please don't unplug your machine while we update your life

Months have passed since I last wrote anything worth publishing here or elsewhere. My waking hours have been consumed by work, the eternal hellscape of trying to find somewhere to live in this new and unwelcoming, cold city and battling ridiculous amounts of paperwork and other bureaucratic joys. After the to do-list for each day is done, I have little energy for anything else except gorging my brain cells on the high-cal-low-info-content diet of Twitter and the occasional watch-me-get-ready video which always features someone who is both overly beautiful and most likely overly affluent and has a morning skin care routine that involves more product placement than a Michael Bay movie, but I digress.

Although I haven’t had the brainspace to formulate anything coherent here, I have been thinking about things here and there in between the paperwork and watching the Brexit tire-trash-dumpster-fire teeter at the edge. Mostly they’re just a jumble of random thoughts, but I thought I’d lay them on paper here.

Work and careers

This has been on my mind a lot. Something or other reminded me of a tweet I had once read (and which I, of course, can’t find anymore, because Twitter search is always a joy to work with), which (I paraphrase) said something in the vein of “your career is not the list of jobs you’ve had” and this sentence kind of hit me square in the face with the “yeah of course, but hold on, wait a second, that’s exactly how I’ve been defining a career in my mind all along”. When we read about famous and successful people in the media, the sentences right before or right after their names always contain a string of accolades, pearls on the string of their successful life. When people speak of someone having had a distinguished career, they always make sure to include a list of places worked, the number of open source projects started, number of company IPOs or acquisitons and so forth. It’s not easy to miss why the term “successful career” is closely linked to “jobs you had and how well you did in them”. The tweet sneakily never tells you what a career is, if not exactly that: a list of jobs you’ve had.

So as I’ve been mulling these things in my mind, I’ve started thinking about “the life after tech”. What’s going to happen to me when I reach the expiration date for your average woman in tech (and by all accounts, I am very average at what I do, so why would I expect to last longer)? Very early on in my career, I read that famous Sue Gardner google doc that succintly outlines why making endless tutorials of how to assemble your very own pink hairdryer or pouring PR dollars into “if we could just get girls interested in coding early enough we could solve this pesky diversity problem” won’t solve the leaky pipeline that, like Julie Pagano writes, leads into an wasteland (paraphrasing again - the exact quote escapes me at this hour). At one time or another, I’ve kind of hit all of the things mentioned in that google doc and some days I’m no longer sure all of those things are worth it. At first the days when I was sure this was the path, outnumbered those when I doubted, but that, too, is slowly changing for a variety of reasons.

I keep thinking about the kinds of problems I am helping to solve and the kinds of problems my solutions are helping to create. I wonder about the people who use the technology I make and the blind trust they place my profession for processing their information in such a way that won’t harm them now or in the potentially precarious future. I ask myself who benefits from this thing I’m building and who pays the price for it.

Questions, questions, but not many answers.

I guess in some ways, I’ve already started the process of unplugging myself. In what feels like a split second and a damn stupid decision (career-wise and life-wise), I’ve exiled myself from a city where a large chunk of the population can smoothly transition from kubernetes to five o’clock tea to terraform and back to a rather remote corner in the north. The streets are quiet here at night and in the mornings. It’s April. It is still snowing and I am more homesick for my previous life than I have ever been in my life. A friend from a previous life in the big city, who moved across the pond, wrote to me about her recent visit to our previous home. The streets were filled with the hum of people and I felt like home, her message said and I felt a kind of visceral pain in my chest. I remembered that hum, that feeling of being alone together in this place that was both magical and terrifying. I started streaming a movie in the background to distract myself and then of course, the heroine has to visit the big city and I, I have to start crying.

I suppose the only good part about this voluntary exile with a tinge of Brexodus thrown in is that I have slowly and painfully started to decouple my internal feeling of self-worth from my job and the associated metrics: the number of PRs I’ve made, how many times I’ve been promoted, compensation, number of conference talks given and side-projects finished. Although it will probably be good in the long term, it feels like erasure. I’ve taken an eraser and rubbed out the parts of myself that were the most interesting and relevant. It’s going to be a painful process, this decoupling.

gradients

This post is part of my challenge to write more in 2019! I intend to write every day but as you can see, I’m slipping slightly from my goal - mostly due to work and challenges of relocating. Excuses, excuses! These posts are mostly unpolished fragments from various notebooks.

