On Monday, my manager asked about on-call coverage for the Elixir app I work on. There are only a handful of people in the company who know Elixir, and he was concerned that I would feel like I couldn’t take a vacation. Him: How often do you get on-call alerts? Me: shrug Never 😏 Him: Wait, what? Do you have them set up? Do they work? 😰 Me: Yeah, they’re set up, and yes, they work, but the interval…Two weeks ago, another team made a change that affected us without telling us, and that caused an alert.

Last week, Miriam Pena from the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation’s education working group mentioned in the Elixir Slack’s channel for women and other minority genders that Code BEAM V America was coming up. She said the working group had a handful of tickets available for students, folks who can’t otherwise afford to go, and people in groups that are underrepresented in tech. I’ve never applied for a “diversity” ticket to a conference before, but she said they’d pre-purchased them, and the conference was 6 days away.

When I add a new model to the Django app at work, I try to make sure the results in the Django admin have good usability, too. Just because it’ll be mainly developers (and a few project managers) seeing it doesn’t mean I can neglect usability. Consequently, I spend some time on hacking the Django admin. My manager says I’ve been making it do things he didn’t even realize were possible.

Background This message was shared at West Hills Friends Church on 7 June 2020, as protests continued following the killing of George Floyd by police. It was presented over Zoom, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This traveling ministry was undertaken under the care of Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Scripture A reading from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, verses 31 through 46.