Humanizing computer work

Roger is working on a computer all the time

I started this Tumblr about a week or two after I started working at 18F. This had been my second foray into remote-work life and I was starting to really miss some of the aspects of checking into an office building everyday and having living-breathing humans around me that weren't my living-breathing reflection in the mirror.

So I considered it important to start doing this publicly.

I had found out about lolcommits from the Meetup's Hack &
Tell in NYC back in 2011. I had been mesmerized by how simple the concept of tagging your likeness to a commit would make for better signing of commits than a GPG key. It made what I do on the computer more approachable.

I would tell friends that I hacked on something over the weekend, and didn't have anything to show for it. It was either a script or a tweak to my system that I couldn't really show off. But showing people a series of pictures taken while I was working on said thing was always easier to show off. More human too.

So I continued from job to job and project to project collecting .lolcommit/*.[jpg|gif] along the way.

That remote life

So once I moved from NYC to RVA, I found myself in a predicament. Jobs in Richmond weren't all they were promised to be, and I started looking for something else I could work with. So I did what I think most people in my situation do. I started working remotely. Freelancing at first, and finally landing my first full-time remote job at 18F.

This is when the real need for something like this came up. I needed a way to both keep myself sane and express myself to my new coworkers. So I updated my clone, merged with upstream, and found myself with all these glorious plugins that hadn't always been available. So I installed the Tumblr one and wrote about how to set it up.