Some of you may have already seen this, but I recently released a Figma Slides template, “Retro Vibes.”
I was inspired by some cookbook covers I’d scoped out at Binding Agents, the cutest little cookbook shop. I mean how could you not be inspired by these?
I put together a Pinterest board of covers for additional inspiration, then popped them into a Figma design file and started color picking from the covers. I arranged the colors into a palette, then started tweaking the various HSL levels so they were more cohesive. This gave me a diverse palette to start experimenting with.
I knew I wanted to use a narrow, condensed serif in the style of old Apple ads, and I was also constrained by using Google Fonts, since I wanted to ensure whatever font I used would be available in the template. (Have I mentioned how happy I am that Figma introduced Google Fonts? So happy.) So, I went through and put together a bunch of different options that I thought could work.
I wanted a font that included an italic option, which narrowed down my search considerably. There’s a ton of good options, but so many of the more interesting fonts just had one style included. Good for a single use case, less good if I’m looking to release a template, where people are going to have a wider array of use cases. I ended up with five potential typefaces:
The last element I needed to start really playing around was some imagery. I sourced some retro-looking stock photos from Pexels, focusing on images that would work well with my color palette. I did this concurrently with building out my slides.
After some experimentation and photo gathering, I started narrowing down my color palette to just a few options, cutting out the purples and a few of the various shades of red. I also tried a few font combinations, but Instrument Serif really did fit the original aesthetic I was aiming for best. And, it has an accompanying Instrument Sans, which I was able to use when I wanted to bring a sans-serif typeface in.
Finding the right stock imagery was a challenge, but I tried not to overthink it—the photos would just be there to reinforce the overall theme and would end up being replaced by actual user content.
I also stole some ideas from Figma’s own Mid Mod theme, liking how it approached some of its title slides and section slides.
Then, I just spent a while playing around with different layouts until I ended up with something that felt cohesive and releasable!
Okay, so, it’s been a while since my last post. But I’ve been busy! In addition to my job at 18F (RIP, more on that here), I’ve written a ton of music and done a bunch of art over the last couple years. Blogging’s fallen to the wayside.
But! Big changes are happening. My five-year plan is in the garbage, I’m looking for a new job, and I needed a better spot for my portfolio than a Figma deck. So, here we are: new site design, new content, fresh and ready for a new job.
What would I like to do next? Well, I’m always up for a remote job in these areas:
Civil service on a contracting, local, or state level
A company that builds and advocates for open source
Anyone looking to mitigate climate change
…Surprise me! I’m open to a lot of new opportunities. I haven’t felt this undirected in my career in over a decade, so it might be time to really dive into something new.
What’s next for my site? Well, I plan on refining some of my case studies, and have some other projects I’ve been noodling on that I’d like to talk more about. Keep an eye on this space.
This recap is late, but that about sums up 2022. It was a quiet year for me, and I mostly kept my head down due to lack of energy. 2022 felt more like a slog than previous pandemic years—whether because we’ve settled into this uneasy “let’s just pretend there isn’t a pandemic still happening” funk or what, I’m not sure, but it always feels weird to be one of the only people still masking inside.
Work
With a new job, I’ve had to work a lot on resetting my routines. I have much less time now, and spend a lot of my work day in meetings—much more than I had in the past, which has taken a great deal of time to get used to. I think it’s one of the many things fueling my low-level exhaustion, since I find video meetings especially tiring.
But I have settled, and for all I have too many meetings, I like my new job a lot. I’m working on projects focused on improving public services, and learning a lot from my fantastic coworkers. One of my biggest fears leaving a8c was leaving behind so many amazing colleagues, but my coworkers at 18F are just as kind, hard working, and caring.
I have a strong sense of responsibility for my work that I think was a natural progression from working on a huge open source project, to working on projects that impact huge swaths of America. I haven’t necessarily done anything super impactful yet, but even the small stuff feels like it can make a difference. I’ve always had a strong sense of civic duty, and this has only grown at 18F.
I’m likely going to be wrapping up the project I’ve been on since mid-year in the next few months, which is exciting—hopefully that project will launch later this year, and I can talk about it more. I’m also stoked to work on something new soon.
WordPress
I did such little contributing this year, which was frankly weird. I didn’t receive props for my first release since I started contributing over a decade ago. I miss it a lot, but it’s hard to muster up the energy to contribute after work and on the weekends.
