Letters from a broad...

The year 2024 is wrapping up -- which means that it's time for my yearly self-assessment!! (Buckle in, this is a long one...)

I need to start with my job because that is what consumes most of my time and corresponding mental bandwidth. It's kind of a long and technical (perhaps dull) story, though, so feel free to skip straight to the next section (world events), which is probably more interesting.

My Job

Here's a quick recap of the last few years:

For three years I held a job that was my favorite job that I'd ever had. Since the company was a successful and quickly-growing startup, I had the chance to exercise one of my most valuable skills: growing a startup company up to scalable mode (see my professional blog at startup2scalable.com). I was hired as a DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, and I quickly worked my way up to being the Tech Lead of the central DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure team of the company.

I had the opportunity to work with eight or nine dev teams (depending on how you count) -- helping them to get all of their applications running in kubernetes -- with continuous build-and-deployment pipelines tailored to each team's needs. I led weekly workshops and I assisted anyone who wanted help applying new technologies to their projects. And I got rave reviews!

Perfect, right?

Unfortunately, one of the selling points of that job turned out to be a liability. I had chosen the company because I wanted to do something to fight climate change -- and many of the teams I was working with were creating scientific models and other types of projects to help companies reduce their carbon footprint!

...But it turned out that almost all of the money was actually coming from selling carbon offsets. While working there, I learned not only that carbon offsets are questionable in general but that the company I was working for specifically was selling some especially dodgy ones. I learned this from the press like everyone else did. That said, I can't pretend to complete ignorance on this point -- I knew from the list of clients that we were green-washing some of the worst offenders in carbon emissions. But it seemed logical that they should be the ones paying for offsets, right?

Anyway, when the carbon markets imploded and my employer in particular took a thrashing in the press, the money dried up -- which meant throwing overboard all of the ballast such as diversifying their offering with digital solutions, etc. As you can see from my corresponding post from last year, however, I still had hope of some positive resolutions. Specifically, since one of my areas of expertise is helping companies grow from startup to scalable, I have corresponding skills in helping them downsize as well. I could have helped them trim their cloud infrastructure back down to startup size -- while keeping everything up and running.

So, yes, I'm saying I would have kept helping them (at least for a time) after finding out about their business. And the stress and worry of trying to play my cards to make that happen pretty much ruined my whole Christmas season last year. They didn't deserve it, but I had loved that job for three years, and I had the right skillset to really help them in bad times like in good.

The problem is that the top brass showed stunning incompetence, really the whole time. In particular, since they're not a tech company, they didn't have the idea in their heads that maybe the top engineers should be consulted regarding tech & engineering decisions. In their world, there are executives to make decisions and then there are tech/specialist cows to be milked.

Anyway, I could see the wrecking ball coming for my department, and as tech lead, I would be responsible for keeping things running while I didn't have the authority to make the decisions that would allow me to do so effectively throughout the downsizing. So I resigned. If they want to unplug things randomly, then they can explain to the various dev teams why their infrastructure isn't working anymore. I didn't want to resign, but I also didn't think I deserved to be made to take the fall.

A colleague had suggested that I could start my own business, and I thought it would be a good way to recreate the situation I loved -- doing the DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure for a portfolio of teams and small businesses. I had expected that I might get some "garden leave" when I resigned (since others had gotten it). but nope. I had to work right to my last day. So I had with no income while trying to start my new business.

(By the end of 2024, the last remaining members of my team were laid-off -- which meant at least that they got a few months of garden-leave pay plus the right to collect unemployment right away...)

A learned a couple of important lessons from creating my own company:

1. I find paperwork so stressful that a single form I needed to fill out would lead me to waste multiple work days just stressing over it.

2. While companies do sometimes outsource DevOps and Infra to consultants, they hire consulting firms, not freelancers.

So, ultimately, after several potential clients told me that they could hire me -- but not through my small business -- I gave up. After about two months of no income and no real prospects, I accepted a temporary contract -- even though it wasn't through my small business.

There are a lot of nice things about my current temporary contract, but it's been stressful because it's not really where I want to be long term.

Fortunately, just before the holiday season I found a new job that is right up my alley. I got it and accepted it. I haven't started yet (so I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch, so to speak), but I have very high hopes that this is the right move for me. Here's hoping the "job" section of next year's "state of the me" will be full of wonderful news!

In career-related creative projects, as I mentioned in last year's edition, I've been upgrading my hobby-server infrastructure. I've created a bunch of additional demo projects on my kubernetes cluster this past year -- though, unfortunately, I didn't have time to blog about as many of them as I had planned. Hopefully I'll have more opportunity to write for my professional blog in 2025.

