r-e-b-a-l-a-n-c-e

[r-e-b-a-l-a-n-c-e]

05/29/2020

Greetings mortals, it is your aries mother calling.

First of all, let me say that I am in love with Stingray #1 and Stingray #2. Don’t know who those are? That’s not my problem, boo. 

We talked until 2AM (may god bless our sleeping schedules) about the current situation that has resulted from George Floyd’s tragic passing and I was reminded that there are real allies in this world. The way that people have risen up and are bravely fighting against police brutality during a pandemic... I am speechless and in awe of them. I feel like we’re on the cusp of a revolution...

Back to the stingrays in my life, it’s an empowering feeling to be surrounded by people that just get it. Not only just get it, but are critical of how to appropriately respond to sensitive issues such as this. I’m lucky to have found a circle that will constantly challenge my understanding of the world and help me evolve for the better. You become the people you surround yourself with and I hit the jackpot.

For the majority of my life, I have been resigned to my fate of being surrounded by, dare I say, stupid small-minded children that have priorities I can never understand. found myself surrounded by people  help you grow on aIn an industry/field where I am constantly surrounded by, dare I say, stupid small-minded children, 

Anywho, let’s get on with what happened today. 

8:40AM: Woke da faq up. Not going to lie, I tried waking up earlier but my body was screaming for help. I decided to listen to it. 🥺

8:40-9:30AM: Responded to Slack messages, cleaned my email, rescheduled meetings, and overall organized myself for the day.

9:30-10:00AM: Yoga with my mom, made breakfast + coffee, and dressed cute/professionally. 

10:00-4:30PM: intern bootcamp 

Again, I was reminded of how wrong they did me during my onboarding LOL. This bootcamp was amazing and I wish I had something like this earlier.

They discussed open-source contributions, gave clear resources and actionable items on how we can start, told us about the rewards we can receive ($1000+), and then made us do one! Just wow.

Note that we’re talking open-source and contributing to the big tech community, not my company’s.

Following that, we had a rapid-prototyping session and this is when I realized my power once again. Sometimes I think my work, standards, and skillset are average but then I work on a team and see what others perceive as acceptable and I’m like WTF. When will I fully acknowledge I’m an aries and our standards are not the norm!?! 

There were a couple of interactive activities where we’d have to break up into smaller groups and have discussions. Every single time, I found that I had to interject and lead the conversation because everyone would lose focus and waste time discussing unimportant details.

Just like anyone, I hate repeating myself and I found that I had to keep reminding people of the task at hand which was sooo annoying. Especially when we have to present something and we have a deadline. 

And then the UI that was created... LMFAO. I had to take a deep breath and remind myself to choose my battles. I was so embarrassed though when we had to show it to other people LOL. Don’t you just hate when you have to lower your standards to appease others, especially when they’re not hard fixes? 

I think what shook me was that many times there would be Ivy kids in the room. I was ready for their leadership and perfectionist natures but they were so disappointing. 😂

i submitted my first PR for work during one of those sessions (and I still managed to lead the conversation 💀).

4:30-11:00PM:

Started a channel for female dev summer interns at the company.

Worked on the diaspora-app-manager-v2 and finally got the circleci passing! Migrated from yarn to npm too.

Got everyone in a student group to join a channel... Why did I have to do that after sending multiple reminders. 😒 

Shared a post made about the student group on the university page. Restructured the Slacks I sent them to.

Sent workouts to a girl that seems scared of physical activity LOL.

Currently working on fixing the Sign out button on the app manager.

... I can’t remember what else...

I am exhausted today. 😫 I cannot be bothered to read this post over lol.

night babies

[r-e-b-a-l-a-n-c-e]

05/28/2020

Are you ever filled with a sense of wrongness? It’s that feeling in the pit of your stomach and it feels like you’re internally twisting and squelching the urge to scream? That’s me writing this post right now! 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 I missed a few days and now the posts are out-of-order and if I ever decide to post about the missed days in the future and it kills me inside... OMG, I think my eyes are tearing up. SOMEONE PLEASE GET ME A MAN WITH BIG, STRONG ARMS TO ROCK ME! This is not a drill! 😭 

...

