Volunteering - The Source

My company gives me a few days off and the Friday before last I volunteered to do food shelf work in the hood where I used to work near Nicollet and Lake. I worked that area for almost ten years?  Darn close, doing all manner of typing and cleaning.

Here's our crew.  Small.  But we don't have a Twin Cities office, so that constrains our size a bit.

We spent a lot of time moving bulk produce into family sized bags, about two pounds each.  My hands got stiff prying apart bags.  Whenever we finished up a shopping cart, it was back to the pallets to refill it.

The Source does pop up food shelves, meals, and more.  It's quite the enterprise.

Almost done with a shopping cart.

I think my neighbor donated all of his pears last year to a food shelf.  It's cool to see fresh fruit being packed for families, not just prepackaged food.  The guy in the gray hoodie has lived in that neighborhood his whole life.  We got to talking and he once got a flu shot at Third District Nurses when they were in the neighborhood. I was handling checkin/admin work for that event as we only had one ever.  So he and I met over a third of a century ago.  We didn't remember each other.

Success - an empty cart.

Afterwards, those of us who could stay went over to Eat Street Crossing.  There's a bit of a disconnect between going out for ramen after loading up food for folks, but sometimes you just have to deal with the dichotomy of your actions.  Eat Street Crossing is several restaurants under one roof and has been there about a month.  It was a great place and I'm going to justify my food shelf to eating out path by hoping that new employers in that neighborhood contribute significantly to dealing with income and hunger issues.

Some coworkers enjoying pizza and vegetarian ramen.

My ramen was not vegetarian.  But it was delicious.  They had very lean pork instead of fatty pork.  My wife would approve.  I like this picture as we have a local celebrity in the background.

Feed My Starving Children

This last week I did a stint at Feed My Starving Children in Eagan with a bunch of Minnesota co-workers.  There's no office here; we're all remote.  Originally we all thought there were five or six of us, but the total is closer to twenty.  Eight showed up for the event over lunch [Alteryx does give us a couple of days of paid leave to volunteer each year. Historically, I log them, but tend to make up all those hours and volunteer a lot more than 16.  That was the case at Thomson Reuters as well.  I will say, it's not back patting.  I'm not incredibly passionate about any one thing and I really respect people who are.  My area of focus is - and here you can see the disparate nature of it: kids with diabetes, kids with brain issues and cancer, adults with Alzheimer's, bikes for kids, food for kids, planting trees and clearing parks, medical services in Uganda, Movember which I don't miss with my porno mustaches, books for prisons, school supplies, food shelves, MS of course...ah, checking my LinkedIn for recorded memory: teaching kids Python, teaching teachers Python, teaching classrooms about tech jobs, hour of code, Garlough kids reading to me, teaching kids about economics and practical skills, coordinating volunteer services for several thousand coworkers, and putting in some volunteer hours on the corporate donation match and time match systems I originally created and maintained for more then a decade until we went with an enterprise system.  It's more about me and variety and meeting new people, so in the end it's a little selfish.]

I've done Feed My Starving Children a number of times.  2008 with a Thomson Reuters crew.  2013 with some of Aeryn's classmates [some of whom were coworkers at TR].  2013 again, and a few years around that watershed in both directions, as I worked with the TR Global Volunteer group to have FMSC come to TR so we could have a few thousand people volunteer instead of a few thousand people travel to the packing site.  They just drove a semi full of tables and tons of food and supplies down into the underground parking garage.  I specifically remember labeling bags the year I couldn't walk so well because of the busted hip and pins - e.g. probably 2012.

This was a particularly fun instance because there was a group of challenged adults from Dundas.  Maybe Epic Enterprises?  I think I heard that name while all the chatting was happening.  They were a great time.  Super friendly and really supportive of each other.  I spent more time on their line then on our Alteryx line as we firmed up our stations.  The majority of my time was heat sealing bags of food.

Here we are, busily packing.  I'm way over in that far corner of the photo.  I'm disappointed you can't see the blind co-packer on my line.  He was the most upbeat person I've met in a long time.  Cracked jokes, Didn't spill a grain. Told stories.  Made me smile the whole time.

Cleanup commences.

Cleanup well underway.  That woman near the incomplete packed food because it wasn't quite enough for a box was so nice.  A real joy to talk to. She's staff at Dundas.  

Here we all are post-packing.  I had my hairnet off already, although it's not like I have a lot of hair to net.  Was cool that Christina showed up.  She was my recruitment friend at Alteryx.  A year ago or so she was looking for a job after a stint at Kowalski's in Eagan where she worked with my kid [they even played board games together].  I put her in touch with a couple folks in the ML space I knew locally. However, eventually she went with Alteryx, which I'd been interested in because I knew a little about their product and found it super intuitive for non-coders.  So when I realized my time at VP needed to end, she was my reference.  It was good to realize some of the locals had been with the company almost seven years as well.  That means the commitment to a certain amount of remote work has always been there and isn't just a symptom of the covid era that will disappear the way some companies are trying to position it.  Anyway....great time.  I really need to get over there a bit more often.  It is uplifting to know my food was headed to Columbia to shore up malnutrition and starvation.

IGH Career Day 2019

I did the middle school career day over at IGH again this year.    It's four twenty minute presentations on what it's like to be an IT/Application Development Manager.  I'm always worried everyone is more prepared than me because I try to give it with no power points, a few white board drawings, and it varies from presentation to presentation.  There are cops there with K9s some years, and firefighters dressed in their gear.  Best I could do is bring an app.

