TL;DR: I am Bad™️. Things are Bad™️. I’m making my blog post public because I’m tired of being Bad™️ in a bubble. Let’s be Bad™️ together!

Every time I feel like I catch up to the work in class, something in my life outside of class decides to clamp down on me. Right now it’s work, where there’s a compounding of fabricated deadlines and senses of urgency, and some tension with (and, in my humble opinion, a non-zero amount of mismanagement by) my boss.

That said, a thing I did this week that I am proud of: when I was on a plane and the wifi I had been banking on was not working, I decided to move methodically through trying to figure out some of the Wax templating on my own without very reference resources. I screen recorded myself talking through the problem in digestible 10-15 min increments and uploaded the videos to a team folder for others to review when they wanted to understand more about the problem. I think they’ve been educational for others so far, and the construct was certainly a helpful device for me to break down the problem space for myself. I felt like I unlocked a little cheat code for ways of working through overwhelm.

An aside: Relatedly, this idea of writing about “slow development” (as a twin to “slow archives” for us digital humanists) keeps knocking at my mind, and I think my experiences at work and school this semester feel like lessons pointing me towards work on it. Who knows when that might happen or how relevant it will be once I work on it!

My goal last week was to get an MVP version of the program page layout and song page layout looking as close to the wireframes as possible by class tomorrow. Right now, I think I will be lucky to get the program page done by that deadline.

I think my revised goals are:

• program page PR up by class tomorrow (and maybe merged by end of class?)
• defined ticket for another team member to pick up about home page layout / adding a carousel to homepage by EOD (midnight) tomorrow
• song page PR merged by our group meeting Thursday <– this one feels tough, but we will discuss as a team!

In awe of my teammates and all of us doing the most and doing our best as the world is truly reorienting itself.

Spring break brought me a little relief! I’m curious if others are feeling this, but just one little thing off of my plate opens up SO much room.

This week I played catch up.

I caught my breath, I looked at what’s ahead and I made a plan. And I was reminded that sometimes, that is enough — even if we are behind, and even if we wanted to have accomplished or completed more by now.

I’m behind on front-end development. I know this is true. I also feel confident in my ability to get our project to a good place by the finish line. I was reminded of this when I sat down to record a question to send to Tasha about the way that Wax handles page routing. In the process of explaining the thing I was trying to figure out, I talked myself in to a fuller understanding of the way Wax works. In programming, we call this “rubber ducking,” the idea being that even if you talk things out to an inanimate object, like a rubber duck, you will understand the problem in a new way.

It was a helpful reminder that solutions are often simple and, inevitably, “the work is done by doing” (which is something I read online once cited as being an Afghan proverb, a fact I’ve not yet been able to corroborate, and despite all that a mantra of mine that I often return to). The work is done by doing… even if that work happens at a slower pace or different timeline than we think it should.

I’m in awe of my teammates who have been able to be consistent in their own work and gracious with me when I have fallen short this semester. I’m not used to being the one falling short, and their empathy has been an invitation to try to return to and meet my own standards.

I’m learning a lot from this work, even if it hasn’t always felt good.

I’ve been struggling this last week, to be frank. I’m going to make this post public to our class in case others are feeling this way too.

I know the structure of assignments and work can be comforting to some during times of uncertainty, but it is really hard for me to balance deadlines and the rapid pace of this project development with the current political moment in the air and what I think life is asking from me outside of this program. Our academic peers are being deported for their political views, the views being that our country should not be enabling and funding the indiscriminate genocide of a long-subjugated and occupied population. My friends are holing up, not going out for groceries because they are afraid of ICE. One of the last remaining journalists working in Gaza was killed in a directly targeted attack today; the professional journalists union that I am a part of in my full-time work has said nothing to condemn the killing of more than 200 of our professional colleagues since October 2023, some of them working for our own member unit outlets.

I wish the semester structure and the nature of group work lent themselves more to scheduling in buffer time and room for things to go wrong or slow down. I know we (as a class, as a team) will do our best to make that space but I hate the feeling of responding to an artificial urgency that we have the power to adjust to be more realistic to the current circumstances.

Last week in our in-class work time we had hoped to get Wax up and running for all members of the team and then — very true to the software development “in the real word” — hit a good several speed bumps with both installation options (though I should acknowledge that Tasha was able to get things running, and she is probably the most crucial team member to have local access to running the backend code!). Then for different personal reasons myself and another team member were largely unavailable this week. I am feeling a little disconnected from our project timeline, and again, not super motivated by the self-prescribed deadlines.

I feel really grateful to Lini for stepping in and posting our team wireframes when I was falling short. And, looking at the deadlines that we had ported over to our Asana, I am at least feeling good about getting back on track for some of the upcoming development work in my purview (teaching Git/GH workflows, ticketing out frontend work) that is coming around the corner.

But I am also feeling like the current balance is untenable — especially as life outside of school continues to send unexpected and hard-to-process things our way. In my dream scenario, there would be a little bit of space to soften some of our expectations and pace right now. I hope we are all giving ourselves and each other grace.

Alexandra Millatmal is a software engineer in love with the world outside of (impacted by, apart from, in spite of) tech. As a Digital Humanities masters program candidate, she hopes to bring her artistic, personal, and professional worlds in closer alignment, using the tools of her trade to engage in questions that deeply resonate with her personhood.

On the Women of Bandura project team, Alex contributed as the frontend developer. Additionally, drawing on her past experience as a teaching assistant and curriculum designer for multiple learn-to-code programs, she also planned shadowing and educational opportunities for team members looking to level-up their development skills.