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.