These last couple of weeks I’ve snuck in an hour of just creating things with some friends. It’s been a real pleasure. I did some fiction writing and some coding that’s just for practice. I didn’t realise how much I’d missed it. Making things is good.

Reflections

On my way home from one of our regional offices in the south I was delayed. I was delayed because some poor soul was hit by a train, and given trains are pretty predictable animals, I assume that the poor soul meant to be hit.

And I thought about my mentee, who told me she’s feeling like a trunk that’s overpacked. And I thought about the fact that this week, exhausted and starving, I was faced with a microwave that wouldn’t open and almost started crying. And I thought about a bug that came about because we hadn’t done maintenance on one of our environments, and a little server somewhere was trying to process 3.5m rows of a database and failing every time – and every time it failed, it added a row to the database.

I guess I’m thinking about how the little things add up. They add up in ways you don’t notice until one day there’s too much, and you crumple under it.

You have to face these things in the end, and often the only way out is through. You have to put aside the work you’ve been doing and instead focus on yourself. For some of us that’s anathema. For some of us, a life well-lived is a life of service. I believe there’s a nasty worm in that apple of an idea, and it is:

you are only worthy of love if you can be of service

and I don’t think that’s true. I think I used to. But I don’t any more, and when I catch myself thinking like that, I give myself a stern talking to. It is ableist if nothing else, and it leads to people with this mindset cheerfully telling me they’ll take their life when they can’t support themselves. I believe everyone has the right to take their life, because it belongs to them. But I’ve got to say that I think that’s a dumb old reason. You’ve got value even if you can’t serve. You’ve got value not because of what you can do but because of who you are.

That’s all. That’s what I think of on my third train of the day as I wind my way home. I have value because of who I am, and folks love me not for what I can do for them but because I am funny, and clever, and I write gorgeously at least three times out of seven. And, in my cat’s case, because where I go treats spontaneously appear.

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I got offered a second interview this week after a technical interview last week. The technical interview was interesting, and I enjoyed the coding part. I had a weird experience in the interview, and I’m going to recount it here as best I can.

me: How would I secure an application? You could use allow-listing, but I’d probably use SSO. Although it would expose a login page, I think it’s a more user-friendly, more positive way of ensuring only authorised users can access it.
him (for it was a him): Okay, sure. Do you think there are any positives to whitelisting?

Now this is interesting. I’m trying to avoid using ‘blacklisting’ and ‘whitelisting’, for the reasons laid out in this blog by the NCSC. The person interviewing clearly understood what I meant. He just chose to use a different word. It didn’t sit right with me, but I also didn’t raise it or question it.

I am now old enough, and senior enough, and lucky enough to be in an industry where I can be picky-enough, to be able to turn things down. And my instinct is to turn this down. I don’t want to work with people who actively choose to use this kind of casually perjorative language. Are my instincts wrong? Is language that important?

It is to me, obviously, but I’m keen to hear what you think.

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Speaking of language being important: I am sponsoring the D’Ancey LaGuarde Reader. Depending on your perspective, this is either a beautiful introduction to the work of the most prolific, most underrated romance novellist of this century, or an opportunity for Australian comedian and sometime subject of this blog Alice Fraser to trip backwards into writing a book. She is the person who runs a weekly writers meeting, and apparently all I needed to do to force myself to write was pay some money and be offered an audience.

Nobody tell me that’s how the Fringe works. I’ll be bankrupted.

This week what I’ve been working on is dialogue that builds character, and I got some really good critique. I’m good at writing compelling characters but bad at dialogue, because dialogue requires two compelling characters and figuring out their interactions with each other. I’m hoping to get better at that with he help of the little writers group I’m part of now: a group that features stand-up about economics, and a Welsh epic poem, and a musical about – well. I can’t say.

But they’re a joy and a strength. And that’s a good thing to have, these days.