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This past weekend was the Connecticut Democratic State Convention in Hartford. When I was younger I attended the state convention all the time and even had the opportunity to go on the floor as a delegate once. Now that I live in Cambridge I have to watch this through the eyes of others. It was a surprising challenge.

After years of learning new things in fields like business, law, and software I have learned that the biggest variable in understanding something is the quality of writing and communication. Communicating well is hard and in technical fields not enough value is placed on good writing. Communities like Ruby are lucky to have folks like Michael Hartl and Sandi Metz that are gifted with the written word. All things being equal I will typically choose a tool or programming language that is better documented than one that is new and shiny.

The other day one of my co-workers mentioned that she feels like she has a lot of free time in her life. This is one feeling that I struggle to relate to lately. I have been working to try and liberate time where I can. Despite doing this I can tell I am still a bit behind on the basics. My email inbox still needs to be tended. I blog a few times a week instead of every day. I am not able to do everything I want and it is tough.

By far the mode of receiving information that I find most challenging is the meeting (actually the conference call is a bit worse). Lucky for me government runs mostly on meetings and I now attend a lot of them. As evidenced by this blog my home field for communication is writing. When I have in-person conversations I often later forget things or I miss details. Despite all my efforts to avoid meetings and communicate that they are a terrible method of communication for me, it is challenging to teach old dogs new tricks (in this case the “memo” or “note”).

I have been spending my past week at work learning React for the purpose of making an interactive website and overall have found it to be one of the easier Javascript frameworks to master. A key component of this is React has well written documentation. Despite the complexity of the concepts, they are fairly well explained. Given the current popularity of React there are also plenty of third party resources and StackOverflow posts on React related topics. It is clear that React has the wind at its back.