Etiene Dalcol

⤴ Transforming user-generated content into writing hints in Polygloss

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Redirecting to https://polygloss.app/posts/transforming-user-generated-content-into-writing-hints/ …

Fragments of an anarchist anthropology

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This post is a review, summary, notes, and reflections of the book “Fragments of an anarchist anthropology” by David Graeber. This is the second book I read from him and it immediately joined the list of my favorite books. The first one I read, Bullshit Jobs, is also in my list of favorites. The more I read from him, the sadder I get that he passed away recently. What a huge loss to humanity. I can only but wonder what his future work would look like, but am happy he blessed us with his perspective while he was around.

Wow, what a book! This super short book is a page turner, I swallowed it in a couple of sittings during holidays and it was so incredibly transforming and taught me so much that now I want to keep reading more on these topics.

Disclosure, I read the edition in Spanish, so I might have mistranslated some of my notes in English. I’m also not an anthropologist and not well-versed in anarchy, so bear with me :)

The purpose of the book seems to be presenting some pathways for exploring what a foundation for anarchist theory could look like. It discusses some very big topics like the nature of democracy, the nature of work, the birth of cultures, what is a revolution, and how to make one.

What I liked about it 👍 #

It reads incredibly well, every point in the book is well connected, and the book is basically self-sufficient, meaning that hardly ever a concept was introduced without an explanation. It’s direct, succinct, and wonderful. Reading it is like reading something of the importance of Paulo Freire, but understanding it as clearly as if it were a very light novel.

What I disliked 👎 #

I would have liked if it had clearer references. I don’t think it would have made any difference to the soundness of his arguments as most references were for illustration purposes only, but some of them got me really curious and then I did not have enough information to seek the exact source. For example, at some point he mentions part of the lyrics from a brazilian popular song, and I would love to go listen to it but I couldn’t find it :(

Quick Preface #

Before I share my notes on the book, let me introduce some basic concepts to those are not familiar: what is anthropology, who is David Graber, and what is anarchism. Sources for these explanations: Wikipedia aned Graeber himself. Click on the toggles to open the content.

David Graeber

David Graeber was an USian anthropologist, professor, and anarchist activist. He was involved with the global justice movement and was one of the founders of the Occupy Wall Street movement. His main area of work was in economic anthropology, which attempts to explain human economy in a very wide cultural scope and not just limited to a small number of "modern" western societies. He wrote several books, from which the most famous is Debt: the first 5000 years. According to him, his best book was the first one he wrote, [Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar](https://davidgraeber.org/books/lost-people/).

Anthropology

Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. **Ethnography **is a method used in anthropology of observing people's actions to extract the logic behind it

Anarchism

Anarchism is a political philosophy that is sceptical of authority and rejects all involuntary, coercive forms of hierarchy. It's a historically left-wing movement, placed on the farthest left of the political spectrum, and has a strong historical association with anti-capitalism and socialism. It's important to note that anarchism is an organizational practice, not a theory. It seeks to coexist and find projects of mutual benefit. Its decentralized nature of finding **coexistence is fundamentally incompatible with having a single unified theory. **However, the fact it can’t have a single theory doesn’t mean it wouldn't benefit from intellectual analysis tools, and this is the thing Graeber seems to want to foster with this book.

What I learned from Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology #

So much! As I said before, it is a life transforming book. Below are some notes and thoughts.

Disclaimer: The writings below are not necessarily written with the best reading flow in mind, they’re for my own understanding and remembering what I read. Some sentences are directly copied from the book, not necessarily in the order they appear, and are not necessarily written down here in the most connected way. I have just reorganized some things in the ways that made most sense to me.

Click on the toggles to open the content:

Anarchism is important but not valued in academia almost by definition

The impact of anarchism in social movements is as important today as marxism in the social movements of the 60s. However, marxism still has a higher regard in academia than anarchism for a number of reasons:

Marx himself was an academic
Marxist schools are fruit of “great man” theories (marxism, leninism, maoism…), while anarchist schools refers to organizational practices (anarcho-syndicalism, cooperativism…);
Anarchism believes freedom cannot be generated through authority and academic institutions are right along the catholic church and the monarchy in terms of western institutions not very suited for practicing it.

Capitalism is optional and there are viable alternatives

Alternative organizations for society not only are possible but have already existed and continue to exist today. When people try to argue that there is no successful example of anarchism implementation in the past, that is very incorrect because it’s an attempt to reach for a concept of successful state-nation, which goes into direct conflict with the very definition of anarchism. There are, in fact, multiple self-organizing societies, we just don’t know much about them because of racism, European exceptionalism, and bizarre notions we have of what constitutes a democracy. Graeber proposes studying these viable alternatives that have been already created as contributions, instead of trying to prescribe new strategies for people follow.

He argues the field of anthropology is particularly equipped to tell us about such societies, which are typically studied within this field and not among historians or sociologists. The organizational practices of such societies are anarchist in nature, and can be called anarchist, even if they don’t declare themselves that way, because anarchy is about practice. There are communities in Madagascar that consider relations of power between people something immoral, or, at the very least, something that doesn’t belong to their culture, like something that is done by the French, evil Kings, or slave-owner. In their collective imaginary, all kinds of human dominance, including something like military work or salaried work, is seen as a variant of forced work or slavery. Even the concept of leadership is suspicious, it’s a faux-pas for an adult to continuously give orders to another.

Alternatives to capitalism do not have anything to do with a rupture from modernity

There are plenty of examples of anarchist implementation within technological western society (some cooperatives, open source projects, specific organizations). But the main point Graeber tries to raise attention to is that anarchist communities are not “primitive”, nor are they under any temporal isolation. Not only they go through their own internal changes and revolutions, they simply do not intend to resemble to a state.

There’s not a consensus on when exactly “modernity” started, but its concept is tightly linked to industrialization and the European colonial expansion. The thing is, historical sociology tries to answer the question of what is the particular advantage of the west and the answer is: basically none. Nothing tangible separates the humans of the “”modern world”” from the rest of the history of humanity (a history that typically excludes the marginal communities). The majority of issues of our “modern” society is the same as the rest of society (race, class, gender…). That means there is no such thing “cultural development”, and linking that to modern western society would imply that dispossessing, kidnapping, enslaving and exterminating millions of people is a sign of superiority.

The West is not superior

Western arrogance keeps mistaking means with predisposition as if this is a natural evolution of events, as if would be insulting to non-europeans to say others wouldn’t have done the same given the opportunity. But there are two issues with this absurd thought: we can’t say that without evidence of similar genocidal character in other societies, and we can’t say other societies did not have similar opportunities.

There were multiple groups with the power to do this type of damage, such as the Ming dynasty, for example, but the fact is that nobody else did anything remotely similar to this scale of horror. 1450 Europe was not “superior”. They were not a world leader in technological, social, financial, military (not even naval) aspects compared with many other known urbanised centers at the time. They were simply in a privileged geographic position for navigation, looted an incredible amount of wealth through genocide, then used that wealth to conduct their industrial revolution and destroy Asia’s (which had a more advanced textile industry than Europe).

To sum up, it is ridiculous to think of capitalism as just a “financial instrument”. Displacing the population of entire regions and genocide a huge chunk of the world to obtain the optimal accumulation of money or sugar or whatever in the market is more than a mere “financial instrument”. It’s extremely important to understand that there are multiple societies without money that don’t have it not because they don’t have the technology, but because they actually just don’t want to.** **Not all no-money societies were pre-technological-concept-of-money. It is incorrect to assume that their exchanges are just basic emulations of market and that they just don’t know yet how to profit efficiently. The way society organizes itself is not necessarily related to technology, there were hunter-gatherers with nobles and slaves and equalitarian agrarian communities. The study of amazonian communities uncovers plenty of societies today who are aware of fundamental premises of mainstream societies but just find them offensive or morally unacceptable.

