Everyone deserves empathy.

I marched in front of the White House yesterday with hundreds of other students marching for racial, climate, and immigration justice. This march was called Our Generation, Our Choice, and its hashtag on Twitter is #OurGenerationOurChoice (good social movements always have a hashtag).

I went to a new conference called Release Notes. These are my notes. The conference was about building a sustainable business doing Mac and iOS development. Every one of the talks was not only good but applicable. I spent most of the time not tweeting (a good sign for any conference, in my view), so I didn’t share many of my thoughts along the way. Thus, I want to share one key action or idea I took away from each talk here on my blog. These aren’t by any means the only key takeaways one could have from each talk nor am I claiming they’re the most central to each talk, but they’re mine. I have no doubt everyone came away with a unique set of applicable ideas—the conference was abundant with them.

There’s an incredible conference for iOS and Mac developers in Philly called CocoaLove. I had the immense pleasure of getting to attend its first year last year and want nothing more than to attend again this year. For me, right now, being able to attend means getting a scholarship. While I was working on my application I noticed that Basel Farag—a super passionate and friendly student I met last week at 360iDev who is also applying for CocoaLove—had posted his CocoaLove application on his blog, which inspired me to do the same. (I held off on reading his ‘til I’d finished mine, but I really like how he approached his as a letter—I just took the boring old “respond to each prompt” approach. Either way, if reading other people’s scholarship applications is your thing, which I’m guessing it is if you’re here, go read his—I think he totally nailed it with his emphasis on vulnerability, which I didn’t directly mention even once.)

If you’re like me, it’s not every day that a poem just pops into your head, so when it happens, you can’t help but reflect on it. This is me reflecting on the poem I published yesterday, “In the Garden of the Ivory Tower”.

This came to me while I was reading a couple nights ago. I basically dictated the words as they popped into my head. It was a cool experience—not something I usually (ever?) do.