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Me

Who I am

Community Maker
I've done community development work for a lot of years, both just the social piece in online spaces and the more placemaking type stuff as a volunteer/activist. I run r/CitizenPlanners and launched Eclogiselle in Fall 2020, a development resource for small communities.
  • I have a Certificate in GIS from UC-Riverside, one of the most respected GIS programs in the world.
  • I'm a few classes short of a BS in Environmental Resource Management with a concentration in Housing.
  • I'm interested in the built environment, environmental issues, tech stuff and things where those intersect.

Writer
I run a bunch of websites on a variety of topics and I have worked as a freelance writer for years. I also edit resumes.

Homelessness Subject Matter Expert
Most of what I know about homelessness comes from a college class from San Francisco State University called Homelessness and Public Policy, 5.7 years of sleeping in a tent myself and years of writing about the topic.

"Health Nut"
In May 2001, I was diagnosed with a serious genetic disorder. I was not quite 36 years old. Getting a correct diagnosis was very empowereing and I've been getting healthier ever since.
  • I'm currently drug free. (But I'm not anti drug. Instead, I'm pro health.)
  • My condition is managed with diet and lifestyle.
  • I'm interested in things like genetic research, gut microbiome and "bio hacking."
Miscellaneous
  • I have a multi-cultural background -- German/Irish/Cherokee -- and I never quite fit in anywhere.
  • I'm a former military wife and homeschooling mom of 2xE kids.
  • I spent a few years as a single mom with a corporate job at the insurance giant Alfac.
  • While homeschooling my kids, I was the Director of Community Life for The TAG Project during a time when they were trying to become an officially incorporated non-profit, an effort they later abandoned. I was the lead moderator and in charge of diversity initiatives, among other things.
  • In spite of being American, I have been car free for over a decade.


Last Updated August 26, 2021.

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Sticky This: See a typo? Submit a pull request.

For the first time ever, I submitted a pull request yesterday to an open source project notifying them of a typo. It was accepted within hours. Submitting the pull request was easy and took almost no time. The process of submitting it gave me valuable prompts, such as "This field is typically no more than 50 characters." I've been on Hacker News for over eleven years. I began wondering how on earth I can contribute to open source as a non-coder a few years back. I've talked to other non-coders who were just as mystified as I was -- or more mystified -- as to how on earth you get into open source as a non coder. So, no, it isn't just me. I spent probably a few hours yesterday trying to sort out how on earth to notify them of their typo. It took me far, far longer to figure out what I needed to do than it took to do it. This is a huge barrier to entry and will stop most people before they begin. Most people simply can't give you three hours of their t
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Me. Woodward Park, Fresno, CA. January 2016.

My favorite pic of me that's sort of recent-ish. (No, you aren't lost. As of June 1, 2020, DoreenTraylor.com redirects here.)
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My First Pull Request Was Approved! Huzzah!

A few hours ago, I submitted my first ever pull request . I mean to something other than the Hello World project Github walks you through to show you the basics. It has now been approved by the maintainer and merged. And, wow, I need to get this off my chest: You programmers are completely unnecessarily scaring off non-programmers from your Open Source projects. This is how this went down: I saw a piece on Hacker News that interested me and I opened it up to find that it was a Github repository. I began reading the documentation and noticed a typo. One of the titles said "Funtion" instead of "Function" in it. So I was like "I would like to tell them." Now the last time I wanted to tell someone in Open Source they had a typo, I left a comment on Hacker News to do it. They did fix it and apparently took some of my other advice as well. But this time the article didn't have a lot of comments. It only has two, in fact. So I felt like le
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