At least several times a week I say "I need a GIF of that".

GIF collection:

Its often awkward for me to refer to the size of my body in conversation with people whom I don't know very well. Its challenging with those I've known for awhile but haven't had The Talk with and as of late I've been meeting tons of new people. The moment comes fairly quickly, I've found, in moving through everyday life with others, that the topic needs light shone on it. I see that it can be difficult for others to know how to broach the topic for fear of offending me and I don't want my language choices to make people feel uncomfortable or give the wrong impression.

So, I'd like to share some of my philosophy and politics around my body and how I like to think of and refer to myself.

I'm fat.

Yup, fat.

No, I'm not being derogatory toward myself.

I've spent much of the past year of my professional life frustrated, working within companies that have great potential to innovate but not taking full advantage. Time and again I run up against outdated, big company attitudes that innovation involves only the technology stack and fail to realize that true agility and innovation means sometimes doing hard work on an organizational level. I decided to clearly define what I provide and require in order to find the right organization, so I put a letterish thing out to the world.

Through this last year I've learned a lot about myself. I cannot help but be a boat-rocker at any cost. I am impatient and insist upon honesty, transparency and hold others to high standards of self-reflection. I am also (perhaps unhealthily) drawn to the largest challenge I can find, even when red flags are waving all over the place.

When I was learning to program, one of the areas that tripped me up was the passing of data to otherwise unrelated areas of code via function calls with parameters. As I understand now, its hard to say what it was that was so prohibitive for me. I sorta got that this entity that is called a function is named as such because its supposed to serve as a gateway to using a chunk of code that serves a particular function and that you could pass in parameters that would alter the outcome of the code execution inside of the function. I think perhaps it was the flexibility of what could be passed and used that tripped me up, particularly as I have used scripting languages like JavaScript, PHP and Ruby the most.

Over IM:

Apparently I should stop joking about writing a book on how to manage and work with developers
...or get writing.

I have a shiny new iMac at work. While I admit that its a pretty machine, I deeply dislike developing on OS X for many reasons that I won't bother to go into here. Except to say hooray for proper package management!

I have an Ubuntu virtual machine via VMWare Fusion for all development work. It is where I house my Git repo clones, plan to run whatever web servers that I will need, etc.

I write a lot of JavaScript and so I tend to use Python's wonderful one line web server for a quick development environment. I want to be able to load the development environment that is running on my VM in a browser on my Mac, and have found a quick way to do that.