Note: I can personally confirm this view is present in direct indigenous sources, and I recommend the books from Ailton Krenak, a Brazilian indigenous movement leader, if you’re interested in hearing more perspectives of this sort. Hopefully one day I’ll make a post about one of his books, Ideas to postpone the end of the world.

Imagining utopias is valid and desirable

One common criticism of some ideologies is that they are too utopian as if that is somehow too unrealistic or is bound to cause trouble. However, Graeber argues that desiring utopias is perfectly fine. Stalinists did not create an oppression machinery due to excess of idealism, on the contrary, the use of force was more likely caused by lack of imagination.

We could waste our times arguing if it’s possible to remove all structural inequalities, as if this doubt somehow justifies not attempting to make things better. The thing is there is no society that doesn’t consider human life itself as a fundamental problem full of tensions. Even the elimination of all structural inequalities is not expected to remove all struggle. There are multiple things that removing capitalism is not going to fix. But the societies we take our examples from don’t have to be perfect, we can take just the contributions we wish.** **

Note: Rosa Luxembourg also wrote specifically about this topic. Her goal was was to do a critical analysis given the context at the time of the Russian Revolution, not as recipes.

Every society carries the seed of their own destruction and has some form of counter-power. Counter-power exists both as resistance (counter-power seen in current western societies) and as maintenance - even when a society practices the extinction of power there are institutions to prevent its creation (“Clastrian machine”). Given changes in popular practice can happen extremely fast after a turbulence, the best explanation for it is that no change actually happened and that it was all already in the collective moral imaginary of that society. These invisible imaginary spaces is where the potential for uprising and practical change comes from.

Revolutions are cumulative processes, not single-point-in-time events

According to Graeber, we should stop seeing revolutions as some one-point-in-time events but as a continued process derived from incremental / iterative change. Replacing a system for another cannot happen as some sort of cataclysmic rupture or taking of power, as that demands creating a state apparatus - a group of people with the power to claim legitimate and exclusive use of violence. It necessarily has to be gradual. Under this view, there is no reason to take down governments. He proposes focusing instead on creating autonomous / alternative spaces or communities.

A revolution is then the accumulation of each revolutionary action. So what’s a revolutionary action?

a collective action
that confronts any power or dominance
and rebuilds social relations under a new perspective

Creating new spaces is the best way to confront power

Although academics love Foucault’s theories that force is no longer the main social control, this is proven wrong by the existence of the police. And that is the main force preventing people from taking inequality walls down. The reason why someone can go hungry right next to a giant pile of food in a big city is probably because if you take some of that food and give to the hungry person, the police might show up and beat you. An anarchist community in Denmark dressed in Santa Claus, went in superstores and started giving the toys away to kids to generate the beautiful spectacle of the police hitting the Santas and taking the toys away from crying kids. The main question here is what is the best way to neutralize the state given their claim of rightful use of violence?

In Anthropology, ethnogenesis is a concept kinda like the opposite of genocide, it’s the creation of a new social or ethnic group. Recent ethnogenesis studies are confronting the view of atemporal groups living for thousands of years in ancestral land, and revealing history under a perspective of constant change, with new ethnic groups continuously being created and dissolved. As it turns out, many of these groups resulted from some sort of collective project that largely fits today’s understanding of “social movement” around some specific value.

Theory of revolutionary exodus: proposes that the most efficient way to oppose capitalism is not direct confrontation but mass defection by those who wish to create new forms of community

The Tsimihety are an ethnical group in Madagascar that split from another ethnical group called Saklava. Although the Tsimihety are an ethnical group, their identity is the result of a revolutionary socio-political project. They were the rebels who refused to recognise the Saklava monarchy. Up until today, they are considered the masters of evasion. When French administrators came looking for workers, they would find their entire village abandoned. They did not attempt to take over power (as this would likely result in death) and migrated. There are also lessons to take from marina rice planters: pretend the government has some dignity by doing the bare minimum, and then, after that, ignoring it.

Most successful forms of popular resistance took this form, called by Paolo Virno of “engaged withdrawal”. This might explain why the history of capitalism is tightly connected to the history of creating institutions to control the movement of workforce (from slavery to border control), and is one of the reasons anarchists defend freedom of movement.

Our ideas of democracy have big problems, even direct democracy

Graeber’s hypothesis is that majority democracy is in its origins a fundamentally military institution. Our understanding of democracy was born in ancient Athens. But does this mean that before that it never occurred to anyone to gather a community to make joint decisions? We must come to the realization that we are not the only the people to put democracy into practice, and that when we try to bring democracy to the rest of the world, we are often just ruining it. There have been hundreds of societies, some of them with a lot more equality than Athens, making joint decisions. The reasons why experts disconsider such societies are racism, ignorance, or technicalities such as the fact that popular assemblies do not vote.

Every human community that must make a decision does so by a consensus process, except the ones that are based on ancient greek traditions. Majority voting rarely comes up naturally. It is a result of the following things, and in the history of humanity, very very rarely both of those things coincided:

The people has the right to speak in collective decisions
There is a coercitive apparatus to enforce decisions upon the minority who disagreed

Graeber calls for us to reanalyse the state as a complex dual relation between imaginary utopia and its reality of elitism and control. In western mythology, the ideals of Athens and Sparta are autonomy, freedom and equality; and the ideals of the Persian empire are obedience and control. However, in reality, the Persian empire treated the totality of its members a lot better than Athens treated its slaves or than Spartans treated the Helots. The Helots were the majority of the population in the region, who did not go through spartan education. They were not considered spartan citizens, they were effectively state-owned serfs.

It’s important to note that ancient Greece was one of the most competitive societies that ever existed. They converted everything into a public competition, athleticism, philosophy, tragedy and anything else, so it is not a surprise that the same applied to decision making. Each vote is in fact a conquest. If you can convince enough people to vote on you, you win, the other side loses, and then the losers either accept it or you have to do something to control them.

Consensus making is hard but worth it and often necessary

The purpose of consensus making is that nobody has their point of view ignored or violated. Affirmations that some anarchist groups and demonstrations lack a cohesive ideology doesn’t make any sense, because the diversity of opinions is a result of the decentralized organization and consensus making, and these are fundamental parts of the ideology of the movement.

Consensus seeking should never should be attained by trying to convince someone of their point of view, the goal is to reach some common agreement about what to do despite those differences of opinion. The plan is discussed and reformulate, until a proposal that everyone can agree with is reached. There are two general ways of objecting a proposal: staying on the margin (I disagree and will not participate, but will not try to stop you) or blocking (a veto, only used if the proposal violates the reason for being in this group). To avoid senseless vetos, this works better in smaller groups, hence decentralizing when possible.

This is of course, a hard thing to do and takes a lot of work. So why did societies that don’t derive their process from the ancient Greek tradition operate like that instead of voting? The thing is, in a group where every one knows each other, it is a lot easier to figure out what people want than to convince the ones who disagree. Decision making by consensus is characteristic of societies where it would be too difficult to force a minority to accept a majority decision. There must be a mechanism to impose and enforce the decision, such as a state and the monopoly of force, so a majority voting in societies without these institutions would be absurd.

