New blog focus

I'll still talk about tech related topics in this blog, but my main focus will now be commentary around politics and various thoughts around being a person of color in this country. With this new era we are finding ourselves in with COVID-19 looming like a sickle above our heads, old inequities in our society are being revealed and reproduced again, with working class people of color bearing the brunt of the load with barely any PPE and rarely much of a voice.

Where do I fit into all of this? All things considered, I'm doing okay - I still have a job in tech, I live by myself, and I've got appropriate PPE for someone who occasionally walks over to the grocery store. However, I'm also Filipino-American who has a phenotype that teeters between looking Latinx or looking more East Asian depending on how the light strikes me that day - hearing accounts of Asians being assaulted, spat on, yelled at, even doused with acid (the list goes on) has made me weary of my immediate safety every time I step outside of my apartment. Accounts of NYPD violently arresting POC while handing out free masks to white gentrifiers in Domino Park have made the rounds several times over.

COVID-19 has also touched a bit too close to home: there's several people I know who've gotten infected, a few who passed away due to complications around the virus, and others who work the frontlines every day.

With all of this happening right outside of my apartment, it is hard to ignore - that is why I can't blog just about tech related issues anymore. Or rather, I cannot just blog about solving X, Y, or Z engineering issue in a vacuum - there's a lot of interrelated issues that's much more important in my mind, and I think maintaining a blog that seeks to understand some of those issues is a much more important endeavor than sticking just to professional topics.

I'm hoping to have more to post on this blog shortly - I've let this blog rot for way too long, it's time to revive it with other content.