Technically a Blog: 5 blog posts, getting a diagnosis, what's next for me?
Hello and happy Friday!
This month I have five blog posts for you! Links are below. It was a pretty good writing month and I'm happy with these for the most part. A couple of them, like the eyetracker post, are going to have follow-ups when I'm able to sit back down and make some more progress, hopefully over the holidays. But otherwise, no updates on side projects, except for the "what's up with Nicole's health" project!
After six long months of being sick without a diagnosis, we finally got one. It's a relief to have it, the prognosis is good, and it's also going to be a couple of months of treatment (at least) with at times rough physical side effects. I'm mentally my best that I've been in over half a year, and physically I'm starting to respond to life the way I used to. I'm going to write about my diagnosis and the process to get there sometime, but I have to get some more distance and perspective first. Overall, I'm very happy with my recovery so far, and I have been picking up some of my life responsibilities again as I recover.
Over the past six months as I've gone through phases of intense pain and fatigue, among other symptoms, I've had a lot of time to reflect on what I want to do with my life. And what I really want to do with my life is entertain and teach through writing, coding, and generally whatever *gestures at blog* this is. Now that I'm starting to do better, I don't want to waste any more time, I want to move toward being able to put more of my energy into making entertaining, educational content for you all.
What does that mean? I'm not entirely sure, except moving toward some form of supporting myself or buying some of my own time for doing this kind of stuff. I'm thinking about opening a Patreon and having a Discord server for readers, but I'm also open to suggestions and encouragement!
Blog updates
- Parsing arguments in Rust with no dependencies: It's surprisingly fun to write a command line argument parser from scratch! I did it as part of a yak shave and ended up publishing the code since it will be useful for me, and maybe for you, in the future.
- Supporting coworkers, employees, and friends in this time: There are a lot of people whose rights are directly threatened by the recent election. I'm among them—as a trans woman, it's scary seeing a party win on a campaign of taking away my access to health care or the bathroom. Here is a list of things that people might be in need of, and some ways that each of us can help support folks right now.
- Abusing Talon to use my eye tracker in a project: A friend and I are going to do a game jam with my eye tracker as a central point of the game. Before that, my homework was to connect my eye tracker to the game library we're using. I took, of course, the silliest approach by using my favorite accessibility software, Talon, and putting a sidecar on it to give me the data I need! For once, I think using the C++ bindings may have been the better idea...
- Terminology isn't universal: We want to find words that perfectly describe what we mean, but it's not always possible. There's often no word that is perfect in all situations!
- Evolving my ergonomic setup (or, my laptop with extra steps): My portable ergonomic setup gets a lot of attention when I'm out and about. The party trick? It folds in half. This is the fourth iteration of the design, and it is life-changing for me.
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❤️ Nicole