A few weeks ago, I took a car from Tower Hamlets in East London to Heathrow Airport. Despite living in London for over four years, I’d never taken a car from my apartment to the airport, always opting for the underground or the Heathrow Express. What struck me most as I made this journey from east to west on land instead of underground, were the gradients that were on display, gradients of colours and building materials, wealth and even time. After I came home, from my trip I wrote some reflections about these gradients that one experiences as an inhabitant of London in my notebook and today I’m collecting some of those fragments from that notebook into this blog post.

gradients

I the four years that I had occupied my apartment on the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs, I had become selectively blind to the trash-blighted streets of my neighbourhood. The half-spilled bins across the Millwall Sailing center, the abandoned bags of clothing outside of the Barkantine recycling corner, the slightly crumbling facade of the off-license grocer. Yet, one hastens to say, there were nice, even beautiful things about this place too. Mudchute park in the summer, watching the sun set behind the City skyline from the Thames Path, the evening glint of the lights from Canary Wharf. Like most streets and neighbourhoods, in London, it was a place of gradients and contrasts.

These gradients and contrasts came to me that day, when the three suitcases and two bags I was carrying, forced me to quickly abandon any thoughts of braving the bus and the Jubilee + Piccadilly Line combo to get to Heathrow. The only other way to get to Heathrow is by car and unfortunately, when you live on the east side of London, this means traversing the whole of Central London bang right through the center. Nice for sightseeing, but an utter traffic hellscape otherwise.

The Isle of Dogs is a tongue-shaped peninsula around which the Thames meanders - until Gravesend in the East and through the City of London, through Putney and Richmond, all the way to the source somewhere in the hills in the middle of England (Gloucestershire perhaps? One would need to search engine that - don’t take my word for it!) to the West. A few decades ago it was mostly an industrial area, bearing the legacy of the shipping industry that is still present in many of the placenames (Canary Whard, Millwall, Island Gardens, Docklands etc), but now it’s proximity to Canary Wharf has caused an explosion of high-rise housebuilding. These glass-and-steel skyborne investment accounts for what one assumes are mostly foreign investors are dotting the landscape like, to borrow Tennessee Williams, “warty overgrowths” on an already tightly-fit piece of land.

It is here that our journey west starts, on Westferry Road - one of the main roads circumnavigating the Isle of Dogs peninsula. Driving from the southern tip of the Isle to the north, one encounters a brief interlude of steel-and-glass splendour, the kind of place that wants to look and smell like money, not just any kind of money, but new money, rapid money, the kind of funny money that people talk about when they talk about derivatives and futures and CDOs. Canary Wharf is an island within an island. Behind the checkpoint is the London home of JP Morgan, Citi, HSBC and other moguls of our new Gilded Age of financialisation as well as the restaurants and shops that service the workers and clientele of these firms.

The car does a quick spin around Westferry Circus - the roundabout that controls the entry and exit to the Wharf and off we are into the less clinically rich parts of East London - Limehouse, Mile End and Bow. The landscape changes from steel and glass to weatherworn brick, stone and wood. The birthplace of Clem Attlee’s particular brand of socialism.

We dip into the Limehouse Link and emerge on the other side at the entrace of St. Katharine’s and Wapping, the neighbourhood in the shadow of another square mile of steel-and-glasss glamour: the City of London. The brick buildings of the 1960s and 1970s are interspersed with building sites bearing colourful banners with slogans like “New luxury buildings - visit our showroom to find out more”. One wonders if all this zeal for building might not be better spent building good quality affordable housing, but alas.

Already our eyes are watching god, the god of money, for whom his disciples and Savile row-suited priests have comissioned one gleaming monument after another.