I’d really love to do more work with patterns and block themes. I have some ideas for an updated WordCamp theme using full site editing, I just need to make the effort to sit down and try out some ideas to propose to the community.
I did have a chance to make it to WordCamp Montclair in NJ this summer, and spoke on designing with block patterns:
It was amazing to see community folks in person again, and I’m already excited for the next one this year.
Life Updates
The most exciting thing that happened in 2022: we adopted a new dog! Meet Noodle:
He’s a ~1 year old jindo mix from Korean K9 Rescue and he has been an amazing addition to our family. He’s curious, playful, and gets along with everyone. He’s also been a good influence on our other dog, Lemon, and is helping her come out of her shell a little bit more.
Also in life changes this past year, I finally got an (adult) diagnosis for ADHD, something I was diagnosed with as a kid and never treated for because I could, quote, make eye contact? And didn’t need it? Despite almost failing out of middle school? After 34 goddamn years on this Earth I am finally taking some meds for it, and I’ve noticed an improvement in my overall focus, concentration, and ability to actually start tasks. It’s not drastic by any means, but I’ll take what I can get. Looking forward to seeing how that evolves over the next year and trying not to mourn what could have been.
Hobbies
I’ve been doing some drawing and writing this past year, but mostly I’ve focused on improving my music skills. In addition to my regular music lessons, I participate in a weekly challenges on a music theory discord I’m in, which has been great for keeping me practicing.
Here’s some originals from the past year:
And some rearrangements/remixes:
I’ve also played an ungodly amount of Horizon: Forbidden West. Will that change in 2023? Probably not. (Though I have started playing The Last of Us, thanks to the new show!)
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I participate in a weekly music challenge where we alternate original composition and arrangement prompts. We need to submit both an audio render and sheet music for each prompt. Most people doing these challenges have traditional music training of some kind and often will compose directly in sheet music software like MuseScore.
I do not; I compose directly in my DAW, Ableton Live. This presents a bit of a challenge when I make my scores, so over the last year I’ve developed some techniques for creating scores in MuseScore from midi dumps. This should theoretically work with any DAW that allows you to export your individual tracks as midi files.
The purpose of your duplicate file is to simplify your song for export. I do this in a separate file so I don’t mess anything up in my song. A separate file is also good because you only need to worry about the note data.
When simplifying your file, you’ll want to:
Delete any unnecessary plugins so your file loads faster.
Quantize all of your tracks, especially if you played your parts directly into your tracks. MuseScore hates anything that isn’t perfectly quantized and will spit out some pretty terrible clusters of notes and rests otherwise.
MuseScore also doesn’t like it when notes overlap in the same part. If you have things like notes leading into other notes for pitch bending, either get rid of those or shorten them so there’s no overlap. You’ll notate the pitch bend directly in your score.
Note: if your specific track does need overlapping notes, you’ll need to do a lot of manual cleanup in MuseScore — sometimes that means just changing some voices, sometimes that means rewriting some sections. It’s painful, but I haven’t found a way around this yet. For example, see this before (top) and after (bottom):
Delete extra tracks, like duplicated pads, sound effects just there for ear candy, and anything that shouldn’t make it into your final score.
Finally, export each track as its own midi file.
Import midi into MuseScore
I have midi files set to open up in MuseScore on my computer by default, so I’ll usually just batch open all of my tracks and there they are, all lined up in MuseScore. I’ll do additional cleanup in MuseScore itself. Don’t worry if your tracks aren’t assigned to the correct instruments yet, we’ll deal with that later.
When you open up a midi file in MuseScore, a panel should be docked on the bottom of your screen with some settings:
I almost always uncheck “Clef changes.” And, if your instrument doesn’t use multiple staves, make sure “split staff” is unchecked. Depending on the instrument, I might also uncheck “show staccato.”
If your song is swung, use the “detect swing” dropdown so MuseScore knows how to handle your notes.
I’ll usually do a first round of cleanup in these individual midi files. It makes it easier to see the part I’m working on. If I need to pause and come back to it later, I’ll save the file as an .mcsz within my project folder, which is MuseScore’s native file format.