Let’s move on. 👉🏾👈🏾

Today resulted in a shift in my lifestyle that will hopefully be used as a benchmark for the many days to come. For the past 2 weeks, my sleeping schedule has been so unhealthy to the point where I’ve been consistently sleeping through 3+ alarms. Never in my life had it gotten so bad and a bish could only admit she was sick when she was would stare at herself in the mirror at 4AM while taking a piss. 😫

But today was different! Lemme give you the rundown:

Slept at 1AM which is amazing for me LOL.

6:30-7:30AM: Woke up and worked out (arms)! 

Cardio (20 mins): Ran 1 mile in 15 mins. 

Did a cool down for an additional 5 mins listening to my bihh Bree Runway. 

Daily Arm Workout (7 mins): Holly’s Quick + Intense Arm Workout

Arm Workout 1 (10 mins): Pamela’s Toned Arms Workout

Arm Workout 2 (7 mins): Tracy Campoly’s Bat Wings II

Stretch (15 mins)

7:30-9:00AM: Made cute egg sandwiches and a superfood smoothie with my Mom. 

First thing she said to me this morning was that she was proud of me. That’s all an immigrant’s daughter wants to hear! 😭 

9:00-9:30AM: Met my “buddy”/mentor at work and he’s amazing. 

Imma be honest... My last internships onboarding sucked and it followed me throughout the year. 

My first day consisted of setting my environment with tools I’ve never heard of. A lot of information was thrown my way and it went over my head. That’s normal.

However, what wasn’t normal was that I was watching Udemy courses for 1.5-2 weeks! Like COME ON! You really don’t know what to do with me!

And then I get my first task in the infamous backend with no understanding of the technologies used and how to build/test. I was assumed to know...

It was so bad... How do you ask for help when you don’t even know where to begin or how to articulate the question? I never received a proper full demo of the product and was never given a walkthrough of the codebase. 

This pissed me off later because I saw the same buddy I was assigned to on my first team give a demo and multiple codebase walkthroughs with a new hire. So they were worthy of it but not me? OK, I see what’s up.

Overall, my onboarding killed my confidence and made me scared to ask anything because I felt like such an inconvenience. It took me months to break me out of it (although I appeared confident and happy). I sometimes get sad thinking about it now, but I’m not solely to blame. Took me a long time to understand that. 

It helped when I compared my onboarding with the other intern group that came later and led some of the workshops. Saw how clueless they were too and how I was never given the same opportunities to learn in a guided environment.

My manager (who was so kind and genuine) saw how bad it was and apologized for it. He was the only one who pushed for me to have ownership on a project, and my buddy even protested giving it to me. Why did they underestimate me so much... 

But for my current internship? A-M-A-Z-I-N-G so far! 

I have already received two demos of the product.

I’ve been told specifically about upcoming projects the team will be undertaking and given expectations.

Have a couple of codebase walkthroughs already scheduled! 

Given quick, easy-to-digest resources for serivces I am unfamiliar with. 

And the best thing... My buddy doesn’t assume any of my knowledge and I know I’ve been impressing him with how quick I’ve been so far (it helps when you’ve worked at the company before LOL). it actually boggles my mind how much support I’m getting from him and I’m so appreciative.

9:30-10:00AM: Met the rest of the team. Again, this meeting was facilitated by my buddy and he warned me about the questions they would ask me. I don’t deserve him 😭 ACTUALLY... NO, I DO HAHA! His investment will pay off. 💪🏾

10:00AM-1:30PM: Intern Orientation

This was lowkey painful as it was so long and it repeated a lot of information I already knew.

