This is the first time I've written about the 2016 election. Last year was difficult for me, and I'm guessing things aren't going to get better. I am not going to rail about Trump, as I would rather spend my energy on progressive things, but I will say I am extremely disappointed in many of my friends, family, and fellow citizens. I feel like it came down to business corruption vs government corruption, and then we piled racism, misogyny and fear on the trump side, and white folks, completely blind to the racism and misogyny, were ready to have their fear and hatred stoked, opted for business corruption. I feel the conservative anti-government efforts have been successful, making folks very distrustful of government, and somehow resulting in the thought that big business is our friend. WTF?
That is where my election rant ends. There is a lot of work to be done, and I do not have the emotional bandwidth to fight in a fact-free environment and spend time with folks who have opted to roll the world back to the 1980s, or earlier. I am going to continue doing what I was doing before--mapping out the API layers being leveraged as part of almost every aspect of our increasingly digital lives, and help make sense of the technical, business, and political side dimensions of it all. I'll be focusing heavily on API definitions and standards, which I feel are central to all other areas of the API lifecycle, helping push for meaningful specifications like Open Referral, OpenAPI Spec, API Commons, APIs.json, and beyond.
You will find me heavily focused on work in the coming years, with no time for other social requirements. Any free time I get will be spent on my drone trips, image and video algorithmic rotoscope work, which provides me with a creative outlet and release--which allows me to go back to work easily. Any free energy will be spent helping my teenage daughter prepare for this world she is entering into, finding a university to attend, and obtaining the skills she needs to survive in the digital world, as well as the very male dominated, and toxic online environment we seem to be doubling down on. This is my number one source of anxiety during, and after the election and is where I will be spending ALL my emotional bandwidth on HERE--not fighting, or discussing non-issues with folks who welcomed the Trump administration into our world.
The next couple of years will be hard. They are going to be particularly hard for my friends of color, the Muslim faith, from the LGBTQ community, and for women. I'm very disappointed in my friends, family, and fellow citizens for their blindness in these areas, and only thinking of their self-centered concerns and party lines--a Trump administration elevates everything toxic in our world to entirely new levels, and is not a solution to anything. I am hunkering down, getting to work on the projects that matter. Let me know if you can help in my work, or you need my help on something API or open data related. I can't guarantee I will have the bandwidth, but if it's worthy, making a positive impact on our country, I'm willing to consider. #Onward