Some things I’ll look for when cleaning up my tracks:
Weird rhythmic translations; I don’t necessarily think in subdivisions when composing, which puts me at a disadvantage when making my score. I’ll go through and reassign the kind of note to make it read better, especially if I have a pause that’s not necessary, but just an artifact of how I was writing in my DAW.
If the rhythm is messed up enough, I’ll go back to my duplicated Live project and fuss with the note lengths to make sure everything is sixteenth, quarter, half, or whole, then re-export my midi file. I get in trouble a lot by making notes three beats long and then I end up with a million dotted notes and sometimes weird rests and it just gets messy.
Clean up or change voices, as needed.
Convert drum parts
If you have a drum part, RIP 🙏 💀 (jk jk). But this does get its own section because it is the most complicated issue I run into almost every week (since as a drummer, I like drums).
As far as I can tell, Live has no way of exporting drums to the correct midi channel that indicates to MuseScore that hello, yes, this is a drum part. So you’ll open up your drum midi and it’ll probably look something like this:
i-want-to-die.jpg
Yeah so that’s not very helpful.
You’ll want to do at least two things first: uncheck the “Split staff” option in the midi import panel (and optionally uncheck “Show staccato”) and click apply. Then, open up Mixer (F10) and check “Drumset.”
Now your score looks like this:
okay-i-can-work-with-this.jpg
Significantly more tolerable.
After this, I usually copy the whole piece, press “i” to pull up instruments, and search for the drumset instrument under “Percussion – Unpitched.” Then I’ll get rid of the piano from my instruments list, and paste my drums into the new drumset staff(this just makes all the future drum formatting a little less weird, and you’ll eventually be pasting it into a drumset staff anyway).
The next task is figuring out what pieces of the kit are actually playing. I’ve found some VSTs assign different parts of the the kit to different notes, so I spend a lot of time flipping back and forth between my project file and my score to match up the parts. In this case, despite what the score is telling me, the first four bars are playing kick (correct) and cross-stick (incorrect), with a two-tom fill (incorrect) at the end. The next section has a kick (correct), cross-stick (still incorrect) and now some closed hi-hats (incorrect).
This is where a lot of tedious work comes in. I’ll select each note for a particular drum kit piece, then press up/down on my keyboard until it’s assigned to the correct placement on the score. MuseScore will play the sound associated with each note so you can do it pretty much by ear, and if you’re not a drummer and struggle with any of the sounds, you can click an individual note head and the drum name will appear on the bottom of the UI:
You might have to do this for almost every note in your drum staff and yes, it sucks.
Edit: You don’t, actually—do right click > select > more... > then pick the same pitch option and move them all at once!
Unless I’m doing something really simple with just a bass drum, snare, hi-hat, and occasional crash, I’ll also split my drum part into two voicings: one voice for foot parts (bass, hi-hat pedal) and one for hands. This is also a pain and takes a lot of manual work. As you split your staff into two voicings, you’ll also start getting a lot of extraneous rests. I guess it’s best practice to hide them all by selecting all of the rests (right click > select > all similar elements in same staff) and pressing “v,” but that still shows them grayed out while I’m editing my score. I find that annoying, so I just delete them.
You might find yourself with some sharp or flat accidentals still hanging around from your initial import; I select the entire staff (cmd/ctrl + a), then tap up on my keyboard, then down (to bring all the notes back into place) and it gets rid of all the accidentals.
My final output looks something like this:
Create a new score
Use MuseScore’s setup wizard when creating your score, instead of the blank file that appears when you first open the software. The wizard lets you choose specific instruments to add to your score, puts them in mostly the agreed-upon correct orchestral score order (according to my servermates), and pick the key, time signature, and tempo for your piece.
Once your score is set up, it’s pretty easy just to copy and paste your individual tracks into their respective instruments. If I forgot one or need to add/remove staves, pressing “i” will bring the instruments menu back up.
I’ll do any remaining cleanup I didn’t do in my individual midi files and then move to formatting.
Format score
As someone with no classical training, I know very little about writing good sheet music. Everything I know I’ve picked up because of these weekly challenges, whether that’s asking other folks on the server, or asking my music teacher about specific items. Here are some common tasks I do once all of my parts are in place, using the palette menu (F9):
Adding any missing braces to instruments that share staves, and brackets to group sections (like strings)
Barlines and rehearsal marks (under “text“) to denote sections
Lines like slurs and hairpins, dynamic markings for volume, and articulations (like accents) to direct players on how I want the piece played
8va/8vb for any sections where an instrument goes really high or low, in comparison to other sections. This just means “this part is played an octave higher/lower.”
