Year in Review 2013

Everyone else is writing one of these end of the year blog posts, so I suppose I will jump on that bandwagon too. I'm lazy, so I'm going with a list. Here's some of the stuff I did this year in no particular order:

• Started a new job at Google.
• Continued as the chapter leader of Girl Develop It Pittsburgh and taught two classes.
• Gave my first conference talk (and then two more after that).
• Attended 6 conferences in 5 different cities. Spoke at three of them. Helped organize one. This was probably too much, but it was awesome.
• Went to Grace Hopper Celebration for the first time. There's nothing quite like being in a room with 4,000 other women programmers. If you've never been, you should go at least once.
• Started a speaker support group.
• I read (and livetweeted) Lean In. I'm still angry about it.
• I started assuaging my corporate guilt by donating to awesome people on Gittip. Thank you to the folks who donated to me!
• I got scared (see: pycon 2013), and I got loud because silence is too high a price for my safety.
• Wrote about death by 1000 papercuts because it was important.
• Redesigned my site and tried to write more.
• Created a 101 off limits list because I wanted to educate without exhausting myself. What can I say, I'm a coder, I like to keep things DRY.
• Thought a lot about mental health. I went on medication for the first time in 28 years for my anxiety. I saw Greg Bauges and Ed Finkler speak candidly about their own experiences with mental health issues (if you haven't seen their talks, go watch them now).
• I spoke about impostor syndrome as an important mental health issue. I started an online support group and hope to continue talking about this in 2014.
• Spoiled the crap out of my cats and took approximately a billion photos of them.
• I internalized and started really working on something I've known, but had difficulty with in the past: setting and maintaining boundaries.
• I ran out of fucks to give about people who are harmful and don't respect boundaries. I burned some bridges it was no longer worth maintaining.
• And last, but definitely not least, I made some awesome new friendships and strengthened others. Much love for all of you. <3

I'm still working on figuring things out. What I want to do with myself. Finding my voice. This was a rough year, but I pushed myself to do a lot of scary things that were important to me and met some amazing people as a result. I consider it a net positive.