Then the journey continues, onwards to Aldgate, past the prestigious barrister’s offices at Cannon Street and the little posh cafes where lumbersexual baristas serve specialty coffee to suited financiers in a curious melange of the hipster and corporate. After a bout of traffic, we emerge on Victoria Embankment - Temple, Somerset House - the splendour of the old Establishment erupts into full view and carries us all the way to Westminster.

On the north bank of the Thames reside the regal bastions of hierarchy and colonialism, on the south the emerging grunge-meets-capitalism of Tate Modern, the Southbank Center, the brutalistic IBM building and then the darling: London Eye.

After Whitehall and Westminster, a quick dip into poshier than posh St James and Piccadilly, where awe-struck tourists gaze at displays of caviar, Dom Perignon and luxury jams while walking over sleeping bags of homeless Londoners. We pass the Wolseley and the Ritz and the Green Park Undergound station and zoom towards more glitz and glamour: South Kensington, Hyde Park and Prince Albert’s monument and then, then of course, Knightsbridge and Harrods, where very well deserved executive compensations are used to finance the acquisition of Hermes scarves and Prada bags.

We drive past and onwards, leaving behind the shoppers and those less fortunate they are furiously trying to ignore, traversing through a landscape that morphs from a capitalist wasteland to a capitalist wonderland and back again.

stockholm soundscapes

This is a part of my attempt to write and publish more posts in 2019. I want to become a better writer and start inhabiting digital spaces that are more calm and less corporate than the surveillance hellscape of twitter and co. Maybe I’ll learn something too. The writings in this series will most likely be very raw and unpolished. This challenge was inspired by Wendy Liu’s 2019 challenge.

I just fired off the last post into bytespace, but since it is now past midnight in this new timezone I now inhabit and my neurons are still not ready to sleep, I’m going to start laying down the thought-ation for the next one.

I’m sitting on my bed with my back propped against the pillow, one laptop in my lap, another one next to me - for convenient research and quickie fixes of infotainement. It’s probably not good to bring our work to bed. In fact, it’s most likely bad, but here we are anyway.

I keep listening to the darkness of my new apartment and all I hear is the hum of the laptop fan. Stockholm in the early hours of the morning is eerily quiet. I keep waiting for the sound of police sirens and the sound of cabbies brining home late night partiers and the laughter of the refuse truck drivers and the loud footsteps of my neighbours leaving their apartment for an early shift, but all I can hear is the sound of nothing.

[time passes]

18.27. It’s dark now, just as it was in the early hours of the day when I first started this post. I’m sitting on the sofa and staring at my landlord’s bookshelf. I marvel at its strict adherence to colour coding - all of the books are organized from white, to yellow to orange, to red to green to blue and to black - ROY G BIV + the two extremes: reflecting all wavelengths of light and absorbing all wavelenghts of light. It’s the kind of bookshelf I’d like to have one day, though perhaps I’d never use colour to organize it.

The topic of this post was supposed to be soundscapes in Stockholm, so I better get back to that. Last night, when bouts of insomnia made me create this file, I planned this post to be a sort of mournful look at the myriad of sounds I heard when living in my flat in London and compare that with the quietness of Stockholm. The tone of that post - the “why did I leave” - would not be entirely honest and fair, because when I actually lived in my flat in London, I most often than not hated the sounds of London. The noise of delivery drivers picking up food from the restaurant on the ground floor of my building, the angry voices of drunk people coming home from a night out and arguing underneath my window, the sound of refuse disposal being hurled into the back of a truck at 6 am on a Friday, someone banging the door to the refuse disposal room.

Here, there is mostly nothing of that. Every now and then in the distance an ambulance passes by, but otherwise the only sounds you can hear in this apartment are the sounds of the house and its inhabitants. My neighbour vacuuming or taking a shower, someone throwing a trash bag into the refuse chute, a child crying outside, a car driving by once in a while.

But this is not what I really wanted to write about. I wanted to write about the way the world outside these four walls sounds like and how that’s different from the world I experienced in London. I wanted to mention that you don’t hear the click-clacks of expensive heels and banker’s shoes when you walk around, but the crunch of thick, sturdy snowboots on ice and snow, the rustling of thick winter coats and jackets. You don’t hear the chatter of multiple languages like you do on Piccadilly or in a busy cafe in Soho, but you do hear the birds sing. In the evening, the bells of the cathedral opposite my apartment ring to mark the hour.

