Hey! I'm Carol.

2018 in Review

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

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I know I’m a bit late with the year review post, but I decided to properly disconnect over the holidays. As a result, I’m using the first couple of weeks of the new year to reflect on the year that passed and set some goals and direction to 2019. I will try to keep it short and sweet. Here goes:

January

January was my last month at AppInstitute. I spent the month wrapping up the projects I was working on, and it was incredibly hard to say goodbye to that lovely team. I had a pretty chill January overall, focussed on relaxing and learning a bit of React to get ready for my new job!

✨ I played an insane amount of Legend of Zelda - Breath of the Wild, it might be my favourite video game ever!

February

February was a pretty exciting month for me this year. I started my new job (technically on the 29th of Jan), and so I met lots of lovely people and learnt lots of new things. Thom and I also went up to Liverpool to see Ezra Furman live, and it was incredible 💛

✨ I participated in my first hackathon! It was at work, and I had a lovely time with my new work peeps.

March

March was mostly about Capoeira. My group, CDO Nottingham, had our yearly grading event, and I got a shiny new belt!

Here’s a video summary of the event.

I also got to catch up with lovely friends from afar, and spend a bit more time with my local friends too.

For international women’s day, CDO Birmingham had an event with all female guest teachers, which was awesome!

April

I started the month by travelling down to Devon to visit my family, which includes the cuties pictured below. We also went to visit Thom’s family, and meet their new puppy Laika.

Later in the month, I attended the inspireWiT conference, at Broadway Cinema in Nottingham. It was a great day, filled with inspiring talks and workshops 🙂

May

Thom and I started the month in Paris! I’d never been before, so we booked the EuroStar and spent a few days there. We also went to a Capoeira event while there - what’s a holiday without achy muscles?

When we got back, we started settling into our new flat and acquiring furniture for it (as you can see by the pre sofa picture 😅). Later in the month, my sister came to visit with my nephews, who helped assemble a few pieces of the new furniture.

June

World cup, woohoo! ⚽️ I’ve not been actively engaged with football for a while, as it’s too time consuming, but I’m always there for the world cup. Unfortunately, none of the four teams (!) I support won it. If you must know, they are in order: 🇧🇷🇺🇾🇪🇸🇬🇧

I also went to a Capoeira event in Birmingham, and got a PS4 Pro, so I could finally play Rise of the Tomb Raider 🤓

📖 Phoenix Project - Gene Kim

✨ I also attended an internal Capital One event in our London office, in which folks from the Tech function in the US came over and shared their experiences and tooling in the DevOps space, it was great!

July

Sunny days at last! ☀️

Much fun was had this summer, including but not limited to:

Work summer festival
Went to Buxton Fringe festival to see a friend’s play
Hit max level on Pokemon Go!
Capoeira event in Stoke
We had a super fun acrobatics class at CDO Notts, and I made a video about it!

📖 Out of the Wreckage - George Monbiot

August

August was a good month, I trained lots, got a new bike, and my mum came to visit for a few days.

At work, I had the privilege of spending my summer mentoring Tiffany during her internship at Capital One. She’s an excellent engineer and person, and I’m very much looking forward to her coming back this year 🙂

📖 Hag-Seed - Margaret Atwood, My Shitty Twenties - Emily Morris, Hyperbole and a Half - Alexandra Brosh

September

September started with a week off in lovely Greece! A friend of ours got married near Komotini, so we took the opportunity to get to know a bit of northern Greece. It’s absolutely lovely out there, and the beaches in Halkidiki are stunning!

At work, we had our very own Bake Off competition, spearheaded by Matt Sharp, proving just how interdisciplinary his TPM skills are 😅

Near the end of the month, I was lucky enough to be able to attend DevOpsDays London, it was a great conference and I learnt a great deal. You can read more about it in this earlier post.

📖 Northern Lights - Philip Pullman, Animal - Sara Pascoe, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - Mark Manson, The Subtle Knife - Philip Pullman

October

On my previous trip, I realised my passport was dangerously close to expiring, so I decided to take a few days off and fly to Valencia to get it done (it was cheaper than doing it in London!). I got to catch up with my closest friends, and had a good bask in the sunshine ☀️

Once back in the UK, I hopped on a train to Birmingham for Hackference. It was a really good conference, with really informative talks and a hackathon during the weekend. Met lots of lovely folks and had a really good time ✨ You can read more about it in this earlier post.

