The purpose of “cafe week” blog posts are to record code-related things I do while not employed. (I also do non-code-related things sometimes!)

Saturday

Attended the MITHackingRacism Listening Summit day 1

Organizer and MC Angel Rich passes on a Q&A question about toxic work culture and how black entrepreneurs could help mitigate that by providing an alternative.

Marcia Dyson asks panelist Adam Rubinson about why hackathons specifically are useful- A: they’re less entrenched in what is possible and just do what is interesting and useful

Debra Langford speaking on the necessity of not just company commitment but outside oversight to making progress on any goal

Huh, that’s the first time I’ve heard that second half. “Breaking the glass ceiling is great but let’s not forget the folks on the sticky floor.”

Oh interesting, when you leave and reconnect a Zoom meeting, you stop seeing previous Q&A questions

“Anonymous attendee” and their Q&A questions is being a (likely-purposeful) asshat

“How to Say Good By to Racism in Public Health” with Rashaad Lambert and April Ryan

Torrance Reed founder of hbcuwallstreet speaking on “Socio-Economic Health”

GHC

Supporting a friend as they (and the world) discovered that GHC apparently canceled its career fair only today, a couple days before conference And the “ask us anything” livestream is full of LIVID people

Started setting up my laptop!

(My former work laptop which I was allowed to buy after it was remote-wiped) Maybe I’ll make a post about this. I intend to do it next week too (with my new work laptop when I get it) so I’m keeping track of all the little quirky bits.

YAC

Attended the last meeting of my university’s now-disbanded Young Alumni Committee (I joined a different similar alumni group)

Various personal stuff

Sunday

Twitter searching

(from:user) until:2020-09-28 since:2020-09-27

Ruby for Good: CASA

Attended the r4g retrospective for “team week” where a full team of developers, PMs, and designers from Power Home Remodeling worked on CASA (and other PHR teams worked on other Ruby For Good projects)

Spent two hours helping a new junior dev contributor onboard- gave them the tour of the app in QA and helped them pick their first issue and find the part of the code that the fix to the issue will be in. While setting up the repo on their Windows machine, we ran into an interesting Docker error probably caused by line endings: standard_init_linux.go:211: exec user process caused "no such file or directory"

LW

Picked Oliver’s brain about the LessWrong codebase, current tech debt and future plans, took notes to be the seed of a blogpost.

DNS

A friend took an hour to answer some of my questions about the weirder parts of DNS. I have a working developer’s knowledge of DNS, in that I have made some “A” records in Route 53 and set up domain names in Namecheap & equivalents, but there is so much that I don’t know, and it’s interesting.

Attended the MITHackingRacism Listening Summit day 2

DreamCorps - Tech “Exposure enables us to dream. Access enables us to build. I went to [fancy] school an hour away while living in a ‘bad’ area”

The Q&A box was interesting- “I deal with HIPAA Security awareness. One of the things I always tress is that it is easy to pass a test on security but applying what you have learnt doesn’t translate to success.” hits close to home

“Medical systems are often revenue-driven and not as outcome-driven as we would like. To tackle racism in healthcare… make sure the entire system is rebuilt” - Tiffany Wilson, MD

“You only have so much time in an office visit. Patient portals have been helpful because patients are more open in asking questions- 15 messages back&forth providing education, asking patient their plans. Websites as references are key” Tiffany Wilson, MD

“Culturally competent care isn’t handing someone a meal plan. Ask them if they’re on WIC or food stamps, what their budget is, how many people they need to feed, whether they have access to a grocery store.”

“Doctor bias training has not been enough.”

“We know that patients tend to like being seen by someone like them. Because it increases trust. How can we increase trust, without being who our patient is?” “Patients should not have to advocate for themselves. Doctors should advocate for patients.”

“Lots of applicants want to go into healthcare but don’t know what to do. When I was in med school, I was interested in academic medicine, but my attending told me to think of something else because I’m a woman and it’d be hard” Erkeda DeRouen

Erkeda DeRouen “I’ve never been to a hackathon before. I’m in healthcare, we don’t do design principles. When I was in med school, these [hackathons] didn’t happen”

Dr. Rikesha Fry Brown speaking to how to educate kids about how better to take care of health? Students w parents working outside the home, friend who go out- they get mixed messages. Back to campus would deepen messaging, but can’t control students

“Graduation rates are partially a function of interest rates. If your packaging coding but not explaining what it is, won’t work. Right now, Minecraft is key- that will change. Kids aren’t large groups, they are pockets. And Packaging is also for parents” Rikesha Fry Brown, PhD