At least I did get a chance to give a talk on kubernetes at the Cloud Native Switzerland Meetup. Here's the video of it:

World Events

The US election was obviously much, much worse than any of my personal worries about my career.

I was actually shocked and surprised that Trump won, and here's why:

Even though we were constantly reminded that the polls showed a statistical tie, I thought they were underestimating the enthusiasm, especially from women. Whenever reproductive rights were on the ballot -- even in "red" states -- reproductive rights would win. And with the fall of Roe v. Wade (not to mention horror stories rolling in about women bleeding to death in parking lots after being refused care), I saw the election as largely a referendum on women's right to bodily autonomy.

When the Democrats responded to the outcry over Biden's age by pressuring him to drop out -- and then when Kamala picked the most progressive person from her list of possible running mates -- I thought, "Wow, the Democrats are finally getting it right and doing stuff that people like!!!"

Trump is a convicted felon who is constantly criming so blatantly that he more-or-less openly ran on a platform of "I will treat the country as my own personal property and sell off everything that isn't nailed down and put the proceeds straight into my own pockets."

The fact that a majority of US voters would vote for that is an indication of a very serious systemic problem. I think the most critical problems are money in politics, misinformation, and election interference. With the media landscape as it is today, it's just too easy for the wealthy to manipulate public opinion. I don't know how to fix this, but I think that unless we can find a solution to this problem, fascism will just continue to rise worldwide.

(There are some additional US-specific democracy issues such as gerrymandering, lack of ranked-choice voting, Supreme Court politicized and open for bribes, other types of legal bribery, etc.)

The political commentators are now dissecting what Kamala and the Democrats did wrong, saying Kamala should have talked more about specific policies than about her middle-class roots. Sure, if she'd been shouting "Medicare for all" rather than campaigning with Liz Cheney, that would probably have helped.

One formerly-progressive news/commentary outlet that has recently taken a horrifying sharp right turn argued that Harris should done more to throw trans people under the bus, and applauded Trump's win as a referendum against the Democratic establishment. :(

If it was a referendum on anything, it was a referendum on the question of "fuck women." Most people were essentially voting on "vibes" (not issues), and there were too many people who just couldn't picture a black woman as president, even when the alternative is a doddering and incoherent criminal who is actively robbing them.

If there was any "tweak" the Democrats could have made that might have put Kamala over the edge, it's that they should have pressured Biden to resign right after the mid-terms. If Americans had had two years of getting used to seeing Kamala Harris as president, it would have made all the difference in the world.

Now I'm kind of at a loss. Up until November of 2024, I had had hope that future historians would view it as inevitable that when Americans had come right up to the edge of fascism, they roundly rejected it. Now I don't know what to hope for or if there is any hope left. We can't even look forward to Trump's unhealthy lifestyle finally finishing him off because is VP is misogynistic slimeball.

Around this time, readers might be reminding me that I don't live in the US. While my kids and I are still US citizens, we're also citizens of France and Switzerland, and we live in Switzerland. As far as France is concerned, they've got some problems too. We got the opportunity to participate in the center-left action to block the fascists in the French legislative elections, but all over Europe it looks like the far right is gaining. I hope that is a wrong impression.

Here in Switzerland, we recently defeated a massive nationwide highway expansion proposal. Thanks heavens I have the right to live in this island of sanity where people are rejecting the inefficient, dead-end path of car-centric transportation. Switzerland also serious issues, but at least on my one favorite issue, I got one bit of joyful news.

Creative Hobbies

My participation in ZEST (Zürich English-Speaking Theatre) continues to be a great creative-social component of my life.

Since I didn't learn my lesson from last year, I agreed to act as head of set dressing for the Spring production "Communicating Doors". I'm half joking -- it was a great experience and I'm glad I did it -- but I feel like it was sometimes more stress and responsibility than I had the time and energy to handle. I'd like to take on another "head of"-level role in some future production -- but not any time soon.

I really enjoy doing backstage work, though. It's a fun and not-terribly-stressful way to help out and be part of the production. As I mentioned, last year Nico and I volunteered to be on the stage crew for their November production of "The Lieutenant of Inishmore", and this year I worked backstage on the costume crew for "Dogfight", which was fun.

Due to a series of scheduling conflicts, I haven't been able to go to improv for about 6 months. The cool part is that Nico has been going by himself -- which I think is a good sign.

My other hobby organization (Main Street Plaza and MAA Books) had some cool developments this past year! Chino Blanco (of the exmo reddit) organized a panel at Sunstone that was intended as a reprise of a panel I had organized more than a decade ago. I even got to participate virtually! Monya Baker represented Main Street Plaza in person, and met some up-and-coming authors.

