/preamble
WE ARE ON DAY FOUR

Day 1 was Friday. Day 2, Saturday. Day 3, Sunday. And here we are…

MONDAY NIGHT
September 21, 2026

I am at a pool bar. Called Panthers. In Portland, Oregon. I want people to know, pool is not my game. I suck at it. I have never had the hand / eye coordination to be good at it. So, I am doing something else (and yes, it involves smoking). But that’s not the main event. The main event is what I will be typing on this laptop. I feel like I should explain a few things about myself. My roots, and where I came from. But in all honesty, that would take a book.

Another fucking book.

Another book that no one would read. So again, what’s the use?

…

Cheshire, Connecticut

I would not say that is where I’m from. I would say, that is where my parents moved to. They moved there so they could build a house. A house upon a mountain. Peck Mountain, to be precise. Overlooking a ridgetop. I am told, in living memory, there were once no houses on Peck Mtn. Instead, people would just ride their horses there. How many? I can’t tell you that. I don’t think it was a parade. I don’t think it was anything close to a cavalry. I think it was most likely, just a lucky, privileged few. That was the impression I got. From my friend Heidi, and her mother.

The house is stick built, with a basement carved into the rock. But I’m sure absolutely none of the people reading this blog would care about that. Nor about the fact that it has skylights. Two of them.

Skylights were big in the 1980s. As was modernist (contemporary) design.

But whatever. It’s a bygone era.

I will tell you something that is not in the past. And that is WHITE RACISM.

I grew up in a place steeped in it. It was an open secret. My little sister told me that a vestry member at our church was a member of the KKK. I don’t know how she found that out. But I tend to believe she did not make that up.

I hate to say it, but there is a bit more to my personally experienced tale of white racism.

It concerns a movie. Made from a short story. A science fiction story, called Johnny Mnemonic. I saw it in a theater. It starred Keanu Reeves. Most people panned that movie. I rather liked it. I went to see it with my friend, Goldie Knobloh.

She was a Russian Jew. An immigrant to the United States, with her family. They found asylum here. But that didn’t necessarily help her pay for college.

Anyway, back to that day when we were driving to see that movie, Johnny Mnemonic.

The KKK were out that day. They were marching (or actually, they didn’t do that much marching). They were just standing, in their robes. In front of the Cheshire Town Hall.

On Route 10. That’s about a 40-minute walk from my house. More? Less?

Depends what kind of shape you’re in. And also, on the weather conditions. We get plenty of snow and ice in Cheshire. Every year. In a good year, we also get snow. Blizzards, even. But maybe, with global warming, that will change. Maybe in the future, the climate will be, how shall we say, milder.

All that I can say is that we drove by them, just two teenaged girls, on the way to see a movie for fun, and it scared the shit out of us.

Did we talk about it? Not much.

But I know for a fact, I was terrified.

There are some reasons that I am recalcitrant to go back to Cheshire.

And I won’t even get into all the state prisons, between my parents’ mountaintop hacienda and the Cheshire Town Hall. In my book, state-run prisons are a good thing. Private-run prisons… that’s where things get hairy.

You see, private run prisons?

They make your blue jeans.

I am wearing black jeans.

This is the part that is even scarier.

I am sure those robes did not go away. Those White Robes.

I imagine they were put, carefully, gingerly, into a trunk. Or a hiding place. Perhaps they were laundered. I doubt they were sanitized.

But I imagine some of them can still be found within the confines of Cheshire, Connecticut today. If you know who to ask.

/backstory
I want everyone to know that this post will only be up for 7 days. And with very good reason. You will see why, once I post the rest of it. Today’s time by the way (EDT) is currently 5:43 p.m. Today’s date is September 18th.

So, okay. I have to be in Long Island tomorrow with my family for a memorial service in St. James, New York. The next day, I fly out of JFK. This leaves me with very little time to compose this post.

I hate to break it to any of my breathless readers but I won’t be able to share much until or unless I have a spare moment. These readers are all in my imagination, I’m guessing… unless you are counting web crawlers and other forms of bots. Please note that my husband does not usually read or review these posts on a regular basis, unless I specifically request his opinion.  ALEX, ARE YOU READING MY BLOG?  IF SO, GOOD FOR YOU.  CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU SOON !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You may also possibly notice a really frightening number of typos, misspellings, odd usage choices, and grammatical errors. This is because I literally can no longer use a keyboard without pain. I typically resort to voice-to-text dictation through my Android smartphone, but it’s not very reliable at the moment. It’s more than three years old, and the flash memory storage is getting full. Need to find a better way to type asap. In the meantime, I’m doing the best I can.

