late-night miso

It’s empty like it always is at this hour. Two servings of miso in disposable cups - the kind that you probably can’t recycle. In the table next to me a group of women laughing at something. A guy walks in, grabs some sushi and the soy sauce and settles down into a corner.

This is how I like it. The night owls are here.

I watch the escalators and the people. Suits and briefcases and tired, vacant looks. It’s late.

I’m here after a tech talk, which I left halfway through and then, instead of waiting for the bus (wardrobe choice for tonight’s weather was ill-considered) outside - I take the escalator up. Up past the Pret and the Paul’s and the Wasabi, up past the station concourse and the countless shops selling dress shirts and suits and oxfords, up to the Japanese fast food cafe tucked in on the last floor.

I order a miso. Make that two. And they arrive withing a minute or two in two identical paper cups. I don’t even want to know what kind of an environmental murder rate this place racks up during lunchtime. After all, it’s always easier to focus on the things you can’t see.

I split the chopsticks and stir the liquid. Some wakame and tofu swims to the surface. This is how lonely people, eat, I think. Late at night, in places tucked away, watching the lives of other people.

On the bus back I watch the lights and think of a passage from Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City.

Author’s postscript and a sort-of apology: As it happens with things and plans and the pretty lists of goals and things to do that one writes, they find their way to the bottom of the ecritoire (which I suppose one has if one has a fancy dedicated room for writing, I just have a folder on my computer that I don’t really check too often) never to be looked again. So it was with this piece too and it just happens that a bout of insomnia strikes in the early hours of the 2nd of October 2018 and prompts the restless brain to trudge through a graveyard of blogpost drafts and stumble upon the last words of this thing. Never finished and now half forgotten. I do remember which passage from The Lonely City I was thinking about - the one where Laing describes the millions of windows lighting up against the darkening city skyscape and the profound loneliness that sometimes envelops those that live alone together in megalopolises like London, New York, Paris, Tokyo. At some point or another, I’d like to revisit this idea, this image of millions of burning lights, but for now I’m going to leave this piece as I found it. A half finished evening thought.

2017 - in review

I am here where my time began. Not exactly (that place no longer exists, not in the way it did when I was young), but close enough. Up until this year, I had a firm conviction that I could map out my time from start to point X (some yet undefined pinnacle of whatever weird thing is considered success in our society) and then follow that map, carefully executing each step from point A to point B until I reach X. It didn’t happen that way. I didn’t make it through a lot of things, the trajectory that I so optimistically drew as upward slanting, tanked. I have failed, a lot (which is not to say, all failure is bad!). And this year, I have failed more than ever and learned more than ever. In fact, even the X I set out for myself has shifted. So here I am, with my failures and perhaps a few small successes, saying goodbye to 2017 and welcoming 2018 and all its challenges!

December

London is cold and quiet and most days the fog from the Thames is a milky white shroud. I’ve parked work on some side projects and am focusing on deploying a tricky component on AWS for a client. I’m also searching for “Austin, TX weather”, because I have been fortunate enough to receive a Cloud Native Foundation Diversity Scholarship to attend KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Austin! Thank you very much to Ms. Wendi West from the Linux Foundation who was patient in helping me navigate travel arrangements and a huge thank you to Erica von Buelow (engineer at CoreOs), Kris Nova (developer at Heptio and also, badass mountaineer - just see her Twitter feed!), Jessie Frazelle (container engineer at Microsoft and all things Linux) and Michelle Noorali (Kubernetes exper from Microsoft) who made it possible for 103 diversity scholarship attendees to fly to Austin for a great week! I learned a lot, met a lot of interesting people, learned about containers, orchestration, what it means to be Cloud Native and lots more, which I’m saving for a proper blogpost.

November

One month into my new role as a independent software engineer. New team, new way of working. I’m still learning the ins and outs of collaborating with a fully distributed team. Thus far I can say that working remotely suits me very well. I, along with many of my developer colleagues, find open offices distracting. I appreciate that there are legitimate cases where teams are more productive when all barriers for communication are removed, for example ops and customer facing teams, but for feature teams, this often just does not work. The whole month passes in a bit of a blur - there are hardly any notes in my diaries.

