Now - June 2020
This is my now page - it's what I'd tell my friends if they asked me, "What are you up to right now?"
If you have your own site, you should have one too!
Things I’m Focusing On #
Quarantine, like it has for everyone, has been difficult. I was already struggling with work-life balance as of my Feb post, and it seems like a switch to working from home did not help on that front. I’ve succumbed to the pattern of rolling out of bed into my desk chair, banging out my hours of work, taking a nap, eating, and then back onto my only other hobby…which is also R/Shiny programming but for fantasy football. It’s not exactly a healthy pattern, but when hobbies like lifting, rowing, and hanging out with friends are taken away it’s a very easy trap to fall into.
Counting my blessings, then:
Advancing R skills #
In ~Jan/Feb of this year, I joined the R4DS community on Slack and have greatly enjoyed participating, sharing knowledge, and learning tons. A little way into this, Maya Gans started an Advanced R book club, and it’s become a weekly anchor point for me that has been immensely rewarding and stabilizing.
Pushing DynastyProcess forward #
In May, I finally released a brand new mobile-first version of the DynastyProcess calculator which has been immensely popular - traffic has spiked to ~20,000 unique monthly users!
My dev energies have been immersed in an new project which I’ve nicknamed ffscrapR - it’s an R package designed to capture and share all of the working knowledge I have of fantasy football APIs and endpoints and make that accessible to the average R user in any script for any platform. I’m hoping to have MFL wrapped up in the next two weeks and release it for version 1.0 of the package. (Then will attack Sleeper in version 1.1!)
Thoughts on BLM, diversity, changing things for the better #
I’ve been thinking about everything that’s been going on with respect to BLM, police protests and more, and drawing personal parallels with what has felt like a fight to improve the Rec program at the ORC. It feels selfish and small to draw that mental connection to a much larger issue with way more at stake than the WASP-iest of sports, and yet it’s been my personal project for the past two years and seems to be somewhere I can make a real difference.
Fighting uphill against an established “culture” of “elitism” and something that (frankly) feels like “privilege” echoes a little in my ears as I listen to protests. I’ve been blessed with the changes I’ve pushed for and the growth of the program, and need to figure out how to get that cultural change pushed forward and entrenched as the club’s new values in the future, so that at some point when I leave the Rec program the values will continue to live on without my direct supervision.
I also need to think about other areas I can make similar impacts and pushes, and summon up the energy and courage to keep pushing the flywheel forward.
Continuing to reboot and reinvent #
Through this quarantine, I’ve felt drained of energy, paralyzed by inertia, and constantly distracted. Trying to push those things in my control forward has been challenging, and I often have energy for only one or two things each day. I don’t think I’m particularly worse off than others, but I would not yet count 2020 as a year during which I’ve felt my best. Still, the biggest part of things is showing up and doing your best, so I’m hoping to keep going.