Tag Archives: mental health

Jeneral findings

Jeneral finds of the week: 2015-05-31

This week’s finds: the grace of mastering code debugging, mental health, and a commencement speech that is staying with me. 2015-05-31

  • If you’re not a developer and don’t know what debugging other people’s code is like, this particular post “An Arrival” describes the process with particular poetic elegance, using the analogy of going on an archeological dig quite effectively.  The writer is someone who is a newer code developer, and building on her skills and experience.
  • The Globe is doing an excellent in-depth series on mental health, “Open Minds”. I have members of my family with mental illness and so it’s always encouraging to see more public discussion taking place about this. This personal account from one of the Globe’s business reporters really affected me, as he is a similar age as me with a young family:  “Niall McGee didn’t believe in depression—until cancer medication put him in a suicidal spiral“
  • It’s graduation time across the land, and celebrity commencement speeches are in the news. This lead me to read for the first time the 2005 commencement speech by David Foster Wallace. A powerful read that is still making me muse. “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” —This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. 

~Jen

Jeneral findings

Jeneral finds of the week: 2015-01-18

I know I’m a day late, but here are the good/interesting/provoking finds I’ve stumbled across this week: 2015-01-18

  • This  NYT article is written by a woman who decides to test whether this test done by psychologist Arthur Aron twenty years ago is a successful recipe for falling in love with someone. In its essence, there are a series of 36 increasingly personal questions, that the two participants are to answer truthfully with each other. While certainly no magic potion, I can see how this can transform the whole courting period into just a few condensed, powerfully intimate sessions. And in the intimacy, love can bloom.
  • There is a history of mental illness in my family, and while my family discusses the occurrence of it pretty matter-of-factly, there is not so much discussion on the actual challenges of care and agency of the person who is ill. Reading “My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward“, from Pacific Standard Magazine, is food for thought in this regard.
  • This interview in Wired with Ruchi Sanghvi, “Facebook’s First Female Engineer Speaks Out on Tech’s Gender Gap” is great to see, as a high achieving minority woman in the tech sector. A tiny bit of diversity, but big in terms of inspiration and as a role model.

~Jen

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