I’ve got a lot going on right now.

Nothing feels momentous about any particular thing. I’m trying a lot of new ideas and work, struggling, failing and trying again. The transition from the last couple of years of insane travel and starting a business to development work and staying closer to home has been a very good one.

Work

For those that have asked about my work status recently:

Mozilla is great. You can see a lot of the work I do in the Socorro commit feed. Or, in my bug feed. I hang out in #breakpad, #db and a few other channels on irc.mozilla.org. And I’m going to give a talk about Postgres and Backups on February 6th, based on the research I’ve been doing into open source solutions for binary backups.

It’s wonderful to be working in public. I love how much time I have to write software and think about database architecture. I’ve been digging out of a backlog of application and DBA-related work and just coming up to speed on Socorro for a couple months, and that’s starting to pay off.

It’s also wonderful to have coworkers, working on the same things. Most of my work life has been solitary, both in physical proximity and the work itself. Now, all my code is reviewed and I work closely with developers and engineers, daily, on everything.

PyLadies

I’ve been organizing PyLadies meetups with Flora Worley and a few others. We now have more than 60 people who have joined the Meetup, and over 20 women show up to every workshop and hackathon. It feels quite unreal to have 20 women I didn’t know a month ago showing up, forking repos and sending me commits every day. I ask newcomers to send me a commit that links them to our github landing page.

Travel/Speaking in 2013

I’m giving a talk at Portland State University on Feb 1. I’ll be in Mountain View Feb 4-8.

I’m confirmed to be speaking at PyCon March 16 about K-12 teachers and what we in the open source community can do to help them.

I’ll be speaking at a conference in Taiwan in April, and another in the US in May.

Recent talks

My most recent talk was a plenary session at LISA 2012, a USENIX conference in San Diego. It was about the false dichotomy of Education vs Training, and what we can do to improve education of sysadmins. Specifically, I gave shout outs to opsschool.org!

And…

So many other little things are going on. I restarted my sourdough and I’m reorganizing my house, one room at a time. We’re remodeling bits of the basement. We replaced a terrible light fixture in the house, and got an ESPN subscription with cable (which I love and hate at the same time). I’m reading and re-reading some lovely science fiction, at a pace of about 2 books a week. I’m walking more, catching up with family and planning things all the way into 2014.

I’m saying “no” a lot recently to doing more things, volunteering for conferences, and travel. Which, is hard.

Of all the stuff I’m working on right now, PyLadies is the hardest and the most rewarding. So, I’m making space in my life for that, for the little bits of teaching I get to do, and for connecting more women with each other and the open source communities that I love.