Recap: 2025

I want to start off this little recap by stressing that I know I am privileged. I have no doubt. I have had a wonderful year, full of friends and adventures. The world felt like it had begun to disintegrate in 2025, and yet I found a universe of hope in it, too. I had a packed year. In some ways, I look back and wonder how I got anything done at all! I got to visit many amazing cities all over: Anaheim, DC, Miami, New York, (a secret location), Vienna, Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, and Auckland. 10 big city trips in one year? I’ll probably never top this. And honestly? It was a bit more traveling than I would have wanted. But it was lovely. And Shelby got to tag along for all of these trips, at least in part, except for Miami (which we had both already done together years ago). But 2025 was good. I think any one of these sections below would have been a highlight of a year, so 2025 was really just dozens of years in one. The early months: Pure horror (and SIGCSE crushing my soul) Jan - Apr I won’t write too much here, but the first two months of 2025 were painful. Trump taking office, the cuts to research, ramping up ICE raids, the overall social chaos that ensued… it was not good. It still isn’t good (and in many ways worse ), but it came as a bit of a shock at the time. And SIGCSE happened in Pittsburgh (that’s the Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education). There was an all-day workshop on accessibility and I got my admission paid for by CMU because I had a short talk accepted. I was starry-eyed to be able to attend. Many people I have looked up to for years were there. These were the people I had hoped to come into community with (transitioning from industry to academia was hard, but transitioning from visualization to accessibility has been even harder). My talk was okay. I was nervous talking about how I am a practitioner who researchers with practitioners, and how education matters for my work. I am not sure it landed with that crew (again: accessibility folks are lovely, but getting “in” with the academic community is quite hard when you’re not totally aligned with them already). I could tell it didn’t land because not a single person was remotely interested in talking about practitioners learning. My takeaway is that “CS education” is very clearly, culturally speaking, about formal education and not all of the other settings where education takes place (for better or worse). I also won’t unpack my insecurities here, but I had a conversation that filled me with so much impostor syndrome that I was physically depressed for a whole month after. But the real theme of the day emerged as time went on. The big concerns for everyone were about federal cuts to research and the impending Title II changes for public universities. (So, in some way it really wasn’t a big deal whether or not my talk was informative/helpful/etc. That doesn’t mean my impostor syndrome didn’t flare up, though! I felt very “corporate” and like some kind of non-academic in that space.) Adobe + Quansight collaborations Jan - Mar Good news about the first two months? My collabs with Adobe and Quansight were both going really well. At Adobe, we were working on some neat stuff for their open source library. At Quansight, we had just openly published our 200+ page evaluation of Bokeh’s accessibility . That report is a big deal. Nobody has openly shared something like that before, which is pretty special. Travel: Anaheim for talks at CSUN, finally good donuts, and some much-needed sun Mar 10 - 16 CSUN happened. (CSUN is short for the California State University of Northridge’s Assistive Technology Conference.) I gave a talk with the Highsoft folks (with Ted Gies from Elsevier) on our work making visualizations more personalizeable. This was the pre-paper-talk talk on our work I dubbed “softerware.” I think it went well (at the very least we all had fun). I also gave a short talk about my work in a session on making diagrams more accessible. Stevie Wonder makes an appearance almost every year! I didn't take a photo personally, so credit to this shot goes to Paul Adams over on linkedin. And Shelby and I finally had good donuts, after years of not being able to enjoy some together. Trust me when I say that Dunkin has destroyed good donut culture everywhere except the west coast. God bless Los Angeles for holding strong against the sloppification of donut culture. (For the record, we got a wide variety from the Donuttery in Huntington Beach. 10/10 donuts.) Real donuts, not that hog wash garbage they sell at Dunkin or whatever crap seems to be popular at those places that sell over-topped donuts for 6+ USD each. These were classic and utterly flawless. I hope to go back someday. Thesis proposal (I passed!) Apr 18 I passed my thesis proposal! Woo! (5 days before my birthday, a present to myself hehe.) I had fun, despite having pretty cerebral engagement by my committee (Huge thanks to Dominik Moritz, Patrick Carrington, Ken Holstein, Jen Mankoff, and Tamara Munzner). One of the best parts was “camping out” and completely unplugging in order to get my thesis proposal written in time. I don’t have pics from this part (because of the unplugging), but it was very nice. I hope to turn this into a tradition for future writing sessions, if I can. Next time, maybe a cabin on the top of a mountain or something would be nice. Travel: Washington DC for a talk at UMD and a very good day off Apr 29 - May 1 Joel over at UMD’s HCIL invited me to give a proto job talk, which I very much enjoyed. Everyone was generous with feedback, even critical. I had another bout of impostor syndrome here because I was asked (in regards to my mention of my tech industry funding), “why not just get a job in industry? why work in academia?” It’s a hard question to wrestle with, especially when the temptation to return always exists (and especially with the current state of things right now). But academia does think a bit too highly of itself. The desire for a “pure” environment where people pursue theory and knowledge unbounded by profit or military incentives is something we would have in a healthy environment. But we don’t have that! And asking someone (whose work is very much not profit-driven, like myself) why they don’t get a job that “makes money” in industry is essentially asking someone why they are doing the work they are doing at all. (Accessibility work is something that many companies want, but few are willing to fully fund for themselves. I cannot do the work that I want to do full-time in an industry role, unless it is explicitly set up for “foundational” and not “product” focused research and innovation.) Shelby and I also enjoyed a great evening + following day in Washington DC. We did museums and then poked around Georgetown (and went to a really lovely cat cafe!!). Pycon in Pittsburgh May 16 Gave a wonderful talk, with Pavithra from Quansight, at Pycon US, which was in Pittsburgh this year. It was great to talk to the Python community about accessibility and visualization, which is something that the Python ecosystem (writ-large) has not really considered. You can catch our Pycon talk on youtube , if you want. Travel: Miami for a talk at Outlier, board games, and cuban bakeries June 9 - 15 I was invited down to Outlier in Miami, both for a talk on Softerware (this time expanding from my CSUN talk which was what we did into why and now what ). Outlier was packed with amazing speakers. I am honored to have been one of the ones who could steal the stage. You can find my Softerware talk on Youtube . For context: Outlier is the premier, boutique industry conference for data visualization. In the past we had Eyeo and Tapestry, which were both centered on non-corporate explorations of data visualization. For the most part, this allowed the community to really experiment, celebrate, and innovate in beautiful ways. We don’t quite have that anymore, but Outlier is close. I had a paid trip to…