One of the great privileges of academic life is travel. As someone who grew up relatively poor, I never imagined that I’d see so much of the world, as my family’s reach was wherever we could drive, and the once-in-a-childhood flight to a theme park. But since I started my…

This piece is a bit tongue in cheek. I’m serious about it, but also writing it with the recognition that there are much bigger challenges right now in trans rights than feet and shoes. So consider this a frustrated musing on mundanity of trans inequity and injustice. In an impulsive…

Last fall I was fortunate to get an invitation from the wonderful Mary Shaw and Jim Herbsleb to do a short sabbatical visit at Carnegie Mellon. This sounded great professionally — Pittsburgh is full of wonderful scholars of all kinds, and it seemed like a great way to reconnect with…

My sabbatical is slipping away. It feels like just a few weeks ago I was coming back from a wonderful sunny vacation, preparing for winter, and finding a pleasantly low stress vibe in which to carefully and thoughtfully try to build a more just world. My winter was wide open…

For those stumbling upon this, note that peer review is not my main jam. That would be design-oriented scholarly envisioning about more equitable computing futures. Consider this a passionate digression into academic wonk in service of that mission. I occasionally write about peer review (A Modern Vision for Peer Review…

My first SIGCSE Technical Symposium was in 2013. I can’t understate how much has changed personally since then. At the time, I was just past tenure and promotion, just leaving my startup, and just beginning to realize I couldn’t run from my gender identity any longer. I was just starting…

I have days darkened by despair. Mostly not for my own plight — despite my struggles with self loathing, I float in a fragile bubble of privilege that keeps me relatively safe. But for the plight of my people: the trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming folk of this Earth, and particularly…

Most that know me well know that I have a bit of a contrarian streak. I’m always interested in taking the other side of a debate. I generally see a lot to gain from an iterative Hegelian thesis/anti-thesis discourse, even on topics for which I have strong beliefs. Sometimes this…

I do not like hype. Perhaps it’s the skeptic in me, always seeking to question a claim, to look for evidence, to examine closely before making a judgement. This stance on the world means that I’m often last to accept dramatic change and first to question it. There is nothing…