1/4 of the way through! Time is flying. This post is also quite late. I suppose it’s a good sign that I’ve been too busy to write.

Overall

The week started off on a low, and steadily improved to wonderful levels. 😊

Emotional 😱

I felt emotionally drained
At the start of the week I felt pretty emotionally drained.

My past experiences with making connections/getting involved with communities involved a lot of putting myself out there and stepping out of my comfort zone.
It’s a bit of a numbers game. The more you do these things, the higher your chances of finding those people you click with. At the same time, it can go overboard.

It can become forced.
It can turn into a lack of boundaries.
It can have the opposite effect.

When you over invest, you can go bankrupt. Investments need space/time to grow.

I questioned the value of my invitations
A sticky trap I fall into is self-doubt when my expectations of others don’t play out in real life.
I actually have had only positive interactions with people in person. Yet when I was extending invitations for events/activities, there was less enthusiasm than expected.

I started wondering if my invitations had value. Or whether the quality of these interactions were as good as I thought.

I wondered if RC was wrong for me
Another thought was that maybe RC just wasn’t compatible with me.
I actually got rejected the first time I applied. Not even after an interview…right after the application.

Maybe my social goals weren’t aligned with this space.
Maybe RC is more focused on the technical growth.
Maybe I didn’t belong.

I focused on things outside the space
I realized there was a lot for me to explore outside of RC. As a result, no evenings were spent 100% at RC last week.

I went to shows, tech events and meet-ups. This relieved a lot of the pressure I was putting on RC. Instead of expecting RC to fulfill all my needs, I was being proactive in seeking out alternative spaces. It helped me disassociate a bit and regain autonomy.

I connected with other RCers
Every event I went to ended up having fellow RCers. Being in smaller groups outside the space allowed us to talk a bit more about our lives outside of RC. I heard a few others were having similar troubles feeling connected with others at RC.

Learning that helped me once again feel connected to the space. Things improved with each day and by the end of the week I felt a lot better about everything. ☺️

Social 💃

This week was super social! Was able to go to an event every night except Wednesday. Half of the events were things I planned for myself and the other half things I learned about through RC.

I tend to socialize predominantly outside of work
Something I was thinking about was how much more I’m used to socializing outside of work. I’ve always really enjoyed the people I work with, but naturally tend to find my best connections in external groups. Not sure what originally made me think fulfilling all my social needs at RC would work…

Intellectual 🤔

Experimental checkins
This week I joined something called “Experimental Checkins”.

In regular checkins, you meet in the morning and share what you’re working on. A few people found those unhelpful decided to do “experimental checkins” instead.

The idea with experimental checkins is to share what you’re working on, but additionally get help from other members of the group. It encourages collaboration and gets everyone more invested in the success of their peers.

These checkins turned out to be extremely valuable. I found myself more invested in helping others, and in turn felt supported by them.

Shorter days
Unfortunately, these checkins are also scheduled a bit later in the day. I’ve been using checkins to set the time I arrive at RC. With normal checkins, that meant I was arriving at ~10:30am. With experimental checkins, I don’t need to be at RC until 11:30am.

Experimental checkins also come with an expectation to spend a portion of the day helping others. That time can eat away at personal project time.

But those are minor complaints. Overall it’s been good 🙂.

Extension progress
Last weeks main win was progress on EpubPress. Specifically:

• Deploying new asynchronous API endpoints.
• Updating epub-press-js to take advantage of the new endpoints.
• Updating epub-press-chrome to take advantage of the new epub-press-js.
• Updating epub-press-chrome to work on Firefox 🔥🐺!

The whole update process was somewhat tedious. Every package was a layer to work through - but I’m super happy with the result.

I had also been a tad uncertain about how I was going to get a Firefox version of EpubPress. Being able to sit down and bash it out was super relieving.

Talks
Besides managing to make progress on my own work, I also got to go to some fun tech events.

On Tuesday was an event called “Hack N Tell”. A show and tell for people’s tech projects.
On Thursday was an Etsy/RC event. Getting to hear from past Recursers and see their post-RC work was really interesting.

Physical 🏃

Bouldering
On Saturday I went with some RCers to an outdoor bouldering gym. It was awesome weather and great to get back into climbing. Arms, and hands quickly grew sore but I’d like to keep going and continue improving.

Cooking
I started packing my own lunches which has been super cost effective. I’ve also been slowly getting into the habit of buying eggs despite not being a huge fan. On Saturday I made this wonderful stack of french toast:

Grocery runs were hard to do with such packed evenings. I bought a bunch of vegetables to roast and plan to get to that sometime this week 😋.

Dancing
Sunday I went with a wonderful RCer to an outdoor show. It wasn’t super intense dancing, but still a solid 2 hours of motion. This might be one of my favorite forms of exercise. This Saturday there’s an Electro Swing event going on. I’m excited for all the calories that will be burned there 👯.

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Thanks for reading! I’m enjoying emptying my brain every week with these posts. Part of me wishes that every post was an exciting list of achievements and good vibes.

“Stop venting about the same things week after week! 😱”

But how realistic would that be. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Much love ❤️!