Matt Bowen

At the IRS, the accessibility check was known to kill projects right before deployment. Thanks to Jared and a small team of dedicated practitioners, Direct File’s was chill and collegial. We are lucky to get to learn from such a dedicated and skilled practitioner.

This makes my night. Some of the best (and most ridiculous) work I ever did is in that repo and now it’s not lost to time.

This honestly is a good chance to reflect on some of the things that make opsec on signal hard for everyone, including activists: 1. Managing who is in a group has tough UX and only gets harder as people make their identities ambiguous 2. The group’s security is as good as its sloppiest member

Like do you know who in your group has installed signal on a work computer? Or on a personal computer they never update? Do you ever discuss anything sensitive in a long-lived group? How regularly do you audit that group’s membership?

We had my daughter’s parent/teacher conference this week, and I felt a genuine sense of gratitude for her IEP. Seeing an attempt to shut down the department of education, I worry others won’t have the same support. A thread. 1/

And now we start to see why the GOP wants rid of Ed. Ed, like the IRS, acts as a federal counterbalance against segregation with tax-shielded (or literal tax) dollars. Opposition to Ed has always been couched in the same "state's rights" language as segregationist politics. time.com/7225339/hist...

We had my daughter’s parent/teacher conference this week, and I felt a genuine sense of gratitude for her IEP. Seeing an attempt to shut down the department of education, I worry others won’t have the same support. A thread. 1/

That support was invaluable and, while I could quibble with the formality of the IEP process, it truly felt like care, and like we lived in a society that values people as they are. It breaks my heart that support like that will be one of many casualties in eliminating Ed.

We had my daughter’s parent/teacher conference this week, and I felt a genuine sense of gratitude for her IEP. Seeing an attempt to shut down the department of education, I worry others won’t have the same support. A thread. 1/

For us, this felt remarkable. Like everyone else, we'd had COVID happen to us, and it caused us to make decisions we wouldn't otherwise that set Janie back. At no cost to us, we got to talk to experts who helped figure what help Janie needed to catch up. Then they have delivered that help.

We had my daughter’s parent/teacher conference this week, and I felt a genuine sense of gratitude for her IEP. Seeing an attempt to shut down the department of education, I worry others won’t have the same support. A thread. 1/

In 2023, we learned I did not carry a specific gene mutation (and so neither would Janie) and could re-assess our risk, so we enrolled Janie in pre-K. It was a big change for her, and the teachers let us know she was behind in a couple places.

We had my daughter’s parent/teacher conference this week, and I felt a genuine sense of gratitude for her IEP. Seeing an attempt to shut down the department of education, I worry others won’t have the same support. A thread. 1/

Some background: my daughter Janie was born in 2019, and we took COVID isolation VERY seriously from 2020-23. We had reason to believe we had a scary comorbidity, so we really avoided seeing people indoors. Whatever we were doing worked well, since Janie didn't have even a cold from 2020-23.