In October I also had the experience of attending a hackathon as a sponsor for the first time. And it was really fun! I got to meet and help attendees with their hacks, and chat about their early careers. It was all of the fun with none of the pressure 😅

📖 Wishful Drinking - Carrie Fisher, Feminist Fight Club - Jessica Bennett

✨ I did my first talk! It was a short lightning ⚡️ talk at Notts IoT about DevOps vs SRE.

November

November was also pretty busy, mostly with tech stuff. I attended FFConf for the first, and hopefully not the last time 🙂 It was a great conference, and I feel I personally drew a lot of value from each and every talk. You can read more about it in this earlier post.

I also attended two hackathons in November: Hack Notts as a sponsor with my Capital One colleagues; and LincolnHack, where I made a small little chrome extension that donates a fraction of a bitcoin to a refugee charity every time you visit the daily mail website 😂

Finally, I went down to London to check out the Women in DevOps meet up, and it was fantastic. I’ll definitely come back this year.

✨ The exhibition ‘Still I rise’ at Nottingham Contemporary was great! This was definitely my favourite piece 💛

December

December was a wind down month for me. I attended Hack Kings, again as a sponsor, but other than that it was a month of socialising 🙂

Christmas celebrations included: Tech Nottingham Christmas edition, our work Christmas party, and our Capoeira group’s yearly fancy dress class; all pictured below.

For Christmas itself, Thom and I drove to Devon to spend some time with my family 💛 We spent the rest of our days off chilling out at home and playing lots of Lego Harry Potter on the Switch 🤓

📖 Matilda - Roald Dahl, The Twits - Roald Dahl

What’s next?

The truth is that I don’t know exactly what I want to do next. So far, my goals for the year include:

Do more community work/mentoring: I’m still not sure what this will look like, but I’m keeping an eye out for opportunities.
Conquer my fear of public speaking: my aim on this area is to research and prepare at least two talks, and give those talks at least once.
Learn more about diversity in tech: the plan is to read as much as I can about it, and do whatever is within my reach to improve things.

I appreciate this post is quite personal, and it’s mostly for my benefit. Thanks for reading! Have a fantastic 2019 💛✨

2020 in Review

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

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What to say about 2020, huh? It's pretty safe to say it was an awful year. I spent most of it depressed, exhausted and worried. My energy disappeared, and doing even the basic things required for me to function took all I had.

Despite all that, I still want to reflect and record what it was like, as I hope it will be cathartic.

I guess before I dive in I should review the goals I set myself at the end of last year:

I wanted to "do less" professionally, as I spread myself a bit too thin in 2019: I most certainly did less 😅 but the surplus energy I hoped for wasn't there for obvious reasons.
I mentioned about being interested in DevRel: I interviewed for a DevRel position in a big company this year, and although I didn't get an offer, it was a great opportunity to get a better feel for what the role entails, and ultimately showed me I don't really want to move in that direction, at least not for now.
I had ambitious goals around personal skills and exercise: I failed 100% of those. I did not hit a single one. In fact, I did worse on those areas than I had before setting them as goals.

This year sucked, in varied ways, and that taught me to be more accepting of myself. It taught me to assess the energy I had and act accordingly, instead of chastising myself as I usually do. I wouldn't say I'm brilliant at it yet, but I've gotten a lot better. I think that's my biggest takeaway from 2020: to be kinder to myself.

One of the things I love is taking pictures, and going back though my camera roll makes it easy to spot the darkest times, the months where I have a handful of pictures for the whole month. I still wanted to do a month-by-month section, so here they are, the highlights of a shitty year:

January

This was a month of conferences and events (remember those?). I attended You Got This, New Adventures, ReactJS Girls and spoke at NDC London. I made new friends and hung out with old ones. I travelled, and had a lovely time.

I also ended up on an accidental Monday night rave with my lovely friends, and it was a lot of fun 💃🏽

📖 The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

February

After NDC I hung out in London for a week in February, and met my dearest friend Marisa who came over from Spain. I went to the Tate Modern for the first time, and ate lots of lovely food.

My family also came to visit from Devon for a few days, and I attended Frontend North, in Sheffield.

📖. Ordinary People - Diana Evans, This is Going to Hurt - Adam Kay

March

The first half of March was pretty normal still, met friends, went out for meals, the usual stuff. I set up v1 of my desk at home, to work on side projects. On the 11th of March, work told us to take our laptops to work from home until further notice. My trip to IndieWebCamp London was cancelled, and everything took a turn.

