It’s been quite a while since I did any public writing with any regularity or any expectation of imparting anything of value to a reader of what I wrote. In a workplace environment I write prolifically for a whole host of audiences, but that writing is typically technical in nature, or at a minimum technically adjacent. That writing will likely never see the light of day, and indeed most of it is highly specific to the individual program I’m working at any point in time.

I’d like to have a corpus of material that is the stuff for me and anyone who is interested, independent of the programs I’m knee deep in at any point in time.

A point for myself and for readers, is this is not going to be a place where I open up my heart and soul to the broader world. Like most people who grew up i n the 90’s, I was raised with an expectation of anonymity on the internet, and was warned of predators and individuals of theoretically malicious intent lurking a all over the internet. The truthfulness of those warnings are hard to judge in retrospect, but regardless it meant I started out on the internet with a handle and no other name, and I generally avoided referring to myself in any form other than my handle.

Throughout the late 2000’s (the aughts) I started opening up about who I was in name. The internet felt less dangerous as Facebook and Google were both pushing the idea of being a named person on the internet, and I adopted a few instances of using handles tied to my real name. Now in the start of the 2020’s, both due to the nature of the internet and the nature of my work I’ve come screeching back towards a preference for anonymity like so many others.

As things stand today, watching the implosion of the remaining major social platforms that are/were those most commonly used by my age cohort (namely twitter and reddit), the growth of the fediverse community has been a mild but welcome growth. While following technically minded individuals (who focus principally on hard problems, and conveying their work both with humorous snark and honesty), I’ve landed on a server principally homed or at least frequented by members of the trans community. Even back on twitter I found it odd (in a humorous way) that the folks I enjoyed interacting with were largely open lesbians doing (of their own description) cursed things in electrical engineering. Here I am again, engaging with those same people, even deeper in a group of individuals that I never would have thought I would have any reason to engage with.

–sf

Last modified on 2023-06-18