In North American social movements, this sort of consensus method started in feminist movements, adapted from quakers and groups that were inspired on them, which in turn probably inspired themselves on Native Americans. Most popular assemblies today operate like that. Direct Action Network in New York and some villages in Madagascar make decisions in very similar ways, except the process in DAN is very formalized because people need to learn how to operate on it, and in Madagascar this is learned at the same time you learn how to speak.

Salaried work is problematic

Graeber has another book that is solely on this topic, which I heavily recommend, called Bullshit Jobs, so I’m not keeping any notes here. Hopefully I’ll make a post about it in the future :)

Identity politics can limit discourse

Let me start this note by saying that I’m in favour of identity politics because I don’t think that liberation can be achieved without the participation of historically oppressed groups. The very fabric of capitalism is made from racism, hence recognizing identity is important. However, Graeber raised the point of identities being used as a tool to limit the reach of discourse, and after some consideration, I agree, so I plan on keep thinking about this and being more careful about what is the place of identity.

One of the points he raises is that identities are imposed, in the sense that our own definitions are based on the limitations that oppressors put upon us. Any individual attempt to reinvent ourselves is done operating under these limitations. He says the majority of the USians would probably not know how to define themselves if racism disappeared and people really had all of the freedom to define themselves. I don’t actually agree with this analysis, but he shows a compelling example of when focusing on identity can be negative by sharing the case of the Zapatistas:

The Zapatistas are not working to create autonomous communities and advocating for a general reorganization of Mexican society. However, media, and here he includes even progressive and independent media, instead of talking about them as rebels with a radical democracy transformation goal, talks about them as mayas indigenous reinvidicating indigenous autonomy. Their identity is used against them to limit their contributions: Given they are mayans, they are allowed to recognize themselves so, but not allowed to say anything else to the rest of society that is outside of the topic of their mayan identity.

There's a paradox in anthropology and left-wing members of academia that makes them continue to propagate harmful thought

Anthropologists are the only social scientists that know of societies without state in current times, but the discipline that we know today is the result of horrible war strategies, colonization, genocide, just like most academic disciplines. However, as a discipline with direct contact with the victims, they have given it a lot more thought than in other disciplines. It is then paradoxical and scared of its own potential. They occupy a singular position of being able to make theoretical generalizations about humanity, desire, imagination, the self, or sovereignty, that takes into account all humanity and is familiarized with anomalous cases, but emphatically resists and denies to do so. Which is an understandable reaction given how attempts at generalizations have been used by right wing to justify horrible institutions in history. The result is that anthropologists them support themselves on incredibly limited European philosophers for these generalizations, as if these concepts were invented by Plato or Aristotle, developed by Kant or Marquis de Sade, as if nobody ever thought about it before outside of literary traditions of Europe.

Many anthropologists write as if they are very radical and left wing. Are they supposed to be anticapitalists? Even though it is hard to find an anthropologist that speaks well of capitalism, many of them describe our current moment as late stage capitalism, as if declaring it is by the end will help end it, it is equally rare to find one that proposes alternatives to it. Are they liberal then? What are they?

Graber says they’re ample populists, it’s just an announcement that they side with the humble ones and not the elites. This populism is done in practice by showing that the objects of study always successfully resist to some imposition, manipulation, trickery, or homogeneization from above. Their claim is that people appropriate from what comes from above and reinvent it. This is correct to a certain degree, but the problem is that it is the exact same logic of global capitalism: publicity agencies also don’t believe they are imposing, they are just making material available that the public can appropriate. It’s the rhetoric of creative consumption, and the ideology of the new global market, that every human behavior can be described as as production, exchange or consumption. This ideology sustains that what foments the exchange is the fundamentally human thing of searching for profit, and that it is equal all over the world.

⤴ Learning languages the autonomous way

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Redirecting to https://polygloss.app/posts/learning-languages-the-autonomous-way-introducing-polygloss…

⤴ How to learn languages through reading

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Redirecting to https://polygloss.app/posts/how-to-learn-languages-through-reading …

July 549th, 2019

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Today is March 303rd for many. People are still living in the same mental cycle that started along with the coronavirus pandemic. Death to 2020, a Netflix comedy by the same creators of Black Mirror, makes fun of the fact that important world events like the Australian fires did happen still this year, and not longer ago as our emotional memory might suggest. We divide time in years because seasons are enough of an event to mark the passage of time, but sometimes other events are more alluring to our perception. In this sense, quantitatively measuring time, as in a 12-month period, fits the first greek word for “time”, chronos (χρόνος), while qualitative critical moment seizing and sequencing fits kairos (καιρός). I hadn’t updated my blog since 2017, but my current καιρός started 18 months ago. For me, today is 2019-07-549.

Καλοκαίρι 🌻 #

kalokairi: summer (good+time*)

As I have mentioned in this blog before, I have been dealing with depression and anxiety on and off since as far as my memory goes, but officially since I was a teenager. It’s been an “on” moment since I moved to the UK in 2016, marked by the time I threw my housewarming party and precisely 0 of the people I invited showed up, but which was progressing to the closest I’ve been to “off” since.

June 2019 was a great month. I was financially on track to quit my fancy job and work less so I could restart the MSc I had interrupted last time I was too overwhelmed. I had not smoked for months. It was one of the very few moments in my life where I was fit and accustomed to exercises, I had run different 10Ks and was preparing to run a half-marathon. The running gave me a lot of time and focus to absorb other hobbies, like listening to audiobooks or studying foreign languages. My boyfriend and I had just spent holidays in Greece, my favorite place on Earth. Where previously had been a person with energy only for work and resting from work, was then a person feeling well enough to iterate on the life quality aspects and make big plans: finish a research masters, move to Spain, transform my source of income to something that gave me more autonomy over my time, restart building a social life.

Then one day after a run my knee felt weird, then days later, my hip, then some time after that, my back.

Κακοκαίρια ⛈ #

I had to stop running, which was disastrous for my routine, structure, energy, and focus. This was the onset of months of being in bed crying from physical pain, visits to multiple doctors with no avail, many physiotherapy sessions, and many different drugs. The pain was enough to consume my thoughts all day long, being a huge obstacle to focus at work. But I had just proceeded with my resignation and by the point I could assess my situation and seek help, I was already no longer formally employed. I still feel very naive when I think about all that, but it’s not my main point of contempt from that period of time. I was still protected by the NHS, I still had private health care, I still had my savings, and I had and still have a very supporting partner. My main issue was that being mentally healthy was already hard for me when my body was healthy, but now it was just impossible. It felt like the whole whole progress I fought so hard to gain was suddenly on the trash. And not only that, but also all my plans that had been enabled by that progress. Things got really grimm.

At some point some months later, feeling a bit better but while still in a lot of pain, I felt I just had to suck it up and start doing the contracting work I had financially planned to do. I felt things were still possible if I just tried harder. I went through a medical procedure that was supposed to fix my problems and went to Brazil so I could spend some time recovering in good weather and near my family. “Now things will take a turn upwards”, I thought. But the procedure just ate away some muscle mass leaving a concavity on my right butt and didn’t fix the pain. The time I thought I would spend back home recovering and getting some comfort turned into a new search for doctors and was occupied by more physiotherapy. Despite that, my stay there was going well. Despite my boyfriend falling and breaking a foot. Despite my dad falling and breaking two ribs. Despite me accidentally missing the deadline of a uni assignment I had in fact done just because in the midst of it all I forgot and was too overwhelmed for any resubmission paperwork. That didn’t matter because I was finally able to go on short hikes again which was a huge milestone and Christmas 2019 was lovely. It was such a happy time with my family, and I even thought I could make plans again, like having them over in London for my graduation or spending new year’s eve camping with friends in a paradise beach.