Breaks & spacers to shift my sections around so nothing gets weirdly cut off or to prevent a new section from starting on the last bar of a page. 4 bars per line (or other powers of two) are generally the recommendation, and you might need to add breaks to make that work.
I have not yet graduated to being comfortable using things like repeats and voltas because I am a coward and there’s a whole lot more I’m still missing (like piano sustain pedals; how do they work?) but these tips have been enough to keep me in the 3/5 range for my score ratings each week which is at least like, a passing grade by American standards.
After that, I’ll make page style adjustments like flipping to landscape or changing the page size to fit the number of instruments and staves in my score. It’s not like anyone is actually going to print these, they’re just for practice and for show, so I can crop them however fits the piece best. I might also fiddle with staff spacing depending upon how loose or cramped my score is.
Finally, I’ll export to pdf, and boom, done! One score, ready to be uploaded to my weekly prompt.
Hope this helps anyone else looking to make sheet music from midi in MuseScore!
I’m in a music theory discord that does weekly challenges, alternating between original composition and arrangement weeks. I’ve been doing them pretty consistently over the last year.
Each week has a different prompt. Recently, we did this prompt during an original composition week:
Object theme composition prompt
We’ve composed themes for places, battles, people, monsters, love, etc. Now it is time to make a theme for an object. Some object ideas to inspire people:
– a legendary sword – cursed treasure – a wedding dress never worn – some macguffin everyone is trying to get – a magic ring
I was joking around with ryelle about ideas for my piece that week, and she suggested making a song entirely out of samples of a particular object. Which, you know, is freaking brilliant. I ended up choosing the humble pencil as my object. As I wrote in the score I submitted alongside my piece:
From the humble pencil comes magic. Writers create vivid stories, artists draw masterful pieces, and composers put song onto page. In honor of the pencil, every single instrument in this song has been created using pencil sounds — scrapes, scribbles, and taps. From synths to drums, the pencil can do it all.
Folks were like “how the hell did you do that,” so I figured I’d actually write down my process, if only so I can refer back to it later when I inevitably forget. The melody itself is pretty lackluster, but the techniques I used to generate each instrument were pretty fun.
Here’s what I ended up submitting:
“Pencil”
Sampling
I’d originally planned on recording my own pencil samples, but I ended up getting tight on time, so I opted to search through https://freesound.org/ for some different pencil sounds. They have a CC0 search which has come in handy for a lot of songs! I searched for a few different kinds of sounds, like tapping, scratching, heavy writing, etc. I figured a different range of timbres would give me the best possible starting points.
Once I found some samples, I dropped them into Ableton and started cutting them down with different instruments in mind. For example, looking for sounds I could transform into a high hat, bass drum, and snare for the drums (because of course I’m going to do drums). Those needed to be short, clear sounds, but my synth samples could be a little looser.
Processing
After cutting down my samples, I moved on to sound design and processing of each sample. This part of the process was a lot of playing with audio effects and plugins in Ableton, as well as warping and distorting the clips to create interesting new sounds.
All of the samples got really heavy-handed EQing to narrow in on specific ranges (high for my high hats, lows for my bass drum, mids for my synth, etc.). My drum parts got additional saturation and Ableton’s overdrive effect to oomph up the sounds, a little bit of reverb for resonance. I also used Couture by Auburn Sounds to create snappier transients. My snare and bass drums also got some additional sound shaping through Diablo by Cymatics.
Everything got compression — usually a glue compressor at the beginning of my effects chain and a regular compressor at the end.
To make my lead synth, I used Ableton’s stock resonator to build some harmonics into my sound and then tuned it to a single pitch using Melodyne. The synth also got some overdrive, saturation, and a bit of character from Baby Audio’s Magic Switch and Magic Dice. I also made a bass and sub-bass from the same clip, just using different EQing. I tuned those as well, and played around with some of Ableton’s pedals and the drum buss effect to accentuate the low end.
