software engineer, consultant, conference speaker, #tech4good, #stacktivism

2022 End of Year

I announced my engagement and started an agency with my fiancée, began a new job at Microsoft, joined the Board of Directors and became Treasurer for the Python Software Foundation, continued to volunteer for my favorite language-related conference DjangoCon and served on the Wagtail CMS Core Team. It's been a busy year.
DjangoConUS_Stage_Everyone.jpg

Summarizing 2022

Broad themes of the year:

  • Safe communities
    • I joined Mastodon @BajoranEngineer
    • I joined the PSF as Director and Treasurer
    • I'm managing Discord spaces and it's intimidating AF. I really want to get community right.
    • At The Root team slowed down work because I have been divided in time on managing other projects and investing in safe ways to communicate, so there ultimately were no ways to communicate that I didn't organize. I blocked my own team. We're all still really excited, so I believe we're going to jump back in in the New Year with a lot of other people still asking about it. Next steps are to set up ways to not block my own team.
  • Building and Growing communities
    • Reduce friction and get out of the way
    • Event-in-a-box
    • Focusing on bringing the
  • Leadership Opportunities
    • At The Root
    • Djangonaut Space: Peer Mentorship Contributors
    • TBA: Peer Mentorship Leadership
  • Launching more
    • Trek Demos
    • Djangonaut Space
  • Focusing more on content
    • Blogging more
      • A re-do this site is coming soon
    • Video !
      • Catch Me Live
        • Find me on Twitch
        • Streaming with Microsoft
          • Python Pulse bi-weekly stream for VS Code and deploying Python with Azure.
      • Catch Me Later
        • TikTok
        • Twitch Replays
        • YouTube longer content on Django! (coming soon)
    • A rebrand `BajoranEngineer` on all socials?
      • Not exactly and it's a messy rebrand and meh.
      • But I LOVE the time I have working on Trek Demos so we're diving into that.
      • I'm still Dawn. <3

Microsoft

I started a new job in Python Community Product Management and it started out feeling completely different than anything I've done before. It was almost DevRel, but not exactly. I am now on a "Community-as-a-Service" team as my skip-level Scott Hanselman likes to say. I'm learning how to apply the things I know and have been ruminating over my entire career. I dusted off my very first talk and I'm giving a more evolved version of it over four years later. You can expect content from me coming under the Microsoft umbrella and also personal content as I try things out.

I have a handful of hobbies I rotate through

  • Electric Drums
  • Painting
  • Star Trek novels

The next 3-5 years

I have enjoyed the calm that comes with planning 3-5 years in advance. This time 2019 I was coming back to the US from a short stay in Amsterdam and London, living out of my suitcase. Now, I'm engaged with three dogs and neighborhood coffee shop that knows me by name. Routine has been really rewarding. Although I get the urge to travel, I still have not gotten back to pre-pandemic travel and continue to mask.

I owe every ounce of success to the calm that my fiancée brings to my life. I'm immeasurably proud of her and the career strides she's also made. Samira, my love, is a C#, React and XR developer and designer. I'm constantly inspired by her. Together we created a small consulting agency in Augmented Reality, Development and Design (ARDD).
We're still getting things up and running. We're eager to be a firm that creates and maintains open-source packages and build cool products. No rush on this, but it's a fun space to play in and it's been great to not just see my fiancée's working style; but see how her attention to detail compliments my big-picture approach -- things that may leave us disagreeing on how to approach cleaning the kitchen.

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