And then my mom died. In front of me. Heart attack. Two of them, in fact. She started feeling unwell so we took her to the emergency where the heart attack was confirmed and she was kept in hospital. Some days later she was feeling a lot better and was moved from the critical zone to the one I could visit, but in my first visit she collapsed and I gave her CPR while screaming for help. Nurses ran with her bed back to the critical zone while I was still on the top of her giving CPR. She woke up only enough time for my dad and my brother to see her one last time, to have a doctor reprimand her for trying to pull her oxygen off, beg god to kill her, and start seizing, which was when the doctor had to shoo me away.

I cancelled my flight back to London and spent the following months collecting and separating her things for charity, and just being there for dad, who was working on the legal/financial paperwork and spending his days busy trying to fix his car by himself. I stopped contracting but tried making myself busy as well. When I was too overwhelmed from handling mom’s stuff, I would stop and try to catch up on some lecture recordings or work on my MSc. project idea, which turned out to be Polygloss.

One of the worst parts of that time was sleeping. I had nightmares of my mom dying over and over again, in different situations, car crash, drawning, fire, you name it. In all of them she couldn’t breath and I would desperately try to save her but couldn’t. I could find ways to distract myself and pretend all day long that I was ok, but at night and in the silence there was no escaping. And there was no physiotherapy and pain meds in the world that could offset the effect of that on my general health.

Once things were more or less settled in Brazil, I decided to go back to London so I could be with my partner, try to finish my masters, and try to recover (again). That was the first week of March…

I needed so much and so desperately for things to take a turn upwards, but I only saw two friends, went to two lectures, and had two pilates sessions before the country was taken by the pandemic and everything started shutting down. Recovering in the midst of panic was impossible and my sleep only got worse. My walks were restricted to night scared walks when the park nearby was desert. I didn’t see anyone else apart from my partner. There was no way I could go back to contracting in my state and situation, so I had to prepare for a different financial situation and be dependent on my partner. And it was exams and dissertation time.

Luckily there was some miracle movement in that pilates session, which I kept trying to reproduce at home as another way of not going full couch potato, because my leg drastically improved like 50%. Another luck was that, due to the pandemic, many of the processes in university were updated, and I was able to get more time to work on assignments I hadn’t delivered when I was in Brazil with relatively little paperwork. I doubt things are going to stay like this post-pandemic, but I strongly suggest every person involved in gatekeeping help and punishing students for having concerns in life to reconsider the utility of this task in the future.

Itzamna #

Time can be viewed linearly, like in the Abrahamic world-view, or in cycles, like in the Mayans.

These last months were a sequence of gaining hope and then losing hope. In a way, I hoped that this catastrophe would give space for re-evaluating how many systems work, especially the ways in which it doesn’t properly support people in distress. I thought that such horrifying events would expose how capitalism is failing society. How the way homeless people are treated is untennable, how stigmatizing poverty is useless and dangerous, how the relationship between work and its rewards is so broken, how the suffering of some is direct consequence of the capital accumulation of others, how proper access to healthcare and proper housing is paramount, how the elite uses racism as a tool to divide and conquer, how access to information is in a major crisis despite high connectivity, how connectivity can make or break your education, how things outside work are so important, how everything is a fucking shitshow. I thought at least in some areas everyone would be forced to make some concessions, and in doing that they would realize the outcome would be so positive they could have made the same concessions since a long time ago and would continue with them indefinitely. But in the countries where I was born, live, and am heavily influenced by culturally and at my work industry (Brazil, UK and US), poor people are still being governed by the holy trinity of imbeciles and being treated like shit. The US might be out of the idiot orgy soon, but with no effects to this establishment. Western culture is fundamentally fucked.

Work as a fascist tool of control #

“Works sets you free” is a nazi slogan found at the entry of Auschwitz and other concentration camps, repeated by Donald Trump’s senior campaign adviser when advocating for removal of Covid-19 restrictions, and used in the local Brazilian variation “work builds character” by Bolsonaro when defending child labor.

I expected some major revolution in Work, during the pandemic. But nothing major changed and, unless something new happens, nothing major will. Now, maybe you will say there was a work revolution. A lot of people are working from home now. Right. Take it from someone who has worked remotely since way before the pandemic: besides the elimination of commute and some other practical aspects which I agree are very beneficial, not only there are some downsides which we need to be aware of, but also it definitely does not change the nature of work itself in the slightest. It’s still the same work as before. If you are good at your job in the office, you will still be good at your job wherever you want to be. If you are overworked and micromanaged in the office, you will still be overworked and micromanaged wherever you thought you could hide. I can make a whole blog post only about this topic, so I will not go into more details here. But it changes less things than some think it does, especially in a world that is not prepared bureaucratically or culturally for work distribution, asynchronous communication, managing flexible expectations and trusting people.

The people who have the privilege to work from home are, however, just a portion of the workforce during this pandemic. There are people working in essential face-to-face jobs, like healthcare, some of which paid so miserably people need multiple jobs to make ends meet. There are people being forced to work face-to-face, regardless of when it’s essential or not, like teachers in the UK. There are people who were laid off in mass, many by companies that grow unnaturally for fake numbers to please VCs and then use periods of crisis as an excuse to clean the payroll, only to hire for the same positions shortly after, rinse and repeat. There are people with no formal job contracts to begin with, freelancers, sole traders, small family businesses, and people in the gig economy, like hairdressers or uber drivers, where no hours of work equals no food on the table. There is no optics under which this is a good thing. I have watched my dad do enough things like go to work with a broken foot for 14 hours and take no vacations ever to have a thorough understanding that the impact of the virus on countries like Brazil and the US would be devastating without UBI or something similar.

People are being expected to risk conducting business as usual or starve as some bizarre ritualistic sacrifice to “the economy”. Given there is intentionally little time for citizens under full-time employment to organize, I would think that in places where unemployment is now through the roof and there is no aid, some uproar could happen. Something [1] [2] is happening but I’m not sure if under a scale that can overcome the stigmatizing of poverty and the still ongoing cultural notion that people must do something to deserve access to basic humanity. Certainly the fact that getting together to protest also exposes people to risk does not help. The fact remains that there is little to challenge how people are supposed to dedicate to work.

Failing upwards #

I considered dropping out of the masters multiple times. At one point I even decided I would, and contacted the university to understand my options. I explained to them I was jobless, in physical and emotional pain, struggling to study and process information, on the verge of giving up not just from the degree but from everything, that I wanted support about dropping out, that I wanted to understand what would happen to the gigantic tuition fees I had paid them, and if there was any way of getting some part of it back. I was met with an automated answer regarding the possibility to fill a form to maybe schedule a very short call with some support person some point in the future, 10 pages of links to different websites, handbooks, mental health webinars and tips like “exercise more”. I stared at the email for some minutes crying, failing to process entirely whatever was in it, incredibly overwhelmed to take any action, and deleted it.

I decided to go for a different type of giving up: inertia. “Fuck this”, I said, “I will do whatever, I just want to get rid of this, pass or not”. While the following months were still awful, for some reason this mindset was fundamental in getting me unstuck just enough to succeed on rage alone. I graduated with distinction and I will forever keep nothing but deep hatred for that institution.

