round the programme and so on, but Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were an absolute pile-on of meetings. Between 1000 and 1800 yesterday, I had only 1 hour 15 where I was not in calls and today was pretty much the same. Again, lots of useful discussions, some orientation calls, and some productive decision-making, but damn am I glad that the weekend is here now.

Looking forward to meeting up with more of the local queer activist types at the Queers for Palestine Feeder March ahead of the national demonstration for Nakba Day tomorrow and watching Songbirds perform at LezDiff on Sunday, along with some reading and relaxation. As it’s coming to the end of our financial year at work, lots of us are looking to spend the rest of our learning budgets, so I’ve bought an absolute shitload of books to read:

• Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice and Art Activism of Sins Invalid
• Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples
• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
• Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
• The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight
• Escape: How a generation shaped, destroyed and survived the internet
• Future Ethics
• How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
• Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care
• Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male Power
• Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
• Remote: Office not required
• Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society
• Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
• The Social Profit Handbook: The Essential Guide to Setting Goals, Assessing Outcomes, and Achieving Success for Mission-Driven Organizations
• The Software Architect Elevator: Redefining the Architect’s Role in the Digital Enterprise
• The Souls of Queer Folk: How Understanding LGBTQ+ Culture Can Transform Your Leadership Practice
• Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy