Sonia Connolly

There is an alleyway (that used to have trolley tracks) and a defunct cafe and a two story house and an unused warehouse diagonally across the street from me. And two tall glorious redwood trees. When I look in that direction I see dawn light, moon rise, and bits of the east bay hills.

Just before Thanksgiving, a notice went up that all of that was to be torn down to make way for a six story 143 unit apartment building that will fill the block from end to end and side to side, towering over this low-rise neighborhood. Because 15 of those units will be low-income housing, they get waivers on all the height and setback regulations that keep the area around a building livable.

The comment period was two weeks across Thanksgiving. I contacted my councilmember to ask for help around this, but his staff person was deeply unhelpful and said they're in favor of the project. I did write a letter with my concerns, and contacted some of the small neighborhood associations around here.

I felt like I should be organizing neighbors somehow, but I didn't know where to start. Friday, I got an email saying there's a zoom meeting organized by the developer coming up this Wednesday. I printed out 60 flyers with an introduction and the zoom info, with a photo of the concept drawing for the building on the back, and put them in mailboxes up and down my street. I included my email address, but no one has reached out. Maybe some of them will come to the meeting?

It's a small step, but at least it's a step. It felt like writing letters to voters was training for this, in a way. Print them out, send them on their way, expect a very small effect, if any.

I feel powerless and grief-stricken for the spaciousness I've been enjoying. Yes, we need more housing. 100% affordable and 100% in tune with the neighborhood. I can only hope that it will be a long time before they break ground.

My word of the year this year was Pride. Like my journey with Trust last year, I got better acquainted with (healthy) pride and how it feels in my body. I can be proud of myself and my accomplishments without being in competition with anyone else, and without judging anyone else. It feels like I've reclaimed something that comes naturally to young children, "Look what I did!" and that feels healing. Pride seems to be both an emotion and a skill, and even a thing in itself, as in, abruptly losing my job earlier this year hurt my pride.

Posting something I'm proud of every day for Pride Month turned out to be surprisingly fun. I recommend it!

And maybe I'll keep that permission to post things I'm proud of. One last one for 2024 - I'm proud of keeping my commitment to post every day in December, even when it felt like a strain.

My word for 2025 is Love. I chose Pride as a counterweight to feeling a lot of shame. While it's good to notice what I'm proud of as well as what I'm ashamed of, I noticed during the year that pride isn't an antidote to shame - love is. When I'm flinching about something in the past that brings shame, it helps to send love back to that younger self. I'm noticing that some of the shame comes from perfectionism, since it feels like any mistake is terrible.

It feels vulnerable to choose Love as a word to focus on and talk about. Of course I want all sorts of love in my life, to give and receive, and it sounds wonderful to bring in more love and overall get to know it better. And a positive romantic relationship would be nice if that were to happen... While love feels like an antidote to shame, there's also a lot of shame in doing it wrong, loving too much or not enough or the wrong way or the wrong people.

Once again I am committing to going gently and slowly with this one.

( full word of the year list )

I've had some of these open in tabs for quite a while

How a 27-year-old busted the myth of Bitcoin’s anonymity by Andy Greenberg.

All of it began when a young, puzzle-loving mathematician named Sarah Meiklejohn started to pull out traceable patterns in the apparent noise of Bitcoin’s blockchain.. This excerpt from Tracers in the Dark reveals how Meiklejohn came to the discoveries that would launch that new era of crypto criminal justice.

Substack partners with protofascists by Marisa Kabas. Putting this here for the next time someone asks me why Substack is a problematic newsletter host.

Leaders and Followers

Followership by Jason Wong.

Everyone likes to talk about leadership—we are culturally conditioned to view success as a progression through leadership positions—but there is far less attention paid to being a good follower.

On Rake Collections and Software Engineering by Diego Elio Pettenò.

My understanding of Matthew’s metaphor is that senior developers (or senior software engineers, or senior systems engineers, and so on) are at the same time complaining that their coworkers are making mistakes (“stepping onto rakes”, also sometimes phrased as “stepping into traps”), while at the same time making their environment harder to navigate (“spreading more rakes”, also “setting up traps”).

Thoughts on "Being a Senior Engineer" by Adam Keys. A response to On Being a Senior Engineer by John Allspaw, about the responsibilities and abilities of a mature engineer.

Salaries

What is your labor worth? Tech compensation in 2021 by Jacob Kaplan-Moss. The tech job market is much tougher in 2024 than 2021, but there's still good advice here about how to get a sense of the market.