New season #

I am now expected to work again and I don’t know if I can or want to make that work, so I decided I would try to find a part-time job. One can imagine this would be easy as a senior software engineer. In an industry as heated as tech desperate for talent and given the logistics of the job, this was one of the few jobs barely affected by the current crisis. However, if there is one industry deep into hustle porn, riddled with mental health issues, and very averse to the idea of taking time off for anything that isn’t making you more money or making you better at your job, that is also tech. Employers can’t even conceive the idea that someone can work part-time. Especially in the start-up world where some of my skills are a big fit (lots of early stage experience, language agnostic very generalist tech capable of tackling a product head-to-toes, wore so many hats, likes training people).

Here is an example of how one of my exchanges job hunting went. I was talking to a founder who was hiring:

“Is working part time an option?”

“No, we are looking for the first employees to build the MVP. Why part-time?”

explains that I need more time than work and resting from work

“Sorry, we are really looking for people to get the MVP out of the door.”

Most of my interactions went in a variation of that. Sometimes I internally laughed because I knew I could do exactly what they needed and more and I thought I dodged a bullet, but the fact remained I was still unemployed. There were some companies that seemed enough open to part-time to advance me in the interview stages. Still someone would eventually ask me something that hinted “would you be flexible to crunch when needed?” and I would run. Things were looking grimm again.

Throughout this year I joked about leaving tech many times, and often it was not a joke at all. I started seriously planning what I would do once I was able to move away from London. The current top-of-list is trying to start a plant shop. Other serious items in the list were coffee shop and translating, and the not so serious was retreating into some middle-of-nowhere to raise goats and make cheese.

In the end I did get two offers for part-time jobs, still in tech but not in the tech industry per se. More on that in the next καιρός…;

Recommended watchings and readings of the year:

Sorry We Missed You, Ken Loach.

Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber.

Teaching to Transgress, Bell Hooks.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty.

The open veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano.

⤴ 1 week learning Persian

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Redirecting to https://polygloss.app/posts/one-week-learning-persian …

⤴ I went to duolingo's conference

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Sat, 12 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Redirecting to https://polygloss.app/posts/i-went-to-duolingos-conference-part-1 …

⤴ 3 days learning Scottish Gaelic

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Thu, 08 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Redirecting to https://polygloss.app/posts/scottish-gaelic-and-language-jam/ …

⤴ 3-part guide to automating Hashicorp Vault

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Redirecting to https://blog.gruntwork.io/a-guide-to-automating-hashicorp-vault-1-auto-unsealing-b219970f02c6...

⤴ Language journey 2 - French

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Redirecting to https://medium.com/etiene/my-language-journey-part-ii-french-16a8eefe3877...

⤴ Language journey 1 - English

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Redirecting to https://medium.com/etiene/my-language-journey-part-i-1d8c71d51077...

⤴ Why run a conference in Brazil

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Redirecting to https://medium.com/etiene/luaconf-organisation-why-run-a-conference-in-brazil-e77424b3e0d7...

⤴ Programming languages in a castle

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Redirecting to https://blog.red-badger.com/2017/6/28/pliss-2017-programming-languages-in-a-castle...

Talking about mental health

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Sun, 04 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I read a blog post from a friend about mental health. I thought it was a very brave thing to do, because I know that people often can be judgemental about such things. However, given that 1 in 6 people experienced a common mental health problem in the past week [1], I think it's absurd that this subject isn't more normalised, along with other things that are also in my list about conversational topics that should feel normal:

Men openly talking about their feelings and supporting each other emotionally.
Periods, abortion, breast-feeding, female masturbation and many other things concerning female anatomy.
Gender, gender neutrality and transgenders.
Families that are not constituted with one man and one woman

I have not been public in the past about dealing with anxiety. There's a history of mental health issues in my family, but it's normally dismissed as being "annoying" or "crazy" instead of taken seriously and supporting to seek treatment. I never properly handled this until very recently. I still feel like it's taboo and there's a big lack of understanding towards it. I have lied about this in the past. Normally, recognising it would make me feel more anxious. Some of my friends know about it, and that's it. Few times I brought it up conversationally with colleagues or acquaintances, but not going into details about it and shrugging it off like it's not a big deal.

It is a big deal. Last week I went to AlterConf [2] for the first time and mental health was a broadly discussed topic. For the first time I began to feel comfortable talking about it. I recommend anyone interested in the topic to watch the relevant talks once they are published online. Because of that, I decided to add my own perspectives about it and make a post about mental health as well.

I suffer from chronic anxiety and sometimes waves of depression. Meaning that I have suffered from depression in the past, and I consider myself OK at this moment, but the anxiety is something that's always with me. This has affected my life in different ways:

Sometimes I have panic attacks.
I have hidden these events from my family. Being abroad, there's already much anxiety towards me, and I feared I'd make their mental health worse.
Sometimes I spend various days without leaving my apartment.
I discovered I'm very prone to substance abuse and I worry about it when I drink. E.g. drinking with friends in a party is fine, numbing myself alone isn't.
When I was a teenager I had seizures, probably from extreme anxiety (which was undetected at the time).
The seizures led me to being misdiagnosed with epilepsy and having to take ridiculously strong medicine that turned my life into shit, making me half-doped all day, destroying my grades at school (which was very heavy on me because I was used to being straight A student without efforts) and probably increased my vulnerability to depression, leading to a whole new bunch of problems.
It has affected romantic relationships in the past.
It affects how I handle contraception because pills generally make it worse.
Sometimes I have muscle twitches, nervous tics and my back can spontaneously become so tense that it will cause a contracture. It is very painful.

After a horrible depression wave incident, I actively tried my best to change my habits and behaviours in ways I'll describe later. It helped a bunch. But what actually helped was, of course, looking for professional help.

With years of feeling like shit, dropping meds, taking them again and switching doctors, I finally managed to find a neurologist that identified that I didn't need to take the epilepsy meds after all, that I was too anxious and gave me the OK to drop the old meds and take anxiolytics. That was a life changing thing to me. I never had a seizure again and I was feeling good. The doctor did prescribe them with the intention that I should eventually not need them anymore.

Once I moved abroad for an exchange program, I didn't follow this up with a new doctor. Reasons were I thought I'd be back home after one year, and somehow I felt confident that I could drop the meds after a while. It wasn't the case for either and I spiraled into a bad situation easily. Of course, I should have expected this would be the case given many other complicated things happening in my life at that moment:

Making plans while having a very difficult financial situation to solve.
Finishing a master's.
Doing multiple visa applications.
Moving a lot.
Having a shitty romantic life.
Getting to new places with new people, new jobs, new languages and no friends.
Being Brazilian, the impact of the lack of warmth of the weather and the people and other cultural shocks was non-negligible. These just are things I wasn't used to and it clearly had a big effect on my behaviour as well.

Those are things that clearly would have been difficult on anyone, but given my health situation it nearly disabled me. I eventually sought professional help, but when you're in a weird state, this too is one of the things that I started procrastinating. I really wanted to feel better, so, as I mentioned before, I did take a series of steps to help me with that. Then at some point, I felt I had it together enough to finally register at a GP and sort this part out as well. So here are the things I did***:

*** Apart from "seeking a professional", these are not advices, please take this with a grain of salt, they are just my own experience on how I handle some aspects of my life. I decided to describe this because I friend did ask me how do I cope.