My outline generally goes like:

• Hello, I'm me. IT Managers go by a few names.  I build apps.  I like my job.  Most people with my job have a CompSci degree and were developers.  I was in history/writing/English.  I know devs who were lawyers, bioscience majors, and travel agents.
• I work for a big company that most works with lawyers and judges and the government, but we have reporters who are amazing as well.
• Anyone's parents work with me?  It's a big place.
• You're all familiar with apps.  If you get to the credits at the end of a game (Far Cry) or a movie (Avengers of some sort) you'll see those huge lists of people after the voice actors and actors...a manager helps pull all those things together to get a product out in time, although usually within a limited scope.  My scope is IT.  But that's more than just developers...
• There are folks in quality/testing, PMs, big data, databases, ops (dev ops), business partners,  R&D, security, other kinds of development...I don't coordinate all of them, but I talk to all of them to make sure what's being built is what everyone imagines.  We have to agree.
• On the dev side, for my big company, the levels are software engineer, senior software engineer, lead software engineer, and then architect or manager.  That can change from time to time and place to place.  Then I talk about how much all those roles make because that's the most exciting piece of info I have for some of them.
• I've seen a lot of apps over the last 20 years
• Mainframes and build it on your desktop
• Distributed, but I could kick the server if I wanted to
• Distributed , but the servers lived on the other side of the campus in a plane-proof bunker
• Cloud, and the bunkers are in different regions
• APIs where everyone is back to building it on their desktop, but all the expensive pieces are now cheap and in the cloud.
• Patterns often remain the same from app to app and how to coordinate work, even if the underlying architecture changes.
• What's exciting about what I'm working on.
• There is a supreme court, district courts, state courts, county courts, even city courts.  Add up all those docs and you get hundreds of millions.
• Extract the entities and pertinent data, and you get hundreds of billions.
• Extract the relationships and you're in the trillions.
• You couldn't do that with books.
• Now you get a super cool chart/visualization that shows all that data distilled into a time to rule or other way to make a decision.  That saves them money.  Saves the customer money.  Means the law should be more affordable and accurate.
• APIs mean you can give that power to a lot of developers who may create something you never imagined by mashing up products.
• Questions
• Best one was "is it easy to make something" which prompted a bit more talking about APIs and crowdsourced apps and how cheap the cloud and new tools make it if you want to run it at scale.
• Do you know my mom?

It's a lot to fit into 20 minutes, and I usually take them to minute 19 before we get to questions.  But they almost never have questions, so I guess that's ok.  I was impressed this year that they weren't playing with their free fidget spinners (one presenter was in sales) - very well behaved.  The teacher told them it was nice to be back in 2015.

Litterati

I'm chair of the community volunteer committee this year.  One of my favorite things about being on the committee is hearing about all the volunteer projects others know about that I've never heard of before.  For example, the brother of one of the committee members runs a site called Litterati.  The concept is to use Instagram to take and tag photos of trash (that you pick up and throw away - you don't just leave it there) so that it becomes a bit of a game.  Boss asked me if it had any practical application beyond feeling good and potentially adding a badge system to make participants feel any better.

I kicked up a copy of the trash collected around our place of work and showed him the path of trash that followed the sidewalk between the front doors and the far lot.  By looking at the trash pattern we could tell my co-worker was a later to work sort of guy, but also that our workplace could benefit from a few well-placed trash cans at the midpoint.  Or, it could be seen as an experiment and compare trash-over-time.  The same could be done with parks.  Where concentrations of trash were observed might be optimal spots for disposal systems or for focusing cleanup efforts.

Tags can include brands and composition as well so there's an opportunity to determine the origin of common sources of trash.

And if you like trash porn, well, there's lots of that.  I wasn't previously part of Instagram, so I warned folks that I would only be using it for trash (so far they've been treated to trash before the Lego movie outside the theater and trash at Chipotle), but a number of Facebook friends still asked to follow me.  Good luck on that. You might as well follow the Litterati Instagram pull.

Cool site.  Cool idea.  If there was the idea of teams, challenges (find a plastic bottle, a cigarette package, and a gum wrapper), and/or badges (100th cigarette!), it would top notch.  Reminds me very much of the allure of geocaching.

Popcorn!

I'm part of the Community Volunteer Committee at work.  A few weeks ago we were supposed to hand out popcorn as part of our onsite corporate picnic/summer get together.  There was a baseball theme, so it seemed like a good idea.  We'd hand out bags of popcorn with instructions on them about how to record employee hours in the corporate giving database, encouraging better record keeping so the data is there to create better volunteer programs like our corporate matching and volunteer days.

But the company that rented us the popcorn machine brought a nonfunctional machine and we had to bail, although we were stuck with 5000 printed popcorn bags and all sorts of cases of popcorn and oil. So today, over lunch and when they were having the beer on the terrace event (a first to my knowledge), we attempted to use up our supplies.  Two beers drive a real desire for popcorn.  I spent two hours handing out popcorn during lunch and during the end of day beer event and have my first real sunburn of the season.  And a real burn.  I bumped my hand against the electrical connector that leads to the popcorn popping pot (say that ten times fast) and have a very prominent blister on my right thumb.  No photo of the blister.  It's gross and I'm sick of injury blogging.

Here's the cart.  Very ball game looking.  But it says NOT to use an extension cord or plug it into a generator, so that illusion of being able to roll around and serve popcorn is just that, an illusion.  You can roll it around, but not if you're trying to pop popcorn at the same time.  It's one or the other.  All that popcorn on the ground is my fault.  I tended to overflow the bags so they were extra full.  If you  had a bag, don't worry, I carefully washed my hands first and never touched my face, or anything else, during my serving stint.  I was very germ conscious.  Beautiful day for it, as you can tell.



My shadow looming toward the popcorn machine.  The spirit of volunteering.  What a wonderful metaphor.  Because I'm all about touching metaphors.