I knew I wanted to add in some ear candy, so I also took some samples and did a lot of stretching, squashing, and reversing to find interesting sounds. These also got EQ, overdrive, saturation, and a ton of compression, along with some other pedal and phaser effects in some cases. Once I felt good about my sounds, I recorded them each onto new tracks. I threw these frozen samples into Ableton’s drum rack, and sampler instrument for my synths.
I needed to do a lot of volume adjustment in my drum rack to get the different clips a little more normalized. I still don’t think it’s a super cohesive drum kit, but at some point you just need to move on, you know?
Sampler is great because I was just able to set the initial pitch for it to extrapolate everything else from, and then boom, instant synth. Both my lead synth and bass synths got additional EQing and compression. At some point later in composing, my piece felt a little bare, so I created two pad synths using the same kind of techniques and different samples I’d isolated earlier. I also added Bittersweet by Flux to each pad.
Composition
The actual composition of this piece was absolutely second to the sound design, oops. I made a really repetitive, bouncy, simple melodic line an ABAB structure with a little drum break in the middle. I used maybe five chords in the entire song, using my pad instruments.
The bass I got a little funky with. I started by duplicating my melody, adjusting the rhythm, and adding passing notes between the root notes. I wanted to bring in more bounce. Once that was done, I doubled the part an octave lower for my sub-bass.
For drums I just busted something out that played on the rhythm I’d established on the bass, then added and subtracted some notes to introduce more variation.
Once I had the actual song composed, I took all my different FX noises and scattered them throughout the piece to give it more texture. Some of the samples still sounded like pencils, so I used those to start and end the piece to establish the theme.
Mixing and Mastering
My mixing for this was pretty simple, mostly just some volume balancing and reverb (Valhalla Super Massive) and delay (stock Ableton). I also sidechained my pads and bass to my kick drum, using Ableton’s stock sidechain compression setting (honestly because I was lazy and didn’t want to configure ShaperBox).
✨ c h a o s ✨
I use the same mastering chain for most of my songs: EQ, saturator, glue compressor, and Ozone Elements by Izotope. I struggled a LOT with finding a good preset to adjust in Ozone — the sounds in this are so weird, it just didn’t know what to do with them. Eventually I got something that mostly works okay and kind of dialed back on some other settings.
“Pencil” again, in case you want to take another listen for any specific parts.
Finally, I threw together a slapdash score in Musescore and submitted my piece! I got a pretty decent rating for the week, too:
prompt: You got an average score of 4.86 score: You got an average score of 3.67 overall: You got an average score of 4.00 Your total average was: 4.20!
I didn’t do a 2020 recap, and looking back at my 2019 recap, I feel a sense of loss. 2019 was such a great year, and I had no idea what was coming! So hopeful and energized about the future. Let’s call most of 2020 a lost year, and skip straight to the end.
Moving
In my 2019 recap, I mention the possibility of us moving to Philly. The pandemic waylaid those plans. However, after months inside sharing an office, and the realization that we were in it for the long haul, we said “fuck it” and seriously looked at buying a house in Philly. Why Philly? The cheapest property for sale in our Cambridge neighborhood was $850,000 for a studio. Houses were going for $1.2+ million. In contrast, comparable houses in Philly, a similar old-school East Coast city, were $3-500k. While I miss the hell out of the Boston area and would happily live there forever, it’s just not affordable.
We did most of our search remotely via a local realtor, and our Philly friends Tracy and Mia Levesque, who gave us a bunch of neighborhood advice to narrow down our search range and went and scoped out different houses for us. Thank you Tracy and Mia 🙏
After at least one failed bid, we managed put a successful bid on a house, and came down for the inspection. Unfortunately, that house had a serious mold problem. But now we were in Philly in person, so we extended our trip by a day and looked at a bunch of places in person, which was a much more fun experience than doing video walkthroughs.
It took some more bidding attempts, but eventually we were able to land a house. We moved in November 1st.
Owning a house has been an… experience. Since moving, we’ve had to do electrical work, HVAC, roofing, and plumbing. Our basement flooded several times due to the heavy rain this summer, the first time destroying a bunch of stuff (including my drum kit). We still haven’t been able to replace the drywall and fix the basement bathroom because we’re waiting on the city to install backflow valves to prevent future flooding. Until those are in place, we’re pretty much guaranteed to flood the next time a bad storm comes through. Given 2020 and 2021 saw a huge increase in climate fuckery, we’re assuming bad storms are going to be common from now on.