It picked up near the end as the interns got more active in the chat and created a discord server and a few slack channels. 🤗

1:30PM-5:00PM

I ate food somewhere in this time frame...

Worked on fixing some of my backend problems with my buddy.

Finished a training video for new hires.

Made a record of all I did thus far on GitHub.

The remainder of my day:

Spent time in the backyard with the fam. Today is a celebratory day for my people in successfully overthrowing a terrorist regime in Ethiopia.

My mom decorated the backyard. My parents were forcing me to take videos/put them on live to share with their friends LOL.

My mom dressed a life-sized ratchet Barbie doll in the Ethiopian flag and Akira (my dog) was running for his life away from it. 🤣🤣

I played one game of skribble.io with some interns. They were so cute and one of the girls reached out to me and recognized me from a panel. 🤪 She kept saying it was my energy/style that made me recognizable and I was so flattered. 🥺

Finished the group registration for Ada’s Team (something I forgot about and was putting off. Finally did it though!)

Caught up with people from the Ethiopia COVID-19 Response Team slack and gave updates.

Some random person reached out to me and was gushing how amazing I was. 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 I looked into him and he works at Amazon -- a bish wasn’t ready for the love! 

...

I wrote so much WTF. WHY THO?!

Whatever, this was therapeutic. Starting this internship and comparing it with my previous one has has reignited the toxic resentment I have towards my onboarding experience. Thank you Mimi, Aysha, and Tumblr for facilitating my healing as now I realize I have a problem I need to deal with LOL.

OK, that’s enough! Goodnight. 😘

[r-e-b-a-l-a-n-c-e]

05/25/2020

Hello -- first post here we come!

I’m going to keep this brief because thanks to Ms. Suriel (AKA Aysha), I must be in bed by 11PM and it’s already 10:30PM... Did I mention that I wanted to wash my hair as well? I’ll let you know tomorrow if that happens 😘

So I’m not going to lie, my sleep schedule is WHACK. For the past week, I have been sleeping after 4AM and can’t seem to get my body to cooperate. When going to bed early didn’t work, I tried the extreme opposite -- stay up all night + day and knockout at an appropriate time. That failed big time as well as a girl just wanted to sleep. But it’s OK and I’m not mad at myself. Tomorrow is just another day for me to do better than I did today, and I’m up for the challenge. 

With that being said, I slept after 7AM (you thought I was joking about being whack?!) and got a call at 1PM from my mother that woke me up. She was out of breath saying she was out on a walk and got lost in Cameron Height, needing me to pick her up. She said not to let my Dad know but he knew immediately where I was going when I grabbed the car keys LOL. He lives for the drama. 

Turns out that she knew exactly where she was. She was trying to walk to my godmother’s house to have a little chat (while social distancing, of course) but the trail was too difficult to follow with my younger sister and her scooter in tow. Later, I find out that she always planned for me to pick her up and put on this act to wake me up LMAO.

After that, things were quite normal/boring:

Ate (felt bloated AF), answered emails, reviewed a PR

Workout I: Beat my record and ran a mile in 14 minutes! Did Holly’s arm workout without dropping my arms again. 💪🏾

Cleared my laptop in preparation for Manny re-imaging/deploying it.

Picked up my old laptop from Salem and had a little chat (I was in the car professing my love to her while she looked uncomfortable).

Attended an Ada’s Team conference meeting. Got a lot of work done with the conference team in regards to the GHC application, setting deadlines, deleting/recreating our mailchimp account (backing up data, importing contacts, creating the template, sharing previous promotion emails, etc).

Workout II: Tried doing Holly’s leg workout vid that Mimi sent. I felt my hips/knees start to lock with all the kicks that were incorporated in the rouine so I f’ed that and did my own leg workout then stretched.

Created this tumblr and this post.

And with that, the clock has struck 10:53PM and I have failed my first mission at being in bed by 11PM 🙈. Talk to you tomorrow!

xoxo

aries mother