How to Ask For a Raise by Alison Green.

If you’re like a lot of people, you might have gone your entire career without ever asking for a raise. It’s surprisingly common for workers, particularly women, to wait for their employer to dole out raises rather than proactively requesting one.

Technical

On Long Term Software Development by Bert Hubert. Recommendations for long-term software development, caring (enough) about the future.

A mastodon thread on suggestions for email newsletter providers. I investigated several of these when I accidentally broke my phpList/Mailgun setup recently. I ended up figuring out how to fix my setup rather than giving my list to a third party. (I incautiously upgraded the Mailgun plugin in phpList, and it stopped working. I figured out how to downgrade it again and was back in business.)

Go structs are copied on assignment (and other things about Go I'd missed) by Julia Evans

Exploring Javascript book by Dr. Axel Rauschmayer. I keep thinking I should learn Javascript, but so far I've just had to do a few things around the edges.

The Myth of the Modular Monolith (video tech talk) by Eileen Uchitelle.

This jigsaw puzzle aligns with the interests of a lot of folks here. Reader's Paradise by Aimee Stewart from White Mountain Puzzles. It's a painting of a very crowded bookshop, which means every inch of the puzzle is covered by varying colors, textures, and fonts. No large swaths of bland blue sky that have to be matched solely by puzzle piece shape here. The level of detail is amazing for old book covers and posters in various styles, which Aimee Stewart not only created in loving detail, but most of them are painted at an angle!

There are more bonus living beings than I expected in a bookshop as well, given that there are no visible humans.

I did it without referring to the cover, and the hardest part was getting the border pieces in the right order. After that I could collect pieces that had text, or that matched by color, and start figuring out what went where. It was fun to watch different parts of the scene emerge.

Once it was done, I got curious about the piece count, since this was a regular-cut puzzle with even rows and columns. The rectangle is 37 pieces x 27, which multiplies out to 999. Either 1000 pieces is rounded up, or ... yup, there it is, one of the pieces is two pieces linked together to make an even 1000. My eye went right to it, so the anomaly must have been noticeable even though I didn't think about it consciously when I was putting the pieces in place.

I picked it up while walking in the neighborhood a few months ago, where someone had put it outside when they were done with it. I'll pass it along to a friend, or put it outside in turn (when the weather is drier).

Who Is Baba Yaga? by Kris Spisak. "Trickster, mentor, probable goddess—Slavic folklore’s most famous villain is so much more than a witch." Excerpted and adapted from Becoming Baba Yaga: Trickster, Feminist, and Witch of the Woods.

The Ghost of Workshops Past: How Communism, Conservatism, and the Cold War Still Mold Our Paths Into SFF Writing by S.L. Huang.

As part of tracing out why these types of workshops can be so detrimental to minority writers, both authors delved into the history of writing workshops. And both argued that the traditional workshop in which the author is enforced to silence will not only suppress minority voices—but that its domination across education happened not by accident, but by design.

We Are the Mountain: A Look at the Inactive Protagonist by Vida Cruz.

Now let’s flip the script. Let me take you through the anatomy of characters who are commonly labelled “inactive protagonist.”

They are marginalized in some way, via race or class or gender or sex or ability. They will most certainly have suffered some kind of trauma (or three, or more), whether physical, emotional, psychological, or sexual. These two things have inevitably and inextricably colored not only how they perceive and navigate the world they live in, but how gods, natural or supernatural phenomena, technology, society, or other people react to them.

My living room is ringed with holiday cards all around the edges, crowding the narrow fireplace mantel, hanging from the CD shelf, propped on the stereo cabinet. Some from friendships going back nearly forty years, some from new friendships this year. Tangible evidence that people think of me with warmth, that I've made a positive difference. Reassurance that my awkward quirky way of being in the world is good enough to stay connected with people.

I sent out cards too, some later in the month than I intended, but all eventually made it into the mailbox, hopefully to spread a similar warmth and reassurance.

Repeating something I see go by every so often: If someone has made a difference in your life, take a moment to tell them. Send compliments and love and care out into the world, because we all need that nourishment.

I went to see Kitka's Wintersongs concert last night. The singers recently returned from a study and performance trip to the Republic of Georgia, so the whole concert was Georgian songs, resonating through the high open space of the brick St. Paul's Episcopal Church. They sounded wonderful.