That said, buying a house hasn’t been all bad. We each have an office, and I’ve had fun decorating:
After all of our various repairs this year, I also feel like our house is in a better place moving forward. We’re paying less per month than we were renting in Cambridge. And, we can do whatever the hell we want! We’re not beholden to landlords anymore. We are the lords of our own land. I honestly never really expected to own a house, so that alone is one of the biggest accomplishes of my life to date. We’ve settled in pretty well, though we’re only really familiar with our little corner of the city so far, since we’ve been limiting how much we use public transit. We have some new favorite spots, even if we miss our old ones (Bow Market and Lone Star, I’m looking at you).
Health
Despite everything, we’ve remained healthy and have managed to elude COVID (so far). We received our vaccines as soon as we were eligible (and we got lucky, once again thanks to Tracy, who knows everyone in Philly and told us about a popup). Two weeks after our second shot, we took a trip out to Shenandoah National Park, which was a huge mental health boost:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CO8IYrkpYyG/
Now that winter’s setting in (kind of — it was 60* yesterday. Happy New Year!), I’m contemplating a sunny escape, but that’ll depend on COVID, vacation time, and also where to go and how to get there. I don’t think I have it in me to do a plane ride yet, so maybe somewhere warm isn’t feasible this winter. In the meantime, I’ll try to be safe and stay healthy, to the best of my ability.
Hobbies
Plenty of time inside, without access to many of my existing hobbies (I miss Peachfuzz 😢) = time to form new hobbies!
Once I wasn’t able to go to my drum lessons in-person anymore, I pivoted to doing remote lessons on music theory with my instructor instead. I spent much of 2020 building up my knowledge of music composition and production, and a lot of 2021 writing, rearranging, and remixing music.
I also joined the 8-bit Music TheoryDiscord server and have participated in a bunch of weekly challenges. I think I got to something like 20 straight weeks before breaking my streak at the end of the year? It’s been a fun, structured way to practice my music composition skills, and I’ve learned a little about musical notation and score writing because of the challenges as well.
Additionally, I took two classes on Monthly.com this year: Complete Music Production by Andrew Huang and Electronic Music Production by Kygo. Both were fun, informative, and well worth the investment (though IMO Andrew is the better teacher, probably because of his YouTube background). I’m eying Louis Bell’s Hitmaking for Producers next.
You can check out some of my music on my SoundCloud:
https://soundcloud.com/mel-choyce
(Which reminds me, I have a backlog of things I need to post!)
Prior to the pandemic, I took in-person printmaking classes at Mixit in Somerville. During the pandemic, one of my instructors, Jane Goldman (fellow Smith alum!) started doing remote art lessons. I took her watercolor class, then switched over to her drawing class because of scheduling. Her next class starts up this month and I’m still trying to figure out if I can join in despite my new work schedule, so hopefully I’ll be able to take another class with her soon. Mondays with Jane and my fellow classmates has been a highlight of the past two years.
Lastly, I’ve started fermenting! I’ve done a bunch of projects: sauerkraut and kimchi (which have been the most consistently successful), hot sauces and salsas, kombucha, and even my own miso:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CSnHPFfpcaP/
What are your favorite dishes to create with fermented foods? Always looking for new and interesting ways to incorporate my ferments into my regular diet.
Life Changes
In September, we welcomed the first dog into our family: Lemon, an adorable Jindo/Shiba mix we adopted from an international rescue.
I’ve been saying “I want a dog” for years, but the pandemic kicked my biological clock into high gear. We finally felt like we were in a stable place for adoption. I spent a while researching dog ownership and looking through listings. When I saw Lemon, I was like, “this is the dog.” Kelly agreed, and we put in an application, with the understanding that I’d be the primary dog parent.
Surprise! Lemon instantly bonded with Kelly, and is scared of everyone else, including me.
So, it’s been a little bit of a rough couple months — Kelly’s had to take on all of the dog parenting, pretty much — but Lemon is slowly coming around. She still has a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety that I’m sure we’ll spend a lifetime helping her through, but she’s becoming more open and interested in exploring. She likes meeting other dogs in the park nearby, though we haven’t managed to get her into the dog park itself. She still doesn’t know how to play (and is afraid of squeaky toys), but we’ll get there. And she can stand to be on the same couch/bed as me, even if she doesn’t want me to pet her. In the meantime, we’re giving her plenty of patience, and plenty of treats.
