12 years ago today, I spoke these words into a microphone after writing them late at night. If you forgive my 26 year old pompousness I think they aged… OK. The test of time might be passed when something you wrote for yourself ends up coming back in your mind for over a decade.
A constant variable.
Life is, love is, work is.
Things change, perpetually.
Change is frightening but it’s good. We idealize it and rarely realize how tedious it is until we face it.
The universe is nothing but change. Unstoppable, beautiful, change.
Science brought us tools to understand the universe and ourselves.
Out of these tools emerged the Internet, a tool originally designed to help scientists pool their efforts and communicate. One of these scientists, Tim Berners-Lee of CERN, decided in 1989 that it would be a great idea to take the concept of hypertext and apply it to the network in order to create the World Wide Web.
The web changed everything.
And few people understood the ramifications of that change until recently. Most people still don’t.
We do. We have imagination. We think, design, and build. We won’t let other’s lack of imagination stand in the way of our ideas. We make change real by creating tools and products that make people’s lives — and their jobs — easier, more efficient, and fun.
Change is a prism. It reveals things in ourselves that we either ignore or avoid. But the constant variable never fails.
I was ready for this year to bring a lot of change. And it delivered all along the spectrum. But looking out of the window on the last day of the year — annoyed to have posted once a year for the fourth year in a row — I feel proud and grateful of all that we accomplished in the face of relentless adversity.
This year’s changes were multi-faceted: overdue, scary, frustrating, hopeful, tentative, bold.
After years of resisting change, my partner Tamar and I managed to find peace in a new city we’d struggled to call home, bought a house there, and finally our little family is all in one place for the first time in years.
I attended a (gigtantic and fascinating) speech-language pathology conference with Tamar this year. She worked so hard this year: treating patients at the hospital, pushing her Ph.D. forward, learning how to run a pottery studio, and taking care of her family. Much of this would feel impossible to withstand without the best of partners.
Loved ones had to deal with the brunt of negative change this year, but thankfully things eventually improved for many of them. Shocking disease was tackled and tamed with immense group effort; challenging new horizons were explored yielding much-deserved accomplishments and renewed self-worth; and despite the looming shadow of the pandemic’s long tail we found time to discover and rediscover new things and places together.
On the work side, I received the title of Principal Engineer at Pluralsight. Although it took months to feel like I’d earned it. Despite many letdowns over the years, I’ve grown intensely proud of the work my team and I have done to reshape the company for a multi-modal world.
This year, Shields turned 10. I think it’s safe to say no project I started is likely to have the reach this tiny key-value badge has had. I still delight in finding Shields badges on so many open source project repositories across the web.
Maybe I’ll manage to wrap up Keep a Changelog 2.0 in 2024, who knows? 😅 This year marked the 25th language translation for it. While the reach of Shields may be broader, I can’t believe how deep into the world this “little” project — which turned 8 this year — has gone.
Back in November 20, 2013 and December 21st, 2013 I wrote in I’m an Alien. and I need to write. about my then expiring F-1 OPT visa. It now feels like a lifetime ago. I ended up spending five long years back in Paris. There was good in those years, but also quite a lot of bad. It’s not until 2019 that I made my way back to the U.S. with an H-1B visa.
A lot of what I said in “I need to write” was indeed pivotal. While my voice and contributions didn’t carry me professionally through these years, they sustained my spirit. Having a place in the Ruby community gave me friends and acquaintances to grow along with. People with different context than my co-workers, who I could confide in, and ask for help. I’m thankful for the countless times people lent me a hand along the way.
In July 2023 I finally received a permanent residency in the U.S. That was 12 years after I graduated from a U.S. university with an F-1 student visa. You’ve likely heard of people who managed to do this faster. Please think of the many others who are waiting after countless years, at the whims of tech barons, politicians, and voters. Immigration is a constant variable. It scares us to think our countries change outside our control. But countries are always changing. We can evolve with our environment, as long as we embrace this constant variable.