October

I started my first ever job as an independent software engineer, which was a big (albeit slightly unplanned) milestone in my development career. Along with getting used to working fully remotely and configuring all of the ropes for my new consulting company, I’m procrastinating and preparing to give a talk at PyCon UK 2017. The topic is machine learning security - a newly formed field that blends aspects of infosec and ML engineering. I discover lots of gems while making my slides: self-driving cars that can be confused by salt circles, neural network image classifiers that misclassify pandas as gibbons and June, the oven that is connected to a GPU so it can use machine learning to find the optimal temperature for your cupcakes. I make the trip to Cardiff and spend a day holed into my hotel room practicing my talk over and over again. In the evening, the evening of a great boxing match in the Cardiff stadium, the streets are the colour of flashing bright blue and red and the shadows of hundreds of people walking across the streets to see the match. I walk past them and the castle and look into the glass eyes of the stone animal statues.

September

I attend Container Camp London and learn a bit about container security from Andrew Martin and Ben Hall using Katakoda. I realise that things move quickly in the infra & ops space. The difference in talks between this year and last year is staggering: all of a sudden a whole new vocabulary has evolved for discussing platform architecture - service mesh, container orchestration, managing state and secrets and so forth. Jess Fraz and her amicontained tool gets a shoutout in the closing hacking containers finale - all jokes and super long and frightening bash scripts courtesy of Andrew Martin and Ben Hall. I think I might have gone home and tried some of the techniques on contained.af, but unsuccessfully.

Rome and all of its delights, but most of all the canoli and the coffee. I finally saw the Ecstasy of St. Teresa at the Santa Maria della Vittoria and the Pieta. On a group tour of the Vatican, I stood next to an elderly American lady who was visiting Rome with her extended family. In the Sistine chapel, ushered in by the neverending flow of the crowds and shushed several times by a policeman standing by the microphone, we smiled at each other and looked at the frescoes. I remember the heat of the summer that seeped through the doors and the windows and made the air inside heavy or perhaps it was the collective warmth from the bodies of hundreds of tourists gathered inside. The sussuration of hundreds of people wrinkles the silence and I wonder, what is it like to inhabit this space alone.

August

I’m not in a good place and trying to reconcile my decision to leave a development job I had wanted for a long time with the challenges that I faced. The one good thing about the whole situation is that I can finally enjoy the sun and the Thames.

July

I read a lot.

June

I go to Borrowdale and attempt to hike Skiddaw. My map reading skills being what they are, I end up on the summit of Little Man. I stand next to the trig point and puzzle over the map while the fog and clouds swirl around me and conclude that I must have reached Skiddaw only to descend and realise that the summit is further away. In the end, I make an attempt at Skiddaw, but give up due to poor visibility. Until next time, Skiddaw! I descend past the summit and Sale How to the Skiddaw YHA hostel and then follow the Cumbria Way into the valley. The cloud cover disperses and the most brilliant beautiful sunlight illuminates the valley and the mountain streams running through the veins of the mountain. I’ve never felt so alive and at peace.

May

Working and doubting some of my choices.

April

I summit Snowdon using the Llanberis Way.

March

A brief visit home to enjoy the snow and then back to work.

February

Promotions. I recall a Hacker News comment about prestige that Dan Luu has kindly preserved for posterity.

January

Work.

fork

I started this blog back in 2014 as a way to easily publish notes for a PyLadies London tutorial. It then morphed into a (not so great) technical notebook and a log for things I learned at conferences. Three years hence, the topics are drifting from tutorials and experience reports, to various concoctions of tech culture, software engineer career development reports, personal things, fiction, literature, numerous quitpieces about social media and so forth.

Life changes, drifts, and things that did not seem important in 2014 have now resurfaced and occupy my writing. I plan to keep writing about these things (not always technology) here at thoughtwisps. There will be some changes to the site to make the reading experience better. To make it easier to navigate this blog, I’ve made a very simple ‘Archives’ page which can be accessed from the sidebar.

