Chris McCormick

Nearly three years ago I wrote:

Prediction: within 3 years the stylus will be the killer feature of Android tablets.

Since then I've felt a little embarrassed remembering that post. Grand claims, ha ha!

With the recent announcement of Apple's "Pencil" I feel somewhat vindicated. I got the details wrong but I think broadly speaking that hand-drawing, sketches, doodles, will feature strongly in the future of human-to-human communication. Maybe even more strongly than typed messages for some people.

• I'm thinking about the 16% of people worldwide who can't read or write, but who are rapidly adopting hand held technologies where they can draw.

• I'm thinking about the tens of thousands of years of human beings using sticks as a technology for making marks upon a surface.

• I'm thinking about the popularity of emoji, the universality of pictographs, the cross-cultural and language-independent nature of the medium of drawn communication.

• I'm thinking about my kids and how the second thing they learn after talking is drawing.

Maybe one future is a world in which many of our planet's population do a significant fraction of our communication through the medium of doodles.

miniCast is a self-hosted web app for listening to podcasts.

I wrote it while learning ClojureScript. The back-end API is written in PHP. My friend George came up with the name and design.

This is late.

I feel grateful because this year when my daughter said to me "I want to be a mummy, not an astronaut," I was able to tell her about Anna Fisher, who in 1984 became the first astronaut-mother in space, and to show her the stories and images online of the several astronaut-mothers who have followed her into space.

Anna Lee Fisher by Bren Luke.

I feel grateful this year to Jess Frazelle from Docker, who wrote an honest blog post that reminded me of my privilege; reminded me how lucky I am to participate in tech and open source communities without friction and harassment; reminded me of a hidden strength and fortitude exhibited by amazing people all around us that I can aspire to; and reminded me that there is always more work to be done to make the world a better place for all humans.

I feel grateful that I am not alone in thinking and wanting that our culture can change for the better. I'm grateful that the internet can amplify the voices of people like Jess, and counteract the Friendship Paradox every time somebody speaks up.

I am grateful for the writing of bloggers like Pamela Fox and Liza Shulyayeva and Nicole Reid who demonstrate the technical, evidence based counter-factual to every trolling Hacker News comment.

As I do every year, this year I feel deeply grateful and so very lucky that my parents bought our Apple IIe when I was eight years old and that my mother taught me to code.

I feel grateful to have worked, and to continue to work beside amazing people who every day prove that smart, capable, technical people don't fit a stereotype.

The stereotype disagrees with reality, and so it is wrong.

Scout and I picked up a Lego table for $25 last year. One of our favourite pastimes lately has been making Lego things together.