My second big life change this year was leaving Automattic and joining 18F. I’ve already said a lot about Automattic (I miss y’all!), but I just started at 18F in December. So far it’s been mostly orientation and training, and getting to know my new coworkers. The biggest point of impact so far is seeing how important and serious the work is, and the potential for improving the lives of fellow Americans. All of my coworkers have been so nice and welcoming, and I’m excited to start on my first project. There’s a lot to get used to — working for the federal government is much more structured and organized than working for a tech company — but I expect I’ll settle in soon.
Today was my last day at Automattic, where I’ve been employed the last eight-and-some years. It feels like the end of an era, and I’ll miss Automattic dearly.
Automattic’s been more than just a workplace for me; it’s been a place of acceptance, growth, and opportunity. I’ve made lifelong friendships. I’ve traveled across the world to places I’d never imagine I’d have the privilege to go. I’ve eaten a lot of really amazing food. And hopefully, I’ve made a positive impact on my corner of the web.
The choice to leave was one of the most difficult I’ve made. But, I’m leaving to go somewhere exciting, where I feel like I can make a positive difference in people’s lives. (Still remote, thankfully!)
More on that later. I’m taking a few weeks off to decompress and make some art and music before jumping into my next big adventure.
Since the pandemic started, and I wasn’t able to take drum lessons in person, I’ve pivoted to learning music theory and composition. I’ve noodled with a bunch of songs, some of which you can hear on SoundCloud, but this past March I decided to work on my first EP: a collection of remixed, lofi Chrono Cross songs.
Chrono Cross has long been one of my favorite videogame OSTs, and it felt like an OST that would fit well into the lofi genre. I selected a few of the chiller songs from the first disc, grabbed some midis or the original audio to edit, and dropped them into Ableton Live. This was a good chance for me to practice adding effects, as well as mixing and mastering my tracks.
I was nominated by Eric to write about my typical day, and I haven’t blogged in a while, so it seems like a good way to get myself writing again!
I’ve been working remotely for almost 8 years, so I didn’t have a dramatic switch this past year due to the pandemic. The biggest change has been working entirely from home, instead of being able to work from cafes, which I desperately miss. I used to break up my day by getting breakfast or lunch out a few times a week, and now I’m hunkered down at home all day. Doldrum city. The good thing is, since moving to Philly in November, I have my own office to work from instead of sharing one with my spouse. I can be as loud and annoying as I want (within reason).
ADHD makes this kind of interesting, since I have pretty much no constraints in my life and therefore no schedule to adhere to. But here’s a general summary.
All Day
This is the kind of stuff I’ll rotate through all day:
Check various social media accounts (mostly twitter), because I am an addict and get sucked into scrolling forever.
Check both work and social Slacks.
Check for any new Automattic internal p2 posts on WordPress.com that are relevant to me.
Glance at my email, which thankfully isn’t very active.
Read newsletters and articles I’ve been putting off for daysweeksmonths eternity.
9–10am
I’m a night owl. I don’t usually wake up until 9, or even later. (Lately, it’s been trending towards later. February sucks.)
Literally this past week I’ve started journaling first thing in the morning — two pages hand-written on an old lined notebook I’d otherwise have no other use for, since I’m DOT GRID 4 LYFE. I’ve literally only been doing it for three days, so we’ll see if I can keep up that habit. I’m doing it as part of reading The Artist’s Way.
Once I manage to drag myself out of bed and start my day, I’ll grab some cold brew I prepared previously from my fridge. If I didn’t have the foresight to brew my own coffee, I’ll hop over to the cafe down the street to pick up a cold brew and some sort of food. If I did have the foresight to make coffee and I’m eating at home, there’s probably a 50% chance I’ll succeed at actually preparing breakfast before starting work.
10–11am
Start work. Maybe succeed at eating breakfast, if I have it. I spend the first portion of my day catching up — on email, on Slack, on Github and Trac, on p2. This doesn’t usually take a full hour. I might reply to some conversations I missed, since I work for an international company, and folks are chatting at all hours across the globe.