I’m also starting a separate series of writing to focus purely on technology. I’ll be posting a link to the new site here in a few days.

To everyone, the regular readers, the passers-by, the link surfers who stopped by for a few lines and then were on to the next hyperlink journey, thank you for sharing these words with me.

books for a year of silence

This year, the year when the world teetered on so many brinks and fell and stumbled, and undid the already fraying fabric of things I took as given in our narrative as humans, is, like this sentence, finally wrapping up. In the sugarcoma-quiet lull between gingerbread houses and fireworks, I have the luxury of a bit of space and silence.

I’m spending time away from the BigSmoke and its relentless hunger for things made of money and sex, of clinical glass and concrete and vanity. Distance is the best medicine and the most potent aphrodisiac. The memory of a Jubilee line trip (Canary Wharf to Baker Street) snugly tucked into a sweaty armpit fades away, replaced by memories of a peachblush morning sky stretching over the Thames. At some point, I’m sure, I will be happy to be back, enjoying the all too crowded rush hour Tube.

I got tangled this year. In things that seemed to matter, but in retrospective, mattered little. I spent too much time living in others’ images, too much time collecting microdoses of pleasure from likes and retweets. In the end, the pleasure of being clicked on by strangers (even strangers whose work you respect and admire), is temporary and quickly becomes an end in itself. I noticed that a sense of purpose slowly morphed into a sense of ‘what will get most tweets and likes’, then, once the tweet has been dispatched, collected, catalogued, analysed, and replied to! starts the agony of

crafting

a reply

that is witty

sharp

funny

punny

(maybe)

into just

280 characters

or if nothing springs to mind, it’s time for that muscle memory to kick in and hit the like. A few things, interactions, thoughts stayed with me, most others, were lost, instantly to be replaced by fresher and fresher content. I became passive and happy, sated with a constant stream of novelties. I became happy to consume these disconnected threads and less happy to think about the content or the meaning or the purpose. I read less. I wrote less code. Two things that are important to me personally, I did less of. And I want to change that next year. I want to try (as hard as it may be), to be without these platforms for a year, to see what can happen when there is silence.

I want to read more next year. There are books on my floor, my night stand, under my bed. Books that I fell in love with while browsing in the bookstore, but that I never finished once they got home. Those books, I want to finally finish. There are books I picked out at the airport this year (My Name is Lucy Barton, Quantum Mechanics - the Theoretical Minimum, The God of Small Things) that I need to enjoy. The books that appeared in critic’s notebooks and ‘best of’ lists. The books that my local Waterstones picks out and recommends. The books that I bought because I wanted to seem smart and well-read (The Underworld by Don DeLillo, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald). The books I loved because of the cover artwork (Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald). The books I bought when I needed solace (How to be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci). The books I loved for the beauty of the words within their covers (Madame Zero by Sarah Hall).

There are many.

There are books that speak to me, because their reviews have beautiful words. Like Parul Sehgal’s New York Times review of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties ,

“But if Machado is strong on pleasure, she’s better on despair, on our rage at our bodies - for their ugliness and unruliness, their excess and inadequacy and, worst of all, their temerity to abandon us altogether.”

It’s like a drug for me, this experience of reading about imperfect bodies, bodies that don’t conform to airbrushed Vogueified norms of beauty, bodies that are tortured by self-induced regimens and subject to casually cruel remarks, by passers-by and well meaning relatives alike.

I don’t think there is a woman I know, who, has not seen herself, at least in passing figments, with this kind of cruel, critical detachment.

And reading of it, about it, around it, seeing it laid bare, in words, on a page, is cathartic.

But no more of that. Probe that wound for too long and the stitches time has sewn to close it will burst open.

Then, of course, there are things of old I’ve rediscovered. The collection of poems by the Finnish-Swedish writer Edith Södegran. Her words live in tiny, carefully crafted worlds that examine new ways of seeing the ordinary.

I have always loved her poem The Stars (don’t be fooled by the banality of the title), below, in translation, by David McDuff.

