To this date, schema-dts is the only side-project I have that achieved better-than-moderate success. It took several hours between the time I had the idea for schema-dts and when I had a reasonably working v0.1. I pulled an all-nighter—something that I hate doing and would never recommend—not out of sheer passion, but because:

• I knew how rare a moment of inspiration is, and
• I knew that if I went to sleep, I would never finish this project; there’s a graveyard of unfinished projects haunting me.

How helping on a film set led to me down a serendipitous path, publishing a new open source library, and getting an IMDB mention.

About a year ago, a friend asked me—along with some others—to help as extra hands on set filming the second season of an absurdist comedy mini-series she was working on called Look it Up.

Originally published on Medium, see Reconsider! here.

There is an empathy gap with how many academics and others view the issues happening on college campuses today.

Bernie Sanders flip-flopped too, and that’s okay. People keep mentioning Hillary Clinton’s shifting on issues as a mark against her, but as she explains, this is only evidence that she is a person who responds to new information and develops their opinion, not a block of granite. Sanders, too, has shifted left on race issues and gun control in the past several months. This is a wonderful thing.

I wrote on Medium about the Evolution of Bernie Sanders on Race. Please read the full post there.

As a Middle Eastern expat, I’m in the position of observing a more diverse spectrum of reactions and attitudes to advancements in civil rights. The United States Supreme Court ruling on Orbergefell v. Hodges generated a lot of such reactions. As I think of the long arc of the moral universe, I feel it is more and more important to bring to light a few issues that the many social conservatives around the world hesitant to call this a victory should keep in mind.

When we look at the advancement of humanity in the past 10,000 years, we often view most shifts since the beginning of civilized recorded history to the modern day in a positive light: Inventing tools, cultivating lands, building shelters, creating governments, abolishing feudalism, creating democratic governments, abolishing primogeniture, abolishing slavery, giving all racial groups the vote, giving women the vote, ending racial segregation, promoting equal-opportunity employment, etc.