On Thursdays, I have a 10am design critique with my squad. We’ll present work, get and give feedback, and help unstick problems.
11am–early afternoon
Most folks would end this next on a specific hour mark denoting lunch, but I’ll eat lunch anywhere between… 1 and 3:30. If I failed at eating breakfast before 11, I might also attempt to force myself to make something between 11 and noon. Everything’s pretty wibbly. I’m not great at being a functioning human. I tend to get “stuck.”
I usually start my design work around this time, or whenever I’ve finished catching up and chatting about anything I need. Most of this takes place in Figma, though this past week I’ve been working on some WordPress core patches using SVN. I’m still using Coda 2 as my editor. I don’t code a lot.
I’ll also have the majority of the meetings I attend weekly within this time slot, though thankfully, I don’t have many meetings throughout the week.
Late afternoon–evening
I try to finish work between 6 and 7. I have music lessons at 5:45 on Wednesdays, so I’ll try to end my day by then — but I might end up working again after my lesson, depending on my workload.
I don’t have a hard stop to my day. Sometimes there’s a natural stop; I’ll finish up a task or a mockup and there’s no point in starting something new that late in the day. Other times, I need to drag myself away from an unfinished design. That’s the hardest time to stop. I could work all night if I’m in the right headspace. I’d gotten really good at containing my work day between my sabbatical and the start of the pandemic, but my work/life balance has been slipping since I’ve been trapped inside all year.
After work
Depending on when I finish up work, I’ll either relax for a little while and play some videogames for a bit or work on some music, or I’ll jump straight into cooking dinner. I cook the majority of our dinners, since my spouse is more of a baker or project-cooking person. I can whip up food from whatever we have hanging around, usually. We pick up a subscription from our neighborhood butcher every other week, and also get fresh vegetables and fruit delivered from a local, not-quite-CSA box, Philly Foodworks. (It’s the Philly equivalent of Boston Organics, which we used for years when we lived in Boston.)
If my spouse and I are both exhausted, which is more often than we’d like, we’ll order delivery. We’re still trying to figure out our go-to places in Philly. Most of the time we end up eating dinner on our couch while we watch something. We’re currently working through an older season of Top Chef.
After dinner, we either switch to watching a plot-driven show, or split off to do hobbies. I’ll play more videogames or work on music more, do some art, or mindlessly doom scroll. I used to be a voracious reader, but my ability to focus on reading since the pandemic started has been completely shot. I miss being able to devour books. I miss being able to go out and have dinner or some drinks. My spouse and I are once again going to try having a date night each week. We used to get drinks after my drum lessons every Wednesday. Once the pandemic started, we tried doing date nights at home for a while, but those fizzled out.
I’m just always so exhausted these days.
12–2am
We’ll usually head upstairs somewhere around midnight. My spouse falls asleep first; I’ll stay up and watch some TV quietly until I can’t keep my eyes open. I’ve always been bad at sleeping, but I’ve been extra bad this past year. If I look at my phone, I’ll doom scroll for hours. If I lay in silence and try to sleep, I’ll start thinking about things and won’t be able to shut off my brain. I literally have to exhaust myself through overstimulation.
It’s been a rough year. Here’s hoping we can all get vaccinated soon.
I’d like to nominate Cami and ryelle to continue this on.
I had the privilege of designing this year’s WordPress default theme, Twenty Twenty-One, which was released yesterday alongside WordPress 5.6. I started working on the initial concepts for the theme back in July, so seeing it finally launched is fantastic.
Thanks to my amazing team of co-contributors: my co-lead Carolina Nymark, who spearheaded development of the theme, our theme wrangler Jessica Lyschik, and our supporting team including Beth Soderberg, Ellen Bauer, and Jonathan Desrosiers (go Sox!). Special thanks to Ari Stathopoulos, Kjell Reigstad, Allan Cole, Jeff Ong, Justin Ahinon, Rolf Siebers, Simon Resok, Guido Offermans, Kishan Jasani, Kelly Choyce-Dwan, and dozens of others for their numerous contributions to the theme, to Sarah Ricker and Enrique Sanchez for their guidance and help in making this theme WCAG 2.1 AAA-compatible, and to Josepha Haden and Chloé Bringmann, who always rallied up support when we needed it.
Keep an eye on this space for a full breakdown of the design process sometime soon.