Today is February 1st, which is important for many reasons.

Today is Superbowl Sunday (go SeaHawks!).

Today is the first day of Black History Month.

Today is famed writer and poet, Langston Hughes’ birthday.

Due to the first reason, (Super Bowl) I will keep this post short. I got chips and hotdogs to eat. But in honor of the 2nd reason, I decided to start a blog series about black tech and media entrepreneurs. There are some out there doing great things in technology and media. This is dispite the statistics that show underrepresentation by minorities in these spaces. Since I believe that Black History is really American History, I will use this month as inspiration to start a series to highlight some of these entrepreneurs.

In honor of Langston Hughes birthday, I will not let my dreams be deferred. Instead, I will celebrate those out there making a difference and blazing a...

Even though its pretty early to be in bed on a saturday night (11 pm), I am awake watching a movie, Being Flynn. The movie is about a lot of differnet things, but it is written from the perspective of a writer. And one phrase keeps sticking out to me, “Life is about gathering material”.

Makes me wonder if I am making enough effort to gather the material of life that I hoped to have. I became an anthropologist, partly to help tell the stories of people that may not have their stories told. Now I feel that I have grown lazy in that pursuit. I have learned a lot, and grown a lot, but what about the stories out there in the world? What is happening with them?

More importantly, am I living a wide enough life? One of the reasons I wanted to become a software engineer was to change my life. I am in the very beginning stages of doing that. Part of changing my life means, for me, to be...

I wrote and re-wrote the code to get this very simple thing working so, I decided to dedicate a blog post to the walkthrough that I wish I could have found when I googled.

Here is how-to on setting up a mailer in Rails 4:

But first, check out the rails guide on mailers. It is thorough and helpful. But for some reason I couldn’t quite get mine working by only referencing the rails guide. So here are the steps that I took to (finally!) get my mailer working.

1. Generate your Mailer
Mailers are like controllers, sort of. Like a controller has a model and view, so does the mailer. A controller renders a view (using HTML), and a mailer renders a view using (SMTP). So instead of a web page, you get an email. In order to generate a mailer, you use a generator like how you would for a controller.

rails generate mailer MailerName

If you want to create a mailer with certain actions when...

I know that this is strange. Trust me, it feels strange. But, for some reason learning to become a software developer has also made me want to be a better writer.

Maybe it is the inordinate amount of time I have been spending in coffee shops. Maybe it is the freedom that comes with building something from the ground up. Maybe it is the joy of being able to do work that I am passionate about. I can’t quite put my finger on this connection….but somehow it exists.

It started out small. More like, I have been coding all day non stop so lets take a break and publish a blog post. But the it grew. It started to turn into reading and writing about technology, going through challenges, making a way for myself. Now I see that this urge to write, to be a writer is becoming a real thing on its own. Not in opposition to my work as a developer, but as a compliment to it.

It could be that in...

I recently watch The Actors Studio and heard Hugh Jackman say to the students, “your job is to tell the truth about humanity because this is one of the last places where that exists”.

Something about that statement clicked for me. Its one of the reasons why I love acting, art and music. This adds a link to connect this disparate love of art to my overly analytic scientific self. It all goes back to my early childhood dreams of being a Mad Scientist and and Actress.

When I was 5, if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would say “Mad Scientist….and also an actress”. To me one could not exist without the other. Why be a scientist if you couldn’t be mad? I imagined beakers overflowing, rules breaking and new discoveries. And of course I wanted to be an actress. Not only did I spend several weeks re-enacting movies I watched (in full costume), but I forced my little...

Today I had my first kickoff meeting to start my new project as a freelancer. I am getting paid and everything. It is exciting, and a bit scary, but definitely something that I have been wanting to do for a long time. When times got hard at The Iron Yard, and I wanted to give up, I would think about how someday I would be able to work for myself. And really…what better job security can you ask for.

As I sit here in a dark coffee shop, laptop open about to crank out some code, I think that part of that little dream of mine has come true. There were many many days that I sat in an office cube thinking, I wish I could just work from home, cause I knew that I would get so much more done. Now, at least for now, I have that very chance. I couldn’t be more grateful.

I won’t lie and say that I am not scared. I am, I want to make sure that I not only fulfill my dev duties, but that I handle...

So the last couple of days have been kinda hard. Ironically, I am coding better than I was probably just a couple weeks ago. But it is getting harder and harder to stop. By stop I mean stop coding.

In the month or so since I have completed The Iron Yard, I have coded almost 90 percent of the days. And when I code, it is an all day thing. I try to limit myself to 8 hours, but its hard. After a few hours away I keep thinking about my problem and I just want to go back and finish it.

The good part is that I have learned a whole lot. I think that some of the stuff from class has really sunk in. Especially because I have been working on cleaning up old projects and making them nicer so that they can be added to my portfolio. Even concepts, like MVC, that I felt pretty solid on have continued to make more and more sense to me. The bad part is that my brain is getting tired.

I have...

I recently had the opportunity to Interview Patricia Sunderland and Rita Denny of Practica Group, LLC, for the New Books in Anthropology Podcast.

If you would like to hear our interview, you can check it out here.

This handbook is a lot more like an anthology. There are 5 different sections, separated by topic, and over 60 articles. The editors chose to include works from disciplines outside of anthropology that employ anthropological techniques, such as ethnography. Really a great resource for anyone straddling several worlds all the while working in business.

You can see my interest.

The interview was great. These ladies are so easy to talk with, it made for a smooth conversation. Its not often that I get to talk with a professional with interest similar to mine, who have made their business work so well.

One thing I was most impressed with was that their group has operated...

This is how my thoughts flow. Almost like an attack, but more like a waterfall…a sudden rush. I like to think that I started writing a blog because I felt that I had something important to say. Or even, that I had an important journey to chronicle. Those things may be true, some of the time, but this rush…that is the real reason.

I needed a means of getting some of this out of my head. It can be a lot, dealing with his rush. Especially if I don’t have a constructive way of understanding it. That is where the blogging comes in. Like my friend, my confidant, my journalism, my war correspondent, myself.

I like to think that in the end….. I am really a storyteller. That everything that I do is really about just creating and telling a story. I mean, who doesn’t like a great story? Its the reason why I watch movies, its the reason why I root for the underdog. I love science, math...

So this isn’t a post about creepy crawly things….well not really. Its more metaphysical than that.

I have always had an affinity to snakes. I know its weird but I just have. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want them lose running around waiting to bite me. I am not crazy. But I have had a sort of fascination with them. I love that they shed their skin. I think its great that they are always going through a rebirth, and that they have the foresight to change out of the surroundings that literally don’t fit them anymore. We humans are not always this insightful.

Plus, snakes have been known as the knowledge givers. They have been associated with knowledge since ancient times. That is why there are snakes going around a staff, as a representation of medicine. It is also the reason that there was a serpent (not necessarily a snake but I don’t want to get too particular) in the garden of...