Sparkle life, sparkle strife

Oh hey internet! I’m still alive, I’ve just been busy. I’m going to attempt to write here more often so that people know what the heck I’m up to. Apparently people kinda care about the stuff I do and get mad when I don’t mention that things are happening. As a kid, I was told that bragging was bad. Now people seem to want me to brag. Go figure.

I’ve had a couple of speaking appearances and am doing some outreach to women in tech and underpriveleged students in who are interested in making games. I’ve spoken at the NYC Games Forum, CUNY Games Fest, and ConveyUX. I’ll be speaking on behalf of Code Liberation at IndieCade East this Saturday as well. You can see many of my presentations on SlideShare (yay, open source all the things).

My job has been going pretty well. I’m in charge of designing a CMS, which is cool since I spend a lot of my internet life on those kinds of interfaces.  The design process for our team is highly in flux at the moment, and I’m teaching the other UXers on my team how to code. Hopefully we will continue to move in a more Lean direction with slightly less documentation and more communication between teams. I really like pair designing and programming the most, but it seems like that kind of environment is very rare at the moment.

I’m somewhere between UX and game-making right now. I always have been. I’ve been watching videos about professional multi-career-type people recently; it seems like many people have more than one passion in life, which is logical. It’s unfortunate that people are often told they can only have one path in life, especially kids and teens. As a child, I always wondered why my mom didn’t continue playing the clarinet or being a journalist or a teacher or a paralegal. Now I understand that it’s possible to want to do many things, and that goal is achievable. The more you know.

Lots of other stuff is happening, too. I’ll go into it more later. Gotta play Dota.