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My mission for today was to apply for health insurance for next year through our state health exchange website. Last year I went through this process and ended up calling the call center to help me through the process because it was confusing. Most of the questions are designed to be easily answered by people with simpler life situations. They know what their job is next year and live in a suburban house with their children. I however am a millennial that lives at home and I have no idea what I am doing for work next year as I continue to apply for things. I do not quite fit into the box they designed.

One of the most useful and underrated things you can do to be more efficient with your computer is to learn keyboard shortcuts. Some of the ones I use regularly include Copy, Cut, and Paste with CMD+C, CMD+X, and CMD+V respectively. CMD+Z is undo in almost every application. I also have keyboard shortcuts I have mapped to easily add information to programs like OmniFocus and Fantastical. The number of shortcuts can seem overwhelming at first so I recommend trying and learning a few at a time. Apple has a useful list of shortcuts.

A year or two ago I learned about and started using GitHub. I have not put many of my projects on my GitHub account because some are properietary and confidential and others are not ready yet to be public. In Chemistry class we learned about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the idea that observing a phenomena changes it. I believe this is as much the case with software development as it is with electrons. So one of my new resolutions is going to be to do more of my development and projects in the open. Hopefully this will push to me to be a bit more organized, less lazy, and to document more. As a part of that I updated my first repo so that it is easier to digest and included a PDF of the presentation I made to the Civic Hack Night group at SeeClickFix back in March.

For e-mail it is both the best of times and worst of times. Tools like GMail and Mailbox make it super-easy to sort and process it. Companies have figured out how to use it in interesting and effective ways like sending me my airline boarding pass or a map of the Uber ride I just took and its cost. I receive some high quality newsletters from Connecticut Mirror, CTNewsJunkie.com, and Popvox.

So I have not had the time to sit down and write a proper reflective post on 2013. Things have been in flux over the past couple months but I recently was offered the privilege of working for the Connecticut Democratic Party for the 2014 election cycle. While I had spent time extensively searching for legal work, and going to numerous interviews, the market unfortunately did not present an opportunity that fit well with my legal interests and background. I helped out at the state party for a couple weeks leading up to the 2013 election and enjoyed it very much. As the party’s new Deputy Data Director I get to use my technology skills, and many of the analytical and research skills that I honed in law school.