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

(WIP) 2022 End of Year

I've decided to publish the WIP. Year 2022.
DjangoConUS_Stage_Everyone.jpg

Photo taken by Bartek Pawlik DjangoCon US 2022

Note: This blog post is being actively edited between now and the end of the year to try to remove the pressure of getting it done.

I had a really good idea on how to summarize this year.

But I forgot it by the time I decided to sit down and write it.

Broad themes of the year, so let's outline them:

  • Safe communities
    • I joined Mastodon
    • I joined the PSF
    • 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, but I've never been very good at consistency with them.

Lately, I've been walking by my drumkit collecting dust (these days but it's not the end of my Josie and the Pussycats-esque band fantasy !!) to read Star Trek novels. I haven't read this much since high school. I've doubled down as Trekker as a personality ha.

Planning my future

I have enjoyed the calm that comes with planning 3-5 years in advance. 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 made and I'm eager to collaborate. Together we created a small consulting agency in Augmented Reality, Development and Design (ARDD). We're still getting things up and running, but we have ideas for our first project together. 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.