I'm really pleased with how the Sunstone adventure has livened up our little community! As of this writing, we're currently in the middle of our awards season -- the big yearly event hosted by Main Street Plaza. The voting for X-Mormon of the Year has been pretty lively, not to mention the many nominations for the Brodie Awards!

In family creative projects, Nico and I have been rebuilding Totally Normal Town, and I've got plenty more awesome original builds planned: a new mountain + castle for Elsa, a Japanese garden + temple & dojo, and some city buildings to flan the tracks of the seilbahn.

The only thing that's stopping me from building the next planned items is that as soon as I start on an original build, I get kind of obsessed and can't work on anything else for about a week. I don't have time to do that between now and our trip to Japan (see below), so I have to set it aside for now. But these planned builds are on my 2025 creative project goals list!

Then, to put this awesome city-under-the-stairs to good use, Nico took the lead in directing a new "film noir" murder mystery episode of out Totally Normal Town video series. This was fun for the whole family -- including some memorable performances by Léo and my husband. It also helped me get more practice with video editing. And Nico has got some great new episodes planned for 2025!!

I also succeeded in one of my personal goals of learning to make animations in Unity!! I had wanted to make some Pokémon Go videos for my channel, but I felt like I wanted a cool, animated intro for them. So I created the following:

Then I used it in two initial Pokémon Go videos: in Budapest and Scuol. As you can see, my video-creation skills still need some work, so that's another of my creative goals for 2025 -- to improve my skills with some new Pokémon Go videos.

I'd actually also like to try to make at least one more animation in Unity (so I don't forget what I learned about how to do it). And I'd also like to finally complete my stated Unity goal from last year which is to create a minimal Unity game that contacts a server (and collaborate with my kids on a corresponding game project).

Then the #1 thing that I'd really like to do by the end of 2025 is to pick up work on my comic book again.

It took me 7 years to illustrate the first volume!! That's why I set it down -- I felt like it was keeping me from working on all of these other projects. But now that I've made some good progress on a lot of my other projects, I feel like I want to work on my comic book in parallel. I have some good ideas for imagery, and I'd like to get back into the fun of world-building.

So my comic book goal for 2025 is to have the second and third volumes completely blocked out -- all pages filled with (empty) panels and text -- and I'd like to do any necessary technical updates/upgrades so that I have drawn at least a few panels before the end of the year.

In addition to my main creative goals, I have a list of smaller things I'd like to get done:

Review the computerized music creation I'd done a couple of years ago -- see if I can squeeze anything good out of it.
Update Mormon Alumni Association Books (add more books).
Blog about my garden -- I learned a lot in 2024, but skipped blogging about it for some reason.
Maybe another hobby website...

Family and Languages

I've grouped my family situation and my language learning goals this year! Here's why:

My husband has been wanting to take a trip to Japan for years -- and this coming Spring we'll finally be going on our trip-of-a-lifetime to Japan!! All four of us!

In order to get the most out of our trip, my husband has decided to try to learn Japanese. For the past few months, he's been using this Renshuu app to practice reading and writing Japanese on his tablet.

After learning French in grad school, I got the idea that I'm a person who likes learning languages. I got a bit of a start on various languages -- and in particular my husband and I had fun learning Italian together back before we were married.

My Italian is still pretty decent because we listen to a lot of Italian opera (and I learned the words to a number of arias). Plus it was just a fun thing to do together. We still have some little catch-phrases we sometimes say to each other from the "40 Leçons pour parler Italien" book that we read together:

"Gli spaghetti italiani sono sempre al dente!"
"L'Italia è il primo produttore mondiale di vino."
"Ma è fantastico imparare una lingua straniera -- soprattutto l'italiano!"
...and some expressions from operas: "Poverino!" and "Eccomi!"

The difficulty I've had learning German in Zürich has kind of put me off of the idea that I'm "good at learning languages" lol, but when I saw my husband doing his Japanese lessons, I started to feel tempted. ...Especially after he found me the recordings for "40 Leçons pour parler Japonais" -- the Japanese version of my favorite language-learning series that I've used for both Italian and German.

Anyway, it's been very fun and even kind of romantic to learn a new language together like we did way back in the honeymoon phase of our relationship.

I've actually also improved on my German this year because in my current (temporary) job I have to speak German all the time. And my new Japanese-learning hobby has taught me some tricks that I can apply to my Swiss-German lessons after we get back from Japan.

Our kids are doing well and making progress in their studies. I don't want to go into too much detail because it's their story to tell, but I'll report any new diplomas that they earn. :D

So I guess that's where I'm at in a nutshell! I hope things will go according to plan -- and that things will get better and not worse for us and the world in the coming year!