Being gentle with myself (1)

I used to beat myself up for not being able to do as much as others seemed to be doing effortlessly. When I reduced my working hours while I was in uni, I felt guilty for a long time, feeling I wasn't capable. It took me some time to absorb that working while studying in the first place would be a struggle for many and that I wasn't a weirdo for feeling drained. Whenever I spent a day hidden from the outside world watching netflix in my cozy blanket, I felt like a piece of shit for being useless and not productive a whole day. This had to stop. Not the netflix, but how I thought about it. Instead of feeling drained until such days just fall upon me, often in critical weekends when I had to be doing something else, now I plan them ahead and call them resting days. I recently learned what is the "spoon theory" as well, which explains this a lot.

Being gentle with myself (2)

I'm a human being and sometimes I make mistakes. Sometimes I hurt others too. The realisation that I erred on others is what weights most on my anxiety waves, it makes me literally throw up sometimes and I have a bad time handling that. I didn't find a good way to work this out yet, but understanding that it is connected to my anxiety helps me let it go. It helps me stop telling myself that I'm a big fuckup (and continue to do fucked up things) and instead try to apologise and work it out.

I recently started saying "no" to more things than "yes"

There are many nice things I'd love to participate on, but I don't want to stress over having to do too much anymore. It is not very enjoyable if I get to that point. It is OK to turn down opportunities sometimes. I don't have to grab everything.

Being cleaner

It's very easy for me to let the mess pile up when I get home very late. I am tired after work, I don't want to do it, and nobody is going to see it. And it is very easy for me not to feel guilty about it, because I am a generally disorganised person anyway and I don't mind the mess very much as long as it is not dirty. The problem is that, by doing this, I am not considering how much the cluttered space is just not as enjoyable as a pretty cozy space. The hidden displeasure of that did cause an effect that I did not give enough credit. My room is still a bit messy and my kitchen needs some cleaning. But as a consequence of saying "no" to more things, I can do some organising or cleaning instead. I started with little things like making my bed most mornings (an activity I considered useless for my whole life), and it did cause an improvement on how I enjoy my time at home.

Listening to happy music

I started profiling the kind of media I consume. I have a happy playlist I tune in as often as necessary. Radiohead is banned for life. Maybe I should also stop watching Grey's Anatomy?

Maintaining a bullet journal [3] [4]

My memory is shit and I tend to procrastinate a lot. This resulted in me spending weeks remembering about changing my Monzo pin at 3 am, and forgetting about it the minute I passed in front of an ATM. Such things do make me feel like a piece of shit and getting me to a state where I feel I have so many things to do and I'm not doing anything, so my anxiety spikes. Turns out that when I write what is it exactly that I have to do, sometimes it is not that much. And by writing and crossing them out, I get a satisfaction. Even if I just crossed something very little, I feel like I have done something of my day, and I go to bed feeling better. The reason I preferred that over maintaining something like Todoist, for example, is that the journal can hold more things than to-do lists, the time organisation is better and the muscle memory of writing helps me retain things better. It also helps me track habits, mood, and other things. It does make me look like an organisation freak now. But I don't have the journal because I'm organised, I have to have it for the exact opposite reason. It works and I'm very happy with it.

Taking sick days at work if necessary be

Fortunately I have never been in a bad shape often enough that it caused a situation with any employers before.

Being upfront with people that matter

I just started a new relationship, and after telling my date that I had anxiety, the way he reacted was one of the factors for me wanting to continue seeing him and even start a relationship. I'm still planning to talk to my mom about this. Unfortunately I believe she has similar problems and would feel too strongly in accepting it. Hopefully talking to her about my own issues will alleviate this. Our relationship has been complicated in the past, so I'm working on trying to express this on the best way.

Taking my meds

Many of the things on this list helped me get in a good enough shape to seek professional help. Others I was finally able to do only after being treated.

Getting a support network

The worst part of having been misdiagnosed is not being able to understand what I had and not having the information to look it up and talking to others about it. It helps so much. I feel glad I found environments where I feel I can be open and hear others being open. I feel glad not being the weirdo. It gives me tools to work it out, accept myself, learn how to handle things, instead of just keep being and feeling weird.

I'd like to thank everyone who has given me support on this recently. You are all fantastic! ✨

[1] https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/statistics/mental-health-statistics-uk-and-worldwide
[2] https://alterconf.com/
[3] https://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelwmiller/how-to-start-a-bullet-journal
[4] https://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelwmiller/mental-health-bullet-journal

⤴ Lua language at FOSDEM

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Redirecting to https://blog.red-badger.com/2017/2/15/fosdem-and-the-lua-devroom...

Nannerl

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I studied classical music at a prestigious university for about 3 years. At that time, it never occurred to me to question why almost all if not all composers we studied were male. I ended up dropping out for reasons that had nothing to do with that to start a new career on Information Systems / Computer Science.

Last weekend I went to a web development conference at Salzburg, called concat. The conference was on saturday, but I actually arrived on friday. After about 20 hours taking different trains to get there, I decided to take a look at the town. I knew that was where Mozart was born so I figured I would take a walk through Mirabel’s garden and visit one of his houses before I checked in at the hostel.

The first surprise was right after leaving Mirabel’s garden. At the corner near to its exit, by a dumpster behind a building, wet with the snow from yesterday, was a small treasure. Boxes full of books. Music books. Mozart sheets. That’s just how he’s famous. Famous, known and accessible enough that beautiful books with his beautiful music are just thrown at the garbage, instead of kept as relic or given away to someone interested. The truth is anyone can find good quality Mozart’s sheets pretty much anywhere. On the internet, scanning someone else’s books, libraries, etc. So yea, I guess the original owners thought old books with some fungi just weren’t worth keeping anymore. I actually thought this would be a great souvenir from my travel. A Mozart’s book from Mozart’s town. So I got a few, threw in my backpack and continued my walk.

Mozart’s house is now a small museum. I got a ticket, the audio-guide and went through seeing the old instruments, paintings, old objects, you know the drill. And it was there, at this small museum, that I discovered something that left me speechless. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was not an only child. He was not the only musician child. He was not even the only musician prodigy child. Yeah. He had a sister, Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia Mozart, also known as Nannerl, five years older than him and also a prodigy child. I was shocked. I had never heard about her. How was that possible? At the beginning I thought I was stupid, I must have missed some classes. I had no idea but there had to be a logical explanation for this. Then I started asking some friends and realized none of them had heard about her either. I was sad.

Their father, Leopold, a professional musician with a stable career, taught both his children how to be excellent musicians. He enjoyed very much exhibiting them at courts and such. Nannerl and Wolfgang spent their childhood performing together. They were also very fond of each other. Both of them composed their own pieces. When Nannerl got to the “marriage” age, however, she was forced to abandon her career. It was not very well seen for a woman to travel around being so independent. Her younger brother was allowed to continue. Famous and acclaimed Wolfgang traveled around Europe on various occasions, joined the academia at Paris, spent years in Italy, lived in Viena. Nannerl stayed at Salzburg. While still being an excellent musician, she found comfort in giving Piano lessons and only local recognition. Wolfgang acknowledged her talent and used to send her his compositions for critique before publishing them. None of her compositions were published as far we known and none of them survived until today. I honestly wonder if some of Wolfgang’s compositions weren’t actually composed by Nannerl, much like the suspicions some experts have already gathered that some of Johann Sebastian Bach pieces were in fact composed by his wife, Anna Magdalena. Nannerl had 3 children, helped raise 5 stepchildren and died blind at Salzburg at age 78.

Rio2Brest

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Tue, 23 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Today I complete 1 year since I left Brazil to come in exchange at Brest and this has been an amazing experience. So many great things happened that I’m not really sure what to talk about. But, in the next days, I’ll make a series of blog posts about it covering different aspects, some about personal stuff or my personal growth here, some about my professional experience and some about random stuff.