I should have more time available when I’m in Portland. Only staying there through next Saturday morning. Wish I could stay longer.

Please stay tuned…

Not encountering technical difficulties.

Not yet, anyway. But I’ve got to pack. Not a trivial task when you put your most essential belongings into a four-door hatchback vehicle and drove it across the country. I know I won’t have as much space to pack for the plane ride back. Not even given that I’m planning to check luggage.

Sudafed, be my friend tonight.

I am so sorry to say this, but that is not a joke.

—

Ok, so I’m here. Made it to Portland. Beautiful flight. Only mildly inconvenient window seat. Felt like I spent more than half of the six hours in the air amazing at the last remnants of the sunset, over faint clouds. At one point, we literally caught up with the sun. Or I guess more technically I should say, outpaced the Earth’s rotation. The sky was completely dark,  with only a few isolated city lights visible at odd intervals through ” flyover country. That was the case for about two hours. Then I noticed a faint brightness at the horizon. I pointed this out to the guy in the middle seat, and he glanced up briefly from his headphones and his movie. I thought it was kind of cool.

But whatever, I’m here. Sitting in the DoubleTree hotel restaurant, near where Lloyd’s Center used to be. I would tag this on Facebook and put up a pretty picture of my tasteful surroundings, but I’m not going to Facebook anytime soon.

If you check out my page <https://Facebook.com/still tessgadwa> You. Will. See. Why.

/epilogue

There is none.

This blog post is public domain. It may be shared and adapted freely, without restriction.

What I am writing about today is something Tom Callaway once referred to in an AWS podcast as “The Pony Effect:” i.e. what would happen to a project if the people involved simply “rode off into the sunset, on a pony?” He described it as a vulnerability chiefly impacting projects with just one contributor/maintainer. However I would tend to argue that it can affect projects with fairly robust participation as well.

It is a significant concern for nearly all grassroots community projects, or for that matter any FOSS project doing its best to scale.

Here’s the issue.

Open source contributors and maintainers — particularly those of us who are female, trans, people of color, students, unemployed, disabled, or underemployed — are at risk of dropping out of projects.

How are we at risk? Three ways:

1.)  Political Repression. (This is the least likely of the three — unless you are not a U.S. citizen, or, like myself, have openly questioned the actions of ICE.) Please note that repression does not necessarily mean incarceration or detainment. It may simply involve a “gag order,” being placed under house arrest, or having your calls and email messages blocked or censored.

2.) Abduction / Human Trafficking. You may find this impossible to believe, but it is a significant threat for those of us whose gender is not male, as well as for people who hold significant amounts of coin. Back in 2018, Gavin Andresen, one of the individuals responsible for popularizing Bitcoin early on, confirmed to me by email that the risk was real and unavoidable. Since then, the world has certainly not gotten safer! I fear that trans people in their teens and early twenties may assume a level of safety that is in fact illusory. They have never been socialized to see themselves as targets. Violent hate crimes may also be on the rise.

3.) Bad Luck. I am talking about serious health issues and major life disruptions causing people to “drop off the grid.” Something as simple as the theft of a phone, job loss, a car that won’t start, or the end of a relationship can spiral into homelessness and poverty. This seems to happen quite frequently in Oregon, and elsewhere on the West Coast.

In a workplace setting, some manager or HR professional almost always has emergency contact information. Not so on volunteer open source projects — regardless of whether some or any maintainers are paid. To date, best practices and Codes of Conduct have largely centered on the behavior of participants themselves. We are naive to assume that the world outside our communities is benevolent and friendly. Of course, privacy is a huge concern but I don’t think most people realize how vulnerable the human aspects of our networks are.

I was hoping to bring up these concerns at an open source conference I attended this summer.

Unfortunately, I had a two-hour drive to return home on the final day, so I could not stay as long that afternoon as I had hoped.

Had there been a space available and had people willing to listen that Sunday, I would have shown the participants a silver ring that I was wearing. It has two stones: one is turquoise. The other is coral. A close friend gave it to me many years ago. She was a talented programmer (taught herself C in high school) but dropped out of college. I tried to get back in touch with her a few years ago, to no avail. She may have changed her name or gender. It could also have been suicide. I reached out to her mother (her dad had passed away) but did not receive any reply. This is a personal loss for me, but it’s also a loss to our talent pool.

