about

Hi! I’m Wendy. I recently made a career switch from software engineer to writer, a move that was sparked by reading lots of books at a time when my startup was tanking. Now I mostly write about the horrors of Silicon Valley and why tech workers need to organise. You can find an index of my writing here.

my programming origin story

I started building websites when I was 12, making heavy use of the popular Copy and Paste Code From Other Websites method. My first few websites were cheesy and terrible so I’ll spare you the details, but one website was popular enough that I found myself managing a small but vibrant community of users, using the open source bulletin board software phpBB. As a result, I spent a lot of time in the phpBB support forums, and eventually picked up enough web dev knowledge to start answering other people’s support questions—not always accurately, but it was a great way to learn.

I no longer run any phpBB boards, but I owe much of my current interest in computer science to that community, which welcomed me aboard as a moderator—and, later, as a member of the website team—even though I was a clueless 15-year-old who had only just found out what Linux was. My early programming experiences consisted of modifying phpBB installations, which was probably not the best way to learn PHP, but I persevered and eventually discovered languages that are not PHP.

In 2014, I graduated from McGill University with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science. I still make cheesy and terrible websites on occasion, like when I registered the domain howdoi.land to show a perpetually flying martlet using CSS animations (still one of my proudest accomplishments). These days, though, I don’t have much time to write code; the code I do write is primarily for a personal project designed to help me retain information from the books I read, so I haven’t animated any martlets in a while.

things people occasionally ask

random technical details

email newsletters i subscribe to

I subscribe to a ton of email newsletters covering a mix of tech, econ, culture, and politics, on substack and other platforms. It gets a little overwhelming at times - keeping up with all this content is almost a full-time job - but it’s a good way to stay up-to-date with what’s going on in the world. (last updated sometime in 2020; I’ve since horrifically fallen behind on email)

website archives

(Sections of this website that have been relegated to the archives.)