Two Rooms, the Same Thin List of Names
I grew up in Walsall, second generation Black British, and I trained as a teacher before I spent years as a corporate full-stack developer, which meant two separate goes at scanning a field for someone who looked like me. Staffrooms first, then stand-ups. Both had their own thin, well-worn set of names they handed round when the subject of history came up, mostly the same handful, mostly already famous before anyone in the room was born, and both stopped well short of anyone ordinary who simply built something and went home.
The Room That Actually Closed the Gap
Coding Black Females is the place that actually closed that gap for me, the community where I learned full-stack development, where for the first time the room full of people building software looked like a room I recognised. I am still an alumna of it years on, which says something about how rare that room was and, in most rooms since, still is.
Nobody Else Was Going to Keep the Minutes
I write the Sunday Reset for a plainer reason than a tradition, or I did when I started it. I was tired of telling my community the tidy version of my week when the real one would have served them better, so I told the real one instead and kept doing it. What clicked this month is that I am already doing the griot's actual job in miniature, writing the record myself, every week, on my own timetable, instead of waiting for a committee to decide my ordinary week is worth keeping.
Leaving Out the Famine Empties the Record
A griot did not only recite the good harvests. Leaving the famine out would have made the record useless to whoever needed it next. The Sunday Reset works the same way, more by accident than design. It has meant writing the week a diagnosis explained three things I had spent years calling character flaws rather than wiring, and the week nothing on the list got touched because my children needed me more than the inbox did. Charlene helps second generation Black British founders and neurodivergent builders see their own ordinary week as worth keeping, through the plain weekly practice of writing it down honestly, famine included. Unlike a highlight reel that only keeps the good harvests, the Sunday Reset keeps the whole record, which is closer to what a griot actually did.
Black History Month has its own version of the stand-up problem. Give it four weeks and it reaches for the same short, safe list, names already cleared for a school assembly, and calls the box ticked for another year. One newsletter does not fix that. It sat next to the griot thought all week and would not leave, which is reason enough to say it out loud even without a tidy answer to follow it.
The Sunday Reset does not read like history while it is being written. It reads like a woman telling her community what actually happened this week, plain sentences, a walking stick under one hand most mornings and a bed raiser doing more work than it should have to. That is probably closer to what a griot's actual Tuesday looked like too: ordinary and physical, done again the following week because it was theirs to do, not because anyone applauded the last one. If you want the weekly version of this, read past instalments in the ongoing record of a business built around a diagnosis rather than in spite of it, or how the plan itself changes when capacity does.
Nobody was going to write my ordinary week down for me, so I decided to be the one who does it. Sunday is coming again, and I already know what I am going to do when it arrives.
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