#2: iteration and existence
well gosh darn. how is growth supposed to feel? what are the different ways of processing existence?
Welcome to post #2. In this issue, I discuss interface design, incremental change, taking care of a mouse, and confiding in my coworkers.
Sorry this is late at night. I redacted the names of my coworkers in the specific situation I recounted, just in case. Writing this has been a really therapeutic experience for me. Enjoy :)
Work
This was a rough week at work, but growth itself is usually painful. For context, this fall, I’m working on a smaller team (3 people) to design, prototype, and test a tool for political journalists. This ‘tool’ uses voter data to suggest newsworthy locations to reporters.
The idea essentially works like this:
We have a huge file that contains info on every registered voter in the US and how they’ve voted since 2012.
We write software to sift through that data and find interesting counties according to metrics like gun ownership, age, rates of voter registration, etc.
The interesting counties are grouped/labeled and output into a file or ‘report’ (for example, “interesting Georgia counties according to gun ownership, as of Oct 7, 2019”).
That file is formatted into a website that reporters can check as they do research for stories.
Nick and Lenny (my teammates) are taking care of steps 1-3. I’m working on 4: the interface, i.e. how to best present this information to reporters. The desired end result is a working website that could be automatically updated when new data is added.
This sounds pretty straightforward, but you have to carefully consider your audience. How can you best present data points to reporters, who are working on a tight deadline and have varying interests/skills? It has to be skimmable, yet informative.
Also, this is pretty universal across many professions, but I’ll explicitly state: To best present information, you have to first consider the content itself and its meaning. There are a lot of questions you have to ask yourself: What points are most important? What needs to stand out the most? What does and doesn’t require emphasis?
It’s a lot to think about from a front-facing level, but also from a back-end level of how you structure the website (How often will you be updating the data? How many files do you imagine there will be?). Sometimes it was too much to wrap my head around. I’d come up with a feature that seemed simple at first, so I’d research how to do it and try to follow instructions online. Upon starting, I’d realize that this feature was way more complicated than I thought it was, and suddenly I’d written a bunch of code that didn’t work at all, so I’d abandon it and try to do something simpler. But this meant that I used up precious time! And I’d facepalm because shouldn’t I have known in the first place that this was going to be complicated? Sure, I read a bunch of articles and documentation, and if I can’t successfully execute it and am forced to abandon it, was it a waste?
And I got so frustrated that I needed to take a walk.
I sat down with Jason B. to figure this out, because he was familiar with Gatsby (a framework I was using to build the site). With his ever-so great wisdom, he said, “Madison. Incremental change is the only change.” Here’s a pic of the Dropbox document from our meeting.
We settled on first doing the simplest implementation of this website: importing the files and creating pages one-by-one, doing things the more verbose way before moving to the more elegant and complex solution. I suppose this might be contrary to a traditional software engineering way of thinking, where you should be doing things as efficiently as possible from the get-go. Maybe I’m writing code like a designer would—iteratively, low-fidelity before high. Is one of these methods better than the other? I don’t know.
I was also talking to my manager, Jeremy, about what I mentioned in my last post: feeling as if I’d learned more the last 4 weeks than I did the whole summer, because the little tasks got a lot easier. He said:
Of course. First, you learn how to do something. Then, you learn how to do it well. After all that, you’ll learn how to assess all the different possible solutions, and how to pick the best one. Getting skilled at the last part will actually be how you spend the majority of your career.
And I realized that I’m getting tripped up in my work right now because it’s taking me ages to make decisions on the best solution. On the flip side, in every meeting with my coworkers, who have now been software engineers for >10 years, they never say, “I can’t figure out how to do ____.” They always say, “How should we go about doing this?” “What’s better, x or y?” and I guess all I can say is that I’m excited to get there.
Life
I know what you’ve been waiting for: news on Francis.
My housemate (I don’t want this to affect his Airbnb ratings, so let’s call him Ryan) returned last Tuesday night and Francis was still alive—scruffy and underfed, but alive. I’d already told Ryan about Francis, but when the two of us stood in front of the box, looking at this poor little mouse, I saw it dawn upon him that this was a living thing, and it would be a bit of a conundrum to free it appropriately.
