Despite working in tech with an engineering title, my only degree is a BFA in Film and Animation. While some schools emphasize critique in their film programs, mine was more technical and hands-on. That meant I was shooting 16mm film by my second week, organizing set crews by my second quarter, and did everything from directing commercials to writing my own imaging codecs.

It’s also how I learned about foot-candles.

I have a tradition of writing down my accomplishments from the past year and sticking them on the wall in my favorite depression zone-out corner to comfort me in the winter.

This year, I thought I would share the results. It’s a nice way for people to catch up with my recent shenanigans, as well as a chance for me to categorize and reflect on the parts I liked the most and would like to continue in the new year.

Perhaps adopting this tradition will help you, too.

For the majority of my life, I was not a social drinker. Not only did I abstain from alcohol, but also any sort of caffeine not found in a good hot chocolate. I made it through high school, college, and the first years of my professional life without a beer, latte, or late-night crunch energy drink.

Some of it was personal morals, but most of it was personal taste. I would sip friends’ drinks, make a face, and return to my water and cake. I was fine with this, because I was staying true to myself. And the people worth keeping in my life didn’t care. But I knew I was missing out.

About a month ago, I had the pleasure of taking a tutorial led by the fantastic Brendan Gregg on creating FlameGraphs using the Linux perf toolset. I recommend reading his many blog posts on the subject, but in short: while perf is an excellent resource for debugging kernel and user space processes, FlameGraphs make the data even easier to consume.

Now, if the process you’re trying to profile is Java, there are some extra hoops to jump through, which Brendan has also detailed online.

But if the Java process is in a container, it’s even more annoying. That’s where this post comes in.

On Monday evening I launched a Teespring campaign to raise money for Outreachy, a fantastic nonprofit that helps underrepresented people in tech find internships. The shirt in question reads “‘LADIES’ IS GENDER NEUTRAL” and is only offered in women’s sizes. However, I presented the women’s sizes as unisex and replied to requests for men’s sizing with phrases women have heard many times.

This rustled some jimmies.

Regardless, the campaign took off and, as of writing this post, we have raised over $2k for Outreachy. Many people jumped onboard, excited to turn the tables on the many uses of “guys” as a gender-neutral term of address.

However, “ladies” is not gender-neutral. Neither is “guys.”

That’s the point.