I guess that’s something. Something different for sure.

Tomorrow I’ll be writing about the gradients one encounters on a journey from east to west in London.

fragments

these pieces are highly unpolished. reader beware.

Wendy Liu (@dellsystem on Twitter) is doing a personal challenge of posting a blog post each day on her blog. The series is titled fragments. Reading Wendy’s writings (you should too) has been very educational and inspiring and has prompted me to try something similar. I’m not starting from January 1st which will make it a bit of an imperfect challenge, but life goes on.

I want to take the space in this blog post to share my thoughts on Wendy’s writing that I’ve read to date. These will be mostly unpolished and scatterbrained and for those sins and many others, I ask for the reader’s patience and forgiveness.

Why I’m doing this

The first piece in the fragments series is titled “Why I’m doing this”. It begins with a reference to the late Mark Fisher and his blog k-punk. It was a funny co-incidence to come across a reference to Fisher in Wendy’s blog, because just months later I had stumbled upon the massive tome of Mark’s collected writings in the Canary Wharf Waterstones. I debated whether or not to pick it up, but in the end the thought about the amount of books I’d have to ship to Sweden in case of an impending move in January (which, sadly, did end up happening) made me decide against it.

Referencing Simon Reynolds’ words in the introduction to k-punk, Wendy writes

«««< HEAD

• In fact, the single most powerful force driving me to write is the desire for this sort of intellectul accomplishment, even if only in my own mind. All the dubious external rewards for writing of this kind … are worthless compared to that rush of feeling like you’ve figured something out through writing *

In Wendy’s original text the emphasis is done using italics. I’m using bolding here to distinguish it from the main quotation which is in italics (please Jekyll markdown, be kind to me on this one).

The ultimate goal of the fragments project is to fix the nascent relationship with writing that has been damaged by an increased systematising of the writing process. Although I’m not nearly in the same league in terms of writing skill or accomplishment, I’ve felt inklings of the same strain in my writing process.

In fact, the single most powerful force driving me to write is the desire for this sort of intellectul accomplishment, even if only in my own mind. All the dubious external rewards for writing of this kind … are worthless compared to that rush of feeling like you’ve figured something out through writing

In Wendy’s original text the emphasis is done using italics. I’m using bolding here to distinguish it from the main quotation which is in italics (please Jekyll markdown, be kind to me on this one).

The ultimate goal of the fragments project is to fix the nascent relationship with writing that has been damaged by an increased systematising of the writing process. Although I’m not nearly in the same league in terms of writing skill or accomplishment, I’ve felt inklings of the same strain in my writing process.

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As a child, writing offerred a convenient world to escape to. Every day after school, I’d sit at a shared computer and type my stories into anything that accepted text as input. I started out by typing out stories and dialogue into Microsoft Calendar until someone showed me how to use Word. Later, in high school, I continued writing - mostly (bad) poetry and (probably equivaly bad) fiction and trying to submit them to literary journals. Needless to say, I never heard back from any of them. But I continue writing, because inhabiting worlds spun up by imagination was often better than a daily reality, which had turned into a competition of metrics: essay word counts, scores on mathematics exams, scores on standardized testing, cutoff limits for university entrance.

During my senior year, I went to an alumni interview organized by one of the Ivy League univerisities I had applied to. We met, as I believe is custom for alumni interviews taking place abroad, at a cafe on Bulevardi, a posh street in the very center of Helsinki. My alumni interviewer was a nice man and interested in my extracurricular hobbies. When I told him about writing, he asked where I had been published! I never knew of many high school students who had been published in serious publications. Needless to say, I was not invited to attend this university.

