Learning Log, Feb 2022
The most important and devastating thing to come out of February is Russia’s attack on Ukraine. It is so incredibly frustrating and heartbreaking that people are dying, over one egomaniacal man’s ideas of what his legacy should be. I wish that all people could be safe and happy and free from their oppressors, and am thinking of the Ukrainian people and their loved ones over these past couple weeks.
If you’re feeling powerless and want to help:
- Netlify (my employer) is doing donation matching to a few 501(c)(3) orgs helping Ukraine
- Real ways you can help Ukraine as a foreigner is a crowdsourced list of resources, contextualized for wherever you are
- Find a peace protest in your city
Things of lesser consequence
- I got engaged! 🥰
- I realized early on in the month that I have a touch of “community” fatigue: I belong to many communities related to my hobbies facets of my identity—multiple Slacks, multiple Discords, multiple subreddits, Instagram, and Twitter—and it’s getting to feel like too much. Time to prune. ✂️
- The “many communities” thing is also somewhat a symptom of being a magpie for identities: I have been a designer / front-end developer ⇒ a web platform person embedded in accessibility, privacy, and HTML ⇒ a product manager on middleware developer tooling/platforms; I weave, and knit, and sew; I want to draw more again...sometimes I feel the need to let go of an old identity in order to make room for future growth. That said, 1) it’s helpful to keep that context, being a PM focused on the needs of web makers and 2) I don’t wanna.
- I joined a Twitter “Space” where folks were talking about side projects and I love something Charlie Gerard said. Her new side projects are initiated by a question she poses to herself; she knows when it’s time to stop when she’s answered the question she started with.
- Episode 351 of Creative Pep Talk (Afraid You’ll Never Catch Up? Give Up Trying and Do This Instead) is also relevant. Andy suggests doing project-based learning: observe others’ work that you like and wish you were making; identify the next most specific skill you want to learn (i.e. what exactly does that person do well?); and bake that into your next project. For product management it can be a little harder to do that observational bit, but the general strategy still applies.
On the Internet
Sculpt the World: I’m a sucker for land art