Week 6: Recovery

Time: 02/21-03/01, 9.9 hours

Topics: Tech Startups and Entrepreneurship, The Pros and Cons of a Remote Internship.

Tools: Prismic, Gatsby.

Summary:

This was another week of sick-staying-in and getting better. It was getting warmer so I went for walks in Washington Park to soak in sunsets. In my journal on March 1st I wrote:

“I’ve mostly recovered—my throat is a bit itchy still. It’s warm enough to sit on the porch behind my apartment and journal as the sun sets on Woodlawn. I am thankful for the sky and the sun and the wind. My heart is full. There is time to play the piano, time to cook and time to mend and clean. Time to spend with loved ones—time to listen to Twain on the porch, and time to visit the belugas at the aquarium." 

In terms of my progress with the marketing site, I couldn’t figure out how to nest different Prismic objects, specifically, I couldn’t get a ’team-member’ object to be associated with a blog post, as an author. I organized the relationship on Prismic correctly but was having a hard time querying the database with GraphQL. The closest I could get was the author-id appearing but I wasn’t able to fetch the next level of data (e.g: the name, and meta information). 

Tech Startups and Entrepreneurship: Because Wunderite was a part of the Techstars Boston 2020 cohort, we had access to Tooploox, a software development company that was an associate with Techstars. Each participating team had a number of hours with Tooploox to help with anything from web development to product design. Peter reached out and put me in touch with Rafal, a react front-end developer at Tooploox who helped me get pass this author blocker in no time. Rafael helped write some query magic to fetch the team-member object within a blogpost object. The startup world is incredible! Participating in Techstars with Wunderite is a true privilege and an amazing opportunity to engage with the Boston startup community.

The Pros and Cons of a Remote Internship: Dr. Karen Johnson in her paper Placing Vocation, warns of the tendency for white evangelical Christians to live in "cultural captivity” by surrounding themselves with people like themselves. It’s difficult to write about living in Woodlawn without describing the odd inescapable pressure of the lessons on cultural and historical context taught and discussed in the classroom that seems to invade all interactions with neighbors and locals. I found that I felt distanced, self-aware, and foreign after learning about the patterns of white-flight, disinvestment, and speculation that have plagued Woodlawn. It was painful and to walk past someone I lived near to and know what difficult and systemically racist land they walked on. Because I was working remotely for Wunderite without consistent interaction with my physical community, this distance between me and my neighbors seemed more exaggerated. I made plans to work in a community garden that spring.