Nearly a year after my last post, I have failed to consistently give project updates on the status of the Unintentional Calamity Project I have been working on for over five years now. While I do want to be more consistent with my updates, this inconsistent behavior is not unwarranted! From getting a new job to fighting with the U.S. healthcare system, I’ve been up to a lot. This isn’t even to mention the different projects that have popped up and continue to add on to my weekly routine. What have I been so busy with? I’m happy to share!

Life Updates

One of the main reasons I became inconsistent with my updates to the Unintentional Calamity Project was due to my main job at the time. While I enjoyed my work at Edge Technology Group engineering a neural network and starting my first attempts to deploy said network in a pre-production environment, the morality of my job was taking out all my energy. There were days where I would barely have enough motivation to flop from my desk to my bed after 8 hours of programming. I didn’t feel like I was making the world a better place and the inner turmoil I was experiencing was not good for my health.

Rather than continuing a job that had a negative affect on my mental health, I quit and joined the Vermont Housing Finance Agency as an IT Support Specialist. While this was a drastic improvement in work conditions, the toll had already been done. It took a while to get back up to speed. Combine this transition in jobs with moving to a different apartment, needing to focus on my own mental health, and fighting with health insurance to cover gender affirmation surgery left me exhausted.

This isn’t to say I did nothing with my free time, but I took a break from the massive project that is the Unintentional Calamity and focused my efforts into different projects that I couldn’t resist working on.

Project Updates

One big accomplishment this year was finishing up the new and improved Vermont Racial Justice Alliance website. With my roommate Ian Dupont (he/him) working on the graphic design, we were able to successfully completely overhaul the website. This not only allowed us to have a more modern interface, but it also allowed us to integrate Tableau dashboards into the data section of the website. While this is very much still a work in progress, the work of the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance is much more present and organized than on the last website.

Unfortunately, I am unable to disclose any information on another rather large project I am working on with Ian. What I can say is that this project is by far one of the largest web applications I’ve made thus far and I cannot wait to share more about it when it is finished!

On the data science front, I do have a new project I’ve started up with Matthew Coupal (he/him). We are creating an open source module that will allow folks to preprocess data, keep track of preprocessing changes, and use a genetic algorithm to find hyper-parameters for scikit-learn algorithms. While grid searches already exist to find the most optimized combination of pre-defined parameters, we feel there is room for hyper-parameter exploration through genetic algorithms. There is a potential for this module to systematically find the best combination of hyper-parameters in a very transparent way. The project has only been underway for a month but we’ve made significant progress in integrating our code together and found some promising initial testing.

Unintentional Calamity Update

While I did spend time this year on other projects, my writing was still kept up. Specifically, I did finish the first draft of the Unintentional Calamity and the second draft has been started. While I am still in the beginning phase of writing this second draft the amount of preparation needed to get to this point was enormous.

First and foremost, I needed to decide on a writing style. The entirety of the first draft is mostly a summation of the plot without any real scenes. Now that I’m writing a much more detailed second draft, I needed to know what tone I was setting. This is why Sea of Book has been updated with more short stories. Even if I wasn’t writing the second draft, I was trying out different writing styles in a shorter format.

Secondly, the back end of my knowledge management system needed some type of infrastructure. Originally I had the compendium stored in Gitbook, but after much consideration I decided it was best to move the compendium out of Gitbook into a place where I could back up my work and ensure it wouldn’t be locked behind a paywall. I transferred the entirety of the compendium into a single markdown document. Unfortunately, this markdown file has its limitations, mainly not providing any way to easily search for content. Eventually I moved that markdown file into a locally hosted BookStack server where I could manually backup the database. This was a free solution that gave me the features I needed.

In addition to moving the compendium I also made some major changes and additions. Outside of rewriting some characters and changing format of default markdown documents, I also changed the race and gender of the main character. This is the first drastic revision of the main plot that has ever happened. My hope is to write from a perspective of a white transgender woman making comments on systemic racism, cisnormativity, and heteronormativity. Writing from any other perspective would have been unauthentic at best and damaging at worst. While other characters with different background will still be included as main characters, I will not be commenting on their lived experiences from their perspective, only my own. This shift in perspective will help me make commentary while avoiding the slippery slope of patronization and ignorance.

Now that the backend of the knowledge management system has been solidified, I can continue to progress on the second draft while writing short stories on the side for a break.

Future Plans

Looking into the new year, I see myself working on three main projects: the Unintentional Calamity, the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance website, and the secret project I cannot disclose. These hurdles are more than enough to keep me occupied outside of my main job and will hopefully not burn me out.

I do also have to acknowledge that these projects may not make much progress this year, and gender affirmation surgery will have a massive impact on myself. While I’d like to imagine I’ll come out of surgery feeling ready to take on the world, the first few months will be rough and the first year will be tiring. Only time will tell how much energy I’ll have in a day to devote my time to the projects I love.