I was one of a handful of people wearing masks, nervously settling into my spot on a pew in a sea of unmasked people. Then a kid almost directly behind me starts up with a hacking cough. I turned horrified eyes on their mom, who looked back at me impassively. This happened several more times.

At intermission, I checked with one of the ushers, someone I know from Balkan choir. Was there anything we could do about the situation? She said yes, she could offer them a mask. That seemed like a good idea, intermediate between doing nothing and asking them to leave.

I didn't turn to watch the conversation, but caught something about "not sick, it's (allergies? asthma?)," and the usher said, "Just in case it's something else in addition," which I thought was a good response. Next time I looked back, their seats were empty.

On the one hand, if it really is allergies or asthma, now I feel bad about interrupting their enjoyment of the concert. On the other hand, they were for sure interrupting the enjoyment of everyone around them, and I wasn't the only one worried about illness.

I wish we had a stronger social contract in all directions. Wearing masks. Not attending concerts while ill. Access to treatment for asthma or allergies - that cough did not sound good, no matter what it was. In our current world, it feels like maybe I should have sucked it up and worried silently through the whole concert, or left myself. It was a full house, or I would have just moved.

Last year, I went to a Kitka holiday singalong in a less full space, and there was someone coughing and sniffling, no mask. I immediately moved away from them to the edge of space next to the windows. Two of the Kitka singers came down with Covid after that, and I haven't heard anything about a holiday singalong this year.

(*) See jesse_the_k's comment about the post title.

22 short story recs from sophia_sol (for forestofglory), "female-focused stories from the last 5 years that are interested in human connection and/or material culture, and usually have a hopeful mood." The first one is Little Free Library by Naomi Kritzer.

I sang in a Balkan choir concert last night and it went well! I am proud of being brave and showing up, and also of practicing and preparing. When I'm not biking and dancing I have more time to sing. I linked to some of the songs earlier.

Then this morning at work, I presented a document I've been writing at the every two weeks' Demo Day. The document was a technical deep dive on the options to get two different systems to talk to each other, and I presented it at a high level. To my surprise, I got all sorts of kudos for moving the project forward, presenting it in an understandable way, and collaborating with my teammates.

And being thorough. That one made me flinch a bit, because it was used as a negative at my last job. But these folks seem to mean it in a positive way. I hope. I'm just doing the messy unwieldy research that needs to be done in preparation for actually doing the programming work, and maybe that's actually being appreciated.

This afternoon, a friend stopped by to pick up some more boxes and bubble wrap for her impending move, and she brought me a cute glass vase with flowers and said she appreciates my friendship. Again I was surprised and felt like I hadn't done anything special. But it's nice to be appreciated!

There's a part of me that worries about not understanding the rules, when results are more positive than I expect. I guess I can take a breath and enjoy the positive and hope I don't trip over any hidden landmines.

Ellipsus, collaborative alternative to Google docs
sineala wrote up a recommendation for Ellipsus, a free online collaborative editor that is staunchly anti-AI. "Barring significant regulatory changes, we will never weave generative AI into Ellipsus."

That gives them points in my book, but the flashy-flashy site and need to create an account don't draw me in at the moment. I like to do my writing on my local machine. I'm posting this so that I can find it later if I want.

And also, apparently it's great for collaborating and getting beta feedback on fanfic (and other writing), so I'm posting it in case anyone here is interested in that. Read sineala's post for more about that.

Setting up vim for writing
Vim (vi improved) is the modern successor to vi (visual) which was the full-screen successor to ex (extended), the original one-line-at-a-time editor on Unix. Vi was released in 1976, and vim was released in 1991. Vi and vim are modal editors, so you can be in edit mode or command mode, and you can also type a ':' in command mode which puts you in line mode at the bottom of the screen, where you can still use ex commands. They are usually used by programmers, or as a fallback when other editors aren't available on Unix.

I learned vi first, and then emacs (which has control characters instead of modes) and then much later VSCode. I occasionally dip into vi when I'm editing a file in the terminal, or editing a git commit message. When I'm thinking very hard about coding, I revert to typing vi commands, even though I'm in VSCode instead.

All that to say, it's surprising to see someone set up vim for writing instead of coding.

This mastodon post from Mx. Aria Stewart says:

I just set vim up for editing prose and uh

... y'all remember spell checking that uses an actual dictionary? That doesn't gaslight you about whether a word is in a dictionary or not, it just tells you?

For what it's worth, Configuring Vim as a Writing Tool by Theena is a decent hint at things that are useful for making vim writerly