03/28/2024

Day of final presentations! This blog post is a little last minute ...

I decided to push forward with my idea of creating a site for "Software Intentions." It is now running live! This is a special link generated for the presentation / class, if you share out please remove the `code=` URL parameter :). https://www.arushibandi.com/intentions/intro.html?code=ewoiYXBpS2V5IjoiZmlnZF9RdmQ1c0xBVUNfMV8yUTBIM0VKbGxpSG5LcHN3RzRIOFZMWUQzTDJrIiwKImZpbGVLZXkiOiJDd1pzY3ViTEpiV21ZRlRuRkpmeWZ5Igp9.

While taking Solidarity Infrastructures, I engaged pretty deeply with the class readings and during class time, but outside of that I was pretty overwhelmed with some stuff going on at work and didn't feel like I had the bandwidth to start self-hosting. My old laptop that I wanted to use is superrr slow, which somehow felt like a barrier too. I should be more patient ...

I also wasn't able to attend any office hours because they always conflicted with my work hours. I was feeling pretty bummed about all of this, especially because I set my ambitions pretty high when going into this class to demo a side project I was working on for self-hosting and data-sharing with some friends. That project is still in progress, but not quite ready.

I feel like I had been going through a long period of absorbing & learning, like a squirrel collecting acorns. And I am coming out of this season feeling newly inspired to create and try to tackle hard problems, like the one of getting my project all set up. But I wanted to make something to memorialize this period and all the ideas that have been flowing through my head for the last year.

I think a lot can be revealed by thinking about the intentions behind a software, piece of work, technology. It's not talked about enough! For all the posts about how automation/AI is going to take over, or all the hype posts about Metaverse or Vision Pro or whatever is the newest thing, the intentions behind all this software -- more profits for billionaires -- is not talked about enough. But once this intention is revealed, the response becomes easy: why would I ever adopt these new technologies?

I had been feeling so caught up in thinking about all of that that the thought of creating yet another piece of software filled me with a lot of anxiety. So this project was really about questioning where that anxiety comes from and trying to repurpose it into something different.

Finally, my favorite part of class has been exploring everyone else's blogs and work outside of class. For my presentation I wanted one last piece of a shared moment and hearing from everyone. So I made an area for people to leave their own intentions for software and for what they are taking away from this class. It can only be accessed by the link above!! (If you remove the URL parameter, you won't be able to see the responses). I hope it is delightful today :_)

It's not exactly backed by my own server of self-hosting, but baby steps? I use an API token from my personal Figma combined with their REST API for comments to power it -- basically treating a Figma file as a database. We'll see how it goes!

03/16/2024

I meant to post on this blog a while back ... but I couldn't figure out how to not nest it under Sample Page, and today I gave up so she just ended up here.

Over the last 8 weeks taking Solidarity Infrastructures, I've been thinking and reading a lot, and not doing much doing. At a technical level, I feel fairly confident in being able to set up my own server one day, but for the class project I haven't been able to get past the block of what to build/make and why. Outside of the class, I've been reading The Gift by Lewis Hyde and Saving Time by Jenny Odell, and those ideas have been intertwining with the content of this class nicely, even though on the surface they seem completely unrelated.

I decided that instead of pushing forward with something new, I want to lean into this and use the final project as a way to collect some thoughts about software, and start developing more concrete intentions when it comes to writing code in my own time. In school for computer science, we learned how to push everything down into 1s and 0s, how to structure information into either-ors/if-elses and I would always wonder what all this was doing to my mind, as if afraid of becoming a rigid computer myself. In a way, with this project I'm circling back to those fears, but after having experienced "software in the real world" first hand, through work. I've started to hold stronger beliefs about things in tech, and I want to dissect and probe at those, to see if they hold up. I'm curious about trying to form a type of "artistic practice", to direct my general creative & intellectual pursuits outside of work; maybe this is a starting point.

For the output, I'm hoping to put some pages on my personal website exploring ideas about software and computing that I've continued to think about and reaffirm. I also am going to have a page called "A Knowledge Repository" which is basically a big dump of links to people and ideas that I swear by. I'm hoping that for the future I can make it possible to upload to this from the public internet, so there's more than just me as a curator.