FOSS communities are unique because they have both a social and a work dimension. If we don’t address this issue, we may lose too many people and not even realize it until much later.

Rose C.
August 22, 2026

No doubt you have heard the expression, “Running out of spoons.” It’s for days when your energy and innate natural life force are depleted, when you struggle to get through the motions of daily life. I remember days like that when I was living with chronic anemia and menorrhagia from fibroids. If I could manage to log six hours of work time, order Pho for a late lunch, and get the aforesaid spoon into the dishwasher, it was a good day!

I’d like to add a new term to the lexicon:

“Running out of forks.”

This is for times when you have tasks in front of you that are a bit more challenging. And yeah, there is a Git reference there as well. I would be so honored if anyone ever chose to fork my projects. It hasn’t happened yet. Ever try eating spaghetti with a spoon? Sometimes, you do need prongs.

The particular reason that I’m low on forks is RSI — also known as Repetitive Strain Injury. It’s a common injury for designers, and also afflicts programmers (or virtually anyone else who puts in long hours with a mouse and keyboard) from time to time. Pain is easy to ignore. Until the point when you just can’t ignore it. Imagine the sensation of a white-hot metal wire pressed into the palm of your hand. It only got that bad a few times, but that’s why I learned to eat and do simple tasks with my left hand as well as my right.

My employer in 2022 tried hard to accommodate my injury. In fact, it went away completely for several months! I was not prepared for the extent to which the hand and arm pain came back after surgery for the fibroids (a completely separate issue). My doctor at the time warned me that fully healing from the surgery would require at least a full year. I’ve not seen medical literature to support this, but it makes perfect sense that while my body was recovering from a major surgical procedure, I would be more susceptible to re-injury. Repairing tissue takes nutrients and energy.

I received a small cash settlement for the RSI injury (equivalent to about three months of pay), which helped. The majority of my time this year has gone into planning and research around a social venture to support adults living with chronic and serious illness. The way in which my life changed completely took me by surprise. We are a mostly invisible group, but there are a lot of us. If you live alone, you are even more vulnerable. Particularly in the post-COVID era.

Regardless, I’m not here to complain or feel sorry for myself. I know exactly why the injury got bad. I was working long hours and not taking breaks, trying to reach a milestone on an old Python project. Which I met.  Now it’s up to me to rest until the pain subsides, and keep fine-tuning my ergonomic setup and exercise routine until I am able to put in something close to a normal working day. I’ll be moving back to Oregon in May.  Until then, my expenses are pretty low.

Have the budget to walk into town about every other day and grab myself a slice of pizza, a cup of coffee, or a beer. Not more than that. Or I lose my runway.

I’m grateful to have this time. Just frustrated I don’t have more forks! So many interesting and challenging tasks await. Opportunities to learn… opportunities to build… dream jobs that I am missing out on applying for…

On the plus side, I can still take walks and read books to my heart’s content. I have my energy back, which is a welcome change from life with severe fibroids, two years ago.

Most tasks are fine in moderation. I just have to be extremely aware of when I’m getting to the “red zone” and force myself to stop. I’m learning to be more strategic about where I put my time and resources. I can still do management, customer support, and coaching work until the cows come home! Too bad those first two categories are shedding so many jobs. Keyboard is ok up to a point. Anything that involves a lot of repetitive mouse work (which can include IDE’s) is a a greater concern. If I never open up another Figma file in my life, I’d be ok with that. Design comes naturally and easily to me and I love the interdisciplinary nature of UX work. By contrast, AI very much requires the command line and it’s where the innovation is happening right now in our industry.

I think in the long run, it will work out. I just wish voice recognition software were a teensy bit better. What was missing (last time I checked) was something equivalent to a sudo or vi mode where it was possible to switch from dictation to navigating with the cursor to fix mistakes.  If all else fails, that may be an area where I could make some contributions.

Figured out some hypothetical voice dictation training exercises which would not bore me to tears. The last time I made a chess reference on this blog was almost seven years ago. I’m in a very different place today, but not necessarily a worse one. (Cannot overemphasize the importance of actually getting that busted uterus removed!) Maybe dictating chess moves would be a good place to start for teaching the computer some new conventions for voice recognition.

And other people would benefit too.

So yeah, the same basic principle espoused in that post continues to hold true. I’ll figure things out.