When night comes

I stand on the stairway and listen,

the stars are swarming in the garden

and I am standing in the dark.

Listen, a star fell with a tinkle!

Do not go out on the grass with bare feet;

my garden is full of splinters.

It is no doubt exciting to always be submerged in novelty, to always ride the wave of the now, be dizzy from the voices and events. I’ve been in the midst of this hivemind now for many years and it’s time for me to step back, away. I want to examine the ordinary, the mundane, the everyday. Find the things that were once looked over, find again the things that were once looked at.

forking paths and extenuating circumstances

It’s almost half past five here and I can’t sleep. The streets are empty, the sky cold and clear. Here, away from the big city and its glittering carpet of lights - cold blue and yellow and red, the eyes can turn to the sky and pinpoint the Big Dipper and the Small and a brilliance of other constellations whose names I don’t know. Their old exhausted light started its journey to this moment long before I walked or talked, long before this field where I stand and look was plowed and sowed, aeons before this country where I am now was formed and fought over. Someone else will be marvelling at their beauty long after I am gone.

2017 was hard - not because I was alone and in a foreign country. That, by now, has become my de facto mode of existence. My accent has been whittled away to nondeterminate lilt in the way certain words step off the tongue and it now leaves the listener with more questions than answers about where and when. Pasts can now be used and discarded, a paper-cup convenience. But being alone together with millions of people, meeting their eyes awkwardly in the rush hour Tube crush just seconds before they give their attention to whatever is going on in the little simulacra running on their phones, the feeling of being untethered and not being able to read a map of whatever terrain I was travelling on, was not why this year made me feel as though I’d aged 40 years instead of one.

I left my job. On the surface, it was, of course, a voluntary decision, and yet, below the surface, I was paddling too hard to stay afloat in the crisscross of currents. It broke me and left me empty and edgeless, a piece of discarded wood spat out by the lowtide Thames. I wasn’t sure I could swim the water again or even dip my toe. But more than anything else, I was a disappointment, a let down, a quitter. In the immediately aftermath, I spent a few weeks staring at the muted grays of a ceiling (one assumes it had been white in another lifetime) and replaying those words and images of failure on repeat. A sickening feeling made a home in the pit of my stomach. I had destroyed everything (career, future, financial security etc etc) and I wasn’t even sure how or why I had done it. What felt like an aeon ago (even though only 3 years have passed), I had made a choice to try technology as a career. Like all choices made with incomplete information and infatuation with an image, the reality of the daily papercuts (with my infinite gratitude to Julie Pagano for first introducing this phrase into dicsourse about an individual’s lived experience in technology) has been hard to reconcile with the initial joy of producing programs.

I can’t help but think all of the things that I hoped would but didn’t happen, did so because I never tried hard enough. The mind’s natural defense against this is, of course, to make a laundry list of ‘extenuating circumstances’, something to point to and say ‘here, xyz is why I failed at abc’. It’s the kind of spirit that lives in the canned response we sometimes get from a good friend who has lent her ear to our troubles, whose sympathetic voice says, ‘But you could not have known about cde, otherwise you could have done fgh’. This is not to say everything is in our control, when it is obviously not, but this idea of being powerless in the face of the nebulous ‘xyz’, the ‘circumstances’ that slowly, sometimes suddenly and violently, drift beyond our control, has seduced me into thinking that I am not responsible.

Whether I made the mistakes I made this year because of ‘xyz’ or because of faults of my character, I want to make the next year about responsibility and focus, about carefully curating the no’s and yes’s. In the infinitely quotable, 1961 Vogue essay ‘On Self-Respect’, Joan Didion writes, ‘Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.’ I’ve been infatuated with so many things, I’ve hardly stopped to think about the price of any (this can be applied to work, technology, conferences, writing projects - the etc’s here are infinite for sure). There is a cost (that ever-present spectre of the FOMO) to saying no. What the FOMO-obsessed of us don’t know, is that sometimes the price we pay for always saying yes is even higher. Saying no forces one to think about what is important, what really matters, what really ought to be the focus of our fleeting time and skittish attention.