We fed Francis some shredded cheese. The next morning, while I was at work, Ryan biked to the other end of the city and released Francis into a park. He texted, “Francis gorged himself on cheese and then ran for the hills,” along with a picture of the empty box. And I got STUPID emotional, as always. I recalled a few days earlier, when I told my mom that I thought Francis was cute, and she said, “You’re so lonely, you’re willing to be friends with anything,” and, well, she was right, but ah. Too real, mom (mom is probably reading this).
While at work, seeing Ryan’s message and the overexposed photo of half-dead grass, I teared up a bit thinking about how, for a few days, it was just me in a house by myself, and he kept me company; how fragile he was; how precious any ounce of life is; how he would most definitely die in the winter weather; how I had no way of securing his safety anymore, but he didn’t belong with me; and how I couldn’t properly look after him. Made me think about my own, ya know, mortality and existence and meaning. 😐
On Thursday night, I attended an event with Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 project (which thoroughly discusses slavery and its current impact, also it’s amazing and you should definitely check it out right now). She talked about how everyone should fully understand slavery and how it affects our society today. Of course, everyone would love to ‘move on’ from slavery, she said, but “you can’t destroy something until you understand it.”
While leaving, I checked slack to find that a few of my coworkers were at a happy hour nearby, so I joined them. None of us had eaten dinner, so we went to a Japanese curry place. It contained only 12 bar seats, so the four of us sat in a row, eating and awkwardly turning our heads to make conversation. Something about 1. being in such close quarters, 2. eating one of my favorite Asian comfort foods, 3. having recently said goodbye to Francis, and 4. Nikole Hannah-Jones’ talk, was bringing out the Real Madison, the After Hours, Overly Introspective Madison. It made me reflect on my life and how I hadn’t seen my best friends in months and maybe they weren’t even my best friends anymore and everything feels futile sometimes.
We reached a lull in conversation. This internal feeling was building up, and I was thinking goddammit I need to just say this out loud to someone. I trust my team a lot, so I turned to [redacted] and started blabbing about personal shit that I’m actually fairly open about, but that I hadn’t yet revealed in the realm of the office building: the fact that I overthink a lot, and I get waves of anxiety over my life being meaningless, and I used to go to therapy about this but sometimes it still worries me.
[redacted] listened and asked questions and I appreciated it a lot. They laughed a little bit and said that the older they get, the less they think about these things. Which actually wasn’t condescending. If anything, it was comforting. [redacted 2] tuned in and mentioned how, when they were younger, they were the opposite, and used to think that everything they did was unique and special. In fact, they sarcastically said, “I remember when I was 20, sitting in a park, in autumn, looking up at the leaves and thinking, ‘Wow. Surely, nobody has ever seen this before. My experience is unique and important and must be shared.’” To which, of course, we laughed. Because, truly, none of us are that special, right?
And in that moment, I felt, for once, a little unique—relieved to have coworkers that care about me enough to listen. Grateful for my health and sanity.
couple of other small things from my week:
went to annandale (finally)
read a book in the library of congress reading room
Play
I don’t have a ton of good reading pieces this week! But I do have a little variety. I guess a theme among these is how quickly things change (along with the world):
Somebody recreated Neopets Food, and I was both nostalgic and excited. Neopets, Runescape, Club Penguin, etc. all the games I played as a kid remind me of the ‘old internet’ before social media ate everyone’s attention, the one I feel this weird longing for despite not remembering it too clearly.
Here’s a blast to the past, i.e. what The Washington Post looked like during Clinton’s impeachment, which gives you another sense of just how much the internet has changed. I was only a few months old then. What will things even look like in another 20 years? I can’t even begin to imagine.
This German poem about life and the passage of time, which my friend posted as we graduated high school. He told me the translation is pretty good. “the heart must submit itself courageously / to life’s call without a hint of grief.” alright, if you say so, Hesse 🥺
NYT’s latest update on the Xinjiang concentration camps. If you haven’t been keeping up with this situation, that’s okay! It’s not too late. The article is pretty comprehensive.
Lastly, a couple songs: 2:56-2:58 on FANTAZIA gets me every time. Makes me wanna shake my head around. The Barnes Blvd. song is part of a lo-fi hip hop album that has more of a concept/structure than most lo-fi projects I’ve seen, which I strongly appreciate. The cover reminds me of suburbia.
:)
See you next time.
Madison