Birthday party at Brest!

I'll start with my initial goals, my reasons to come and the program that brought me here.

My university back home, PUC-Rio, is very reputed, one of the best of Latin America, maybe the best of the country for my course specifically, but also very expensive. Very, veeeeery expensive. I made the exams to enter there just because "who knows" and some peer pressure, because I was sure I had no chances of going there. I was approved. There and in some other great public universities too (they are 100% free in Brazil and apart for PUC and few others, they are more reputed than the private ones). It turned out they offered me a 100% scholarship due to my family's financial condition, so I decided to go. However, even with the free tuitions, it was not free. My parents lived 2-3h away from the university, that means I'd have to move. And by doing so, I acquired debts. So I started working on my free time to pay those debts and by the 4th semester the university decided to cut 40% of my scholarship because now I had an income (my grades were always good and were actually better then for some reason). It was stupid. It didn't matter to them that it was not enough and that I was working my ass off. It didn't matter to them that my grades were great. It didn't matter to them that I no longer had that job and was back to my initial situation. Get a loan, you have good grades, you'll get a good job and pay this easily, they told me. Well, I was fucked. 40% of absurdly expensive was still sooo expensive. I didn't want to acquire tens of thousands of BRL in debt, so I started searching for options. One of those options would be contacting one of the other universities I was accepted 2 years earlier and see if I could transfer. The curriculum wouldn't be a perfect match and I'd graduate late, but it would be ok. They would also not be as great, but that would be ok. And I would still have to work my ass off to pay for my cost of living.

Booo :(

Then my dad told me "it will be ok, you can stay there, we can do it" and we made a plan. I had recently heard about the Science Without Borders program, a Brazilian program that grants selected students with 1 year of scholarship to study abroad, all costs paid (tuition, housing, health insurance etc.). So, I would apply and see what happened, get an internship to keep paying for my cost of living, he would sell his car and refinance a new one to pay for the current year and, if I was accepted to the program, by the time I got back he would have age to retire but would keep working, which meant a little extra and we would survive until I finished the university. (Dad, I know you are not reading this, but I <3 you) If I were not accepted in the program, I would then try the transfer option.

The program worked this way: First, I'd have to go through an internal process on my university, get a motivation letter, recommendation letters, do an interview and be classified by CR (Coeficiente de Rendimento or Performance Ratio, GPA equivalent). If approved, there's the next phase. We have to pick one country participating in the program, do a proficiency exam on a foreign language if applicable, then be classified by this exam and our last grades on ENEM (Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio, a standard exam we do to apply to most universities in Brazil). Most countries required English proficiency, even when that's not their official language, such as Netherlands or Hungary, because the courses were offered in English. France, Italy, Spain and Germany required their respective official languages. They did not require you to be fluent, though. If I knew just enough, I'd be alright. A 2 month course in the required language would be offered to selected applicants, no course would be offered to those already fluent.

I started to ponder what were my goals with this program. I'd like to profit the more I could from it, not just get 1 year of free studies. I decided I wanted to grow both personally and professionally. I figured Germany would be a great place for that, it's very strong in tech and I'd learn a new language. Unfortunately, I didn't know enough German to pass the proficiency test, so I picked France instead since I knew a little French. I'd study some more and if I got approved, hopefully by the end of the year I'd get the hang of it (I did! yay! :D).

So my plan worked! I got approved and sent to ENSTA Bretagne, at Brest. A little isolated, but hey, I'm not complaining. It was summer here, but it was colder than winter at Rio. Nevertheless, since I was studying and working at the same time back in Brazil, I never had the time to relax a bit. Here I'd have "only" studies to do and, for two months, I had only French classes which was light, so I even managed to get a tan on my free time. Crazy, right? Girl leaves Rio, gets tan at Brest.

Brest is famous for having shitty weather, but the summer was quite nice

MyoType and my first hackathon

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Hello, I’m Etiene and I’m an Information Systems/Software Engineering student from Rio de Janeiro - Brazil, now studying in Brest - France.

I was always a bit resistant to Hackathons. Maybe I should never have watched The Social Network or contacted the staff of Paris Coders Night. But yes, I had this idea it wan’t a place for me. Collaboration is good. Competition sounds scary and hostile. I love programming, though. I have my own lovely projects and when I came in an exchange scholarship program to France, I decided I’d try to go to one tech event per month, since Europe is more eventful than Brazil on the tech scene, it seems.

Recently, a colleague at former university PUC-Rio, Guilherme Berger, who is in exchange in the United States, added me to the Hackathon Hackers and The Ladies Storm Hackathons groups on Facebook. I realized people were actually discussing very interesting things and promptly started searching and trying to get into every HH group I found. Then I saw there was one for Europe.

When I was accepted, I made a post introduing myself and telling a bit of my journey, my insecurities and my resistance to Hackathons. Then, something magical happened: people were being so nice on the internet. I got this lovely feedback with articles about being new on hackathons, got tech career advices, and was asked if I was going to HackLondon. They were so nice I had to say yes, specially after I heard I could apply to partial travel reimbursements (Jessica and Joe, if you are reading this, you are awesome). So I got into the waiting list, bought the tickets to travel and started searching a place to stay on friday night. Now listen how these people are nice: they even found me a couch for friday night (Josh, also awesome). Hacklondon begins: I’m kinda lost. I had this idea that all Hackathons were around a theme, so it was useless to think of possible hacks before I got there. I was wrong and started panicking a little bit. We could choose anything and I had absolutely no idea what to do.

I found my team by chance. There was this meeting right after the opening ceremony with everyone that had an idea but not a team, a team but no idea or nothing at all. I found out these wonderful guys and we started wondering about ideas. Ian wanted to do something hardware related and I was pretty resistant to that. I really wanted to do something social. Other ideas were to do something food related because the just-eat sponsor prize was pretty cool. At some point we actually passed through some kind of food tinder idea. We didn’t get to a consensus so we split up a little bit, taking a look at the sponsor’s APIs and other tools the event offered. After getting the Bloomberg API to work I started seeing some cool data about women and career, the rest of the team liked that but they pointed something interesting out: So we get the data and then what? We just show it? While the data is really important I don’t think this makes a cool hack (It could be an awesome blog post in the future!). So we got back to square one. I spent hours thinking we sucked (no we don’t and MyoType is the best team ever! I just didn’t know then). Csongor was playing with the Myo that Ian brought in borrowed from MLH equipment. By dinner time I was still not satisfied, part of the team was walking around, part of the team was stressed, but also part of the team was being so supportive.

Then, during dinner, it hit me. I had this idea, what if we used Myo to type? It could help people that struggle with typing on tiny keyboards. I told the idea to the guys, they seemed to like it and I was so happy! I got this wave of excitement thinking I was some kind of genius. I was so deeply satisfied that I went back to my laptop running. Now, thinking it over, it was the first thing Ian said, plus the first thing I wanted, combined. Something with hardware, something social. And the typing idea did not come from nowhere either. I mean, at the time it seemed like it did. But then I realized I’ve actually been keeping tiny bits of information about this subject without noticing. And I tried to trace it back every time I interacted with something related to MyoType.

Here are some references that were helpful for me to build this project: Just few days ago I saw the Theory of Everything, which showed me in a very emotional way a little about the struggle that Stephen Hawking went through to communicate. Just few weeks ago I saw Gleison Fernandes, a Brazilian computer scientist, in the news. He has cerebral palsy and he invented this interactive keyboard with big buttons to facilite the life of others like him on typing. It was so expensive he gave up patenting to make it more available to people. I remember being so impressed both with his invention. My friends told me, a couple of years ago, about the Steam Big Picture, for chatting on Steam while using a game controller. And I remember thinking it was so cool. And, finally, the oldest thing I could recall, the saddest movie I’ve seen in my whole life, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon. It’s a film that tells the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, a french journalist that acquired the Locked-in syndrome due to a stroke and wrote a whole book by blinking.