«««< HEAD As the years went by, I always meant to start a “serious” writing habit and become a “serious” writer. Not sure what either of tese meant back then and still not sure what they mean today in 2019 and I sure as hell still haven’t accomplished either. I do have bytes upon bytes of blogposts and fragments of stories in the many ideagraveyards on my laptop and in my notebooks, but nothing that could truly be called noteworthy. Every New Year’s Day I make a resolution to finally start writing more, putting stuff out there no matter How Really Bad (TM) it is and then 365 days later on New Year’s Eve, I discover that another year has passed and I have not done any of the things I set out to do. ======= As the years went by, I always meant to start a “serious” writing habit and become a “serious” writer. Not sure what either of these meant back then and still not sure what they mean today in 2019 and I sure as hell still haven’t accomplished either. I do have bytes upon bytes of blogposts and fragments of stories in the many ideagraveyards on my laptop and in my notebooks, but nothing that could truly be called noteworthy. Every New Year’s Day I make a resolution to finally start writing more, putting stuff out there no matter How Really Bad (TM) it is and then 365 days later on New Year’s Eve, I discover that another year has passed and I have not done any of the things I set out to do.

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As I grow older and older, this worries me. Because all of this, these days between New Year’s Day and New Year’s Eve, are day’s that I’ll never live again. Life is here and now and not then “then when”.

Silicon Inquiry

«««< HEAD This piece is linked from the previous one in a sentence talking about “rage-quitting” tech- a feeling that I have been only too well acquainted with in the past years. ======= This piece is linked from the previous one in a sentence talking about “rage-quitting” tech- a feeling that I have been only too well acquainted with in the past years. Italicised passages are direct quotations from Silicon Inquiry linked above.

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I no longer believe in this [the fact that the tech industry is making the world a better place]. I’ve lost my faith in the industry, and with it, any desire to remain within it. All the perks in the world can’t make up for what tech has become: morally destitute, mired in egotis and self-delusion, an aborted promise of what it could have been. Now that I realise this, I can’t go back.

The piece walks the readers through Wendy’s personal journey in technology. An important highlight is the early immersion in hacker culture and the belief, commonly propagated throughout the tech industry, that the people who have the ability to program computers and program them well enough, are special and talented. It’s a belief that is still rampant across the tech industry and the media that covers it. She then recounts her early experiences as a intern at Google, performing a job that was ok, but nothing special or particularly interesting. Wendy’s ecape, a bit like what I attempted in late July/early August 2018, was to jump into the world of startups - the final most sacred layer in the techie heaven.

The high I felt every time I overcame another technical barrier. Feeling like we were some sort of visionaries, building something so new, so exciting, that it was the only thing that mattered.

If you’ve spent even a bit of time around the tech industry, you will know that the startup koolaid is everywhere and once you taste it, you can’t stop. People have made entire careers and companies out of startup accelerators (see for example, Enterpreneur First or many other examples), startup aggregators and so forth.

I think the only thing that stopped us [from giving up] was the lack of any real alternative. We had thoroughly bought into the startup myth that starting a successful company is the only thing worth doing with your life. As a result, we had no real exit strategy; every way out just felt like a failure.

When I read the passage above, I thought about Elizabeth Holmes, the once applauded, now disgraced founder of Theranos who had dropped out of a Stanford chemical engineering degree to change the world by starting a company. I remember reading the Forbes profile (or was it the Wall Street Journal) profile of her life and being simultaneously awed and perplexed. First, awed that someone with only a year of chemical education could come up something so revolutionary (as a freshman, I was already overwhelmed by every synthesis I did in organic chemistry) and perplexed that someone determined to revolutionise an entire medical field had chosen to start a company instead of staying in academia and doing education. I’m certainly not saying that academia is the only path to revolutionising a field, but I’d echo the sentiments of John Carreyrou in distinguishing computer science, a relatively new field from medicine, a field with thousands of years of history. It’s possible to make a big difference in the world of computing at a very young age, but typically in medicine, making a difference requires a longer process.

The koolaid was particularly strong in the corner of the world I happened to inhabit until very recently: East London, just a few miles off the famous Silicon Roundabout that hosted such luminaries as Monzo, Deliveroo, Stack Overflow and others. It seemed that everyone and their friend, auntie and uncle were starting startups left, right and center. So I tried my hand at one too.

Really, though, we were trapped by our own obstinacy, by our conviction that startups were the path to some sort of greater salvation.

I’ve learnt the hard way that building a business and the startup myth inhabit completely different universes.

