Hi friends,
Another weird week. And it’ll be weird and scary and distant for a while to come. Last week I saw more people than ever on evening walks, which warmed my heart. Me and all my neighbors sang happy birthday to my little neighbor turning 7, from across our backyard fences while her mom held her birthday cake. My partner started working from home full-time for the foreseeable future, which is an adjustment. I donated blood with a group of friends to help stave off the anticipated shortage. I worked my already-remote software job – sometimes effectively, sometimes pretty uselessly.
I’m feeling lucky, worried, anxious, panicked, bored, isolated, distant, loved, helpless, overwhelmed, guilty, angry, hopeful, and plague dread(ful) (The Atlantic).
I’m sure you’re feeling lots of this too.
So today I just want to share a few things.
I’ve stayed awake at night and zoned out during days thinking about what I can do. I’m privileged to already work a fully remote job, that’s still pretty stable compared to other industries under these circumstances. Where do I put my time and money and efforts best to do what I can? I made a list to get it out of my head, to refer back to, to share with others. Please respond to this email or tweet me if there are other things you’re doing to help. I would genuinely love to know, and love to hear from you.
Me and some other Gatsby team members hopped on to an idea that our co-worker Bob Orchard and a friend got rolling. We built a Gatsby theme (hit MVP yesterday) for people to spin up city-specific resource index sites. Bob built seattleservicerelief.com, I got up austinservicerelief.com, Duffy got up denverservicerelief.com, etc. We have no idea if people will actually use it, but we hope it’s helpful, and it felt good at least to work on it. Basically it’s a ready-to-go codebase that integrates with Airtable (like an online spreadsheet/database service) as the data source to for resources and info the site will show, enabling anyone to share resources without needing to touch code. We’ll put it out more widely next week, and maybe some folks will use it.
Kurt and I finally ended our unplanned podcast hiatus. We recorded our first new episode a few weeks ago (when the world looked a little different than it does today). We plan to produce more content specifically around topics related to health and self-care during this strange time. But for now, if you’re interested in hearing us discuss the hiatus and have a personal conversation about our experiences with depression, please tune in for that new episode.
I wish you all well in this strange and scary time,
Amberley