This taught me a valuable lesson: Ideas don’t come from nowhere. Just sitting and thinking hard won’t do it. We need to be open and we need to be in contact with information related to the stuff we are interested. Not in a 5 minutes google search. All the time. And it will be even easier if it’s something that gets to you. Something that touches you. And then at some point, all that information comes together and something “clicks”.

So we started developing MyoType. From this point on, my memory is a blur! I just remember being so tired and alert at the same time. Me and Jakub started testing the first keystrokes using Myo. After getting a small prototype done, I took a nap. The guys kept working on the design and a duckduckgo integration. We started bug hunting, adding a backspace feature, I tried improving the flow of the scroll and suddenly everything was fine! Now it was the time for submitting and preparing our pitch (Sorry for panicking, guys <3). The tools we used overall were: Myo , a bracelet for controlling gestures; Lua Programming Language, the awesome language used in Myo’s API; Javascript, to scroll the characters on the website; HTML and CSS for the website’s design; Duckduckgo, to redirect the input text to a search engine; And git + github, to work together and share our work.

I’m very happy with what we achieved during this Hackathon. I’m not sure if MyoType itself would have any real impact, but it’s a very cool prototype, it taught me so much, and nothing stops the continuation of this idea later on. It’s so inspiring and I’d like very much too see more hacks like that. I’ve been reading articles that reinforce that hackathons are not about prizes and I’d to think that in pretty much the same way it’s not about making a new multibillionaire social network app. Hacks don’t need to be enormous and profitable. They need to be inspiring and useful, specially if the utility is making you learn something new.

When MyoType was announced to be in the 10 finalists I started shaking. So much I couldn’t even hold my laptop on my lap. Then Fares tells his story about coming to the UK and feeling different and all. And it’s so relatable to me because I’m going through similar stuff in France right now. So I started crying! I mean, holy crap, the feels! I really have no idea how I didn’t just freak out when MyoType was chosen as Best User Input hack. Specially with all the twitter love we were getting. If you want to see how MyoType works, check the video below:

I'd like to take a moment to thank again everyone who made this possible: Jessica Crossby, Josh Tigger-Simpson, Joe Nash, Fares Alaboud, and all the rest of HackLondon's and MLH's staff; the rest of MyoType's team Ian Denev, Jakub Fil and Csongor Kocsis; and my mom, whom I miss so much and is back in Brazil exagerating my acomplishments to the neighbours.

The social responsibility of engineers

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

There are mistakes and mistakes. Medical doctors, when they graduate, make an oath. There is an organization in charge of analyzing mistakes because it’s something of a tremendous responsibility. Sometimes I have the impression that engineers forget about their social responsibility as engineers. A product may kill people. A mistake in a transportation that causes an accident may kill people. An airbag failure kills people. A programming mistake in a spacecraft costs a gazillion dollars and, if it’s manned, kills people.

However, engineers are free to think any bullshit they want, and say these same bullshits in an professional environment without any consequences. Almost as if engineers had no responsibility at all with human life, just with machines and counting bits. This must end.

Why you should be pessimistic

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Do you know what makes me depressed? It's not reading pessimist literature, I don't care. It's reading 100-year-old very well analyzed social critic and improvement suggestions not yet addressed today. Sometimes, we figure something out ourselves and ask "why doesn't x work like y?" and get upset that nothing seems to change. So, we tend to see our generation as discoverers, and the one that will change everything. But then, how does it feel to learn that this thing has been already figured out 100-200 years ago or 100 years before Christ sometimes? How does it feel to realize that people could have learned this since a long-long time and nothing seems to have changed since!

Generation after generation, we are fighting the same battles over and over again. So the problem is not the people, but society construction, which is so difficult to change. And it feels like I won't be alive to see a minimally healthy and happy society and perhaps nobody will ever be. I like to take Kinsey's books about sexuality (1935) and Darwin's theory of evolution(17th century) as examples. Here we are, 2014, and there are still people around saying homosexuality isn't natural, polyamorous are wicked, HPV vaccines will take little girls into promiscuity and that the theory of evolution is "just a theory". And they are so numerous that Fox has to create a TV show to explain to people why it isn't "just a theory". C'mon! Are you kidding me?

I understand pessimistic writers. It does sound like the optimistic literature of yesterday generates pessimism today. It is extremely devastating to see that wisdom has been around and nobody seems to care. This is partially the reason that, although I prefer calm times, that I trust the power of fights, demonstrations and action! I'm not saying that I despise all the book writing and the quiet and peaceful attitudes, that would be way too hypocritical, as you see, I'm writing in a blog! But I do think something else needs to be done, it's not enough, almost as information needs marketing. And we can compare that to the same way disinformation has been doing this since forever to circulate money into their pockets. So why not use marketing positively? This is a tricky thought, as some people are used to see lawyers and people who work on publicity as devil incarnations. But hey, we are all for progress and openness, right? So if you are included in this group, I advise to give them a second chance.

Back on the subject, general optimism can be dangerous and political pessimism can be necessary. It's okay to think thinks will get better and have hopes on progress, but we shouldn't avoid pessimism because criticism moves changes. Please note that I'm saying well developed criticism with thought, arguments, counter-arguments and not empty shaming and blaming (that takes nowhere). And it's necessary to interfere, roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty. If we have any progress at all that's because we have few firmly believing we will be granted nothing unless they do the hard work themselves, and that's the real deal. We can't hope without those who don't.

The Sailor web framework

dalcol@etiene.net (Etiene Dalcol) — Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is an introductory text about Sailor and how it all started!

I’m a student at PUC-Rio, home of Lua programming language. For some reason, Lua has more recognition abroad, being used in very known softwares such as World of Warcraft, Angry Birds and MediaWiki, and is not a popular thing here. How is it possible that in the the very same university where researchers designed a programming language people don’t try to use it whenever possible? Maybe I’m being stubborn, but I firmly believe we should pay more attention to home-grown stuff, specially when it’s well designed open source. Everyone benefits from widening the use of Lua. If it’s used more often, improvements will be encouraged, the community will grow, it will be easier to find examples and support, PUC-Rio will have more recognition, its researchers will have more recognition, its students will have more recognition. And that includes me.

Looking from another angle, here I am, at Lua's nest. I studied Programming Language Semantics with Roberto Ierusalimschy himself, Formal Languages with Hisham Muhammad and Basic Software with Ana Lúcia de Moura. Let's say I'm in the right place, in the right time and can get in contact with the right people so easily. It's an opportunity to see what's going on on first hand and I'd be so foolish if I didn't learn something about it before I graduate or leave Rio de Janeiro.

So I decided to go on an adventure and develop something real using Lua. My learning curve goes much faster this way. Also, most of my experience as a programmer resides in web development. To make my learning process even easier, why not unite both? And that's how Sailor started. My adventure turned into a lunatic kamikaze thing as I'm seeing Lua for the first time AND building a fully functional MVC web framework at the same time, but it's hella fun!

Yay!

Sailor is completely free to use and open source. If you want to check it out, use it or collaborate, here's the website and the github's repo:
https://github.com/Etiene/sailor

EDIT #

Sailor is no longer in active development…