Eventually, this world stopped feeling like something I could be proud of.

I’ve thought about rage quitting many times too. Occasionally, I cycle through my standard list of quitpieces - Cate Huston’s The Day I Leave the Tech Industry, ‘Honey, I Left the Tech Industry, Evgenia’s I, Too, Left the Tech Industry and eevee’s I quit the tech industry. I think about financial independence a lot and how I could achieve it. It was a part ( a small part, but a part nonetheless, a part in my desire to relocate to a place that has more affordable living costs). I’ve read and re-read Julie Pagano’s transcript of her excellent talk Mid-Career Survival for People Who Don’t Want to be an Attrition Statistic When They Grow Up and taken some steps based on her advice I’ve chosen to work fully remotely from now on and I don’t think I will ever be able to return to an open plan tech office unless I absolutely have to.

What happens next? Who knows really. Whatever it is, I want to make sure it passes the overnight test.

This is part of my attempt to write more frequently in the year 2019. Tomorrow I plan to write about soundscapes of Stockholm or perhaps about my continued addiction to infobingeing. «««< HEAD

=======

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brexodus

I thought I’d cry.

I thought I’d cry when I looked at my_apartment of four years - now the apartment - emptied from my belongings, cleaned and ready for the next tenants to move in. But instead there was nothing apart from the incessant hum of thousands of mental to-do lists. The apartment yet another item, cleaned and checked off.

I thought it would happen when the airport car came and we drove through Tower Hamlets, into the Limehouse Link and through the City, through Westminster and St. James and further out into the West. Surely, I was bound to be hit with the stomach-gouging feeling of sorrow for something that I am about to lose. But as I looked out at the streets that I had come to know as my home - a home I thought I’d surely stay in for a very long time, as long as a lifetime perhaps - and went through the rolodex of memories attached to them, I felt nothing.

If I have to be honest and here, on these pages, I can perhaps afford that, I’d have to say that at some point in the past year home had ceased being a home. It’s hard to know exactly when this happened. That moment in time is buried somewhere under the vicious dialogue about borders, immigration, ending free movement, the Dover-Calais crossing and the ridiculous gaffes surrounding it, blockchain as a solution for the borderless Irish border and the endless debates in Parliament that I had dutifully followed until the very end.

The sense of an ending, to borrow Julian Barnes, had probably been there since that morning on July 2016 when I rushed from my apartment to my workplace at Canary Wharf at 6am to make sure that the system I had developed would remain stable for what would surely be a turbulent day, but the realisation that yes, here it is, the end, did not set in until sometime in October 2018. It was too improbable to really take hold in my naively optimistic mind until then.

Folks I had known from my early days on the London tech scene were all slowly making plans to relocate somewhere on continental Europe or the US. In early November I went to my first infosec conference and explored Berlin, but the thought of relocating to a city where I knew no one and spoke not a single word of German was hard to digest. I’d done relocations to English-speaking countries before and those had been hard enough. So Berlin was struck off the list.

I toyed with the idea of Paris. My French would be sufficient, barely so, but surely with practice it would improve. However, one glance at the rental market was enough to convince me that at this time, relocation to another almost-London would not be a good idea.

So I came back to the north.

Things are different here. Not bad. Just different. Things sound different. The wailing of police sirens is replaced by the grating sound of the snow tractor cleaning off the snowdusted streets for early commuters. Instead of the click-clack of heels and smart business shoes, you hear the steady crunch of sturdy winter boots leaving footprints in a powder snow.

Perhaps that is the worst part. Memoryscapes of London are still part of the muscle memory and every morning is an unpleasant reminder that those places one automatically reaches for have been left behind.

I thought I’d cry in London, but I ended up crying in Stockholm.

Insomnia strikes and I wander through the unfamiliar streets and parks at night, climb up a hill and look at carpet of millions of lights sparkling in the windows of the residents. I used look at the lights in London too, but not like this, with a sense of sadness for the place I’ve abruptly left, but with a sense of wonder about all those lives behind those windows. How miraculous it was to co-exist in a city of millions, together yet alone, tied to a place that could be both magical and terrible at once!