At first it was all new and ok, and I did lots of things outside work. I still attended IndieWebCamp, and spent a whole weekend on zoom (!) and it was great. I also attended a drawing workshop hosted by Denise Yu and it was a lot of fun.

📖 Everything I Know About Love - Dolly Alderton, Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas - Adam Kay

🎮. Animal Crossing

📺. Frasier

April

This was a strange month. We scrambled to move all Tech Nottingham events online in a way that worked for our community. Weekends were filled with walks through the empty city, it was a bit eerie. We celebrated Thom's birthday in our flat alone.

I think I had the 'rona then, cause I had a persistent headache for a couple of weeks, and I lost my sense of taste and smell.

🎮. Animal Crossing

📺. Brooklyn 99

May

By May, all I did was work, run events, and play Animal Crossing. I didn't have the energy for anything else. We celebrated my birthday in our flat alone.

🎮. Animal Crossing

June

In June, violence and heartbreak came into the mix. We attended the BLM protest in Nottingham, and knelt in the muddy grass for 9 minutes. 9 minutes is a long time.

Fed up of the flat, we started looking for a house to buy.

🎮. Animal Crossing

📺. The Office (US)

July

Pretty sure nothing happened in July 🤷‍♀️

📖. Becoming - Michelle Obama

🎮. Animal Crossing

August

We managed to book a farmhouse in Gloucestershire and saw my family in August. The change of scenery was good for us. We also spent a couple of days visiting Bath, a lovely city.

📖. Unnatural Causes - Dr Richard Shepherd

September

Not much happened in September. I continued my favourite activity in stressful times: rewatching sitcoms. I hit all my favourites this year, including Friends for the millionth time 😅

One small thing that cheered me up was discovering Nomo: an app that lets you take point and shoot photos with your smartphone. It has loads of camera models and it's great fun.

📺. Friends

October

I tried to engage in activities outside of work again, and took an SVG Animation workshop. It was brilliant fun, but spending evenings on zoom after full workdays on zoom was extremely tiring.

Luckily, in October we managed to book a cottage in a forest in Scotland Borders for a week. It was the most peaceful week we had this year 💛

There was no phone signal, so we spent our days reading, walking through the forest, petting the local dog Merlot, and chilling by the fire. It was bliss ✨

📖. Never Split the Difference - Chris Voss, Queenie - Candice Carty-Williams, Women & Power - Mary Beard, The Men Who Stare at Goats - Jon Ronson, The Book of Dust Vol. 1 - Philip Pullman

🎮 Wordify, Super Monkey Ball, Paper Mario, Animal Crossing, Trivial Pursuit

📺. Star Trek Discovery, The Jinx

📽. Enola Holmes, Jojo Rabbit, Spider-man: far from home, Baby Driver, The Rock

November

When we got back from Scotland, Nottingham was placed in tier 3, so we were immediately back in house arrest 😅

The weather started to turn, so we stayed in even more. We did, however, find a house we liked and got our offer accepted on it 🎉

I also started therapy for the very first time.

My (book) pile of shame kept getting bigger.

📖. The Guilty Feminist - Deborah Frances-White

🎮. Paper Mario, Superliminal, What Remains of Edith Finch, Horizon Zero Dawn, Fall Guys, The Last of Us Part 2, Star Wars Battlefront 2, Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze, Assassins Creed 2

📺 Star Trek Discovery, GBBO, His Dark Materials

December

This was such a cold and dark month, so for the first time ever, I got some Christmas decorations so try and cheer us up. Organising Secret Santa at work and Tech Nottingham was really nice.

I started the process to get an ADHD assessment. It might take a while, but it's a start.

With the government guidance changes, I couldn't go see my family for Christmas, which was disappointing. However, Thom's family made up the big shed for us to have a socially distanced outdoors-ish Christmas lunch, so that was lovely 💛

I also tried my hand at crafting and really enjoyed it, so stay tuned for obsessive crafting in the new year 😂

📖. Memorias de mis putas tristes - Gabriel García Márquez

🎮 Assassins Creed Brotherhood, Assassins Creed Revelations, Assassins Creed Black Flag, Assassins Creed Unity, Assassins Creed Syndicate

📺. The Mandalorian, Jeopardy!, Schitt's Creek, His Dark Materials, The Good Place

📽. The Holiday, Home Alone, Ghostbusters, Die Hard, Alien, Wonder Woman 1984

This year was rough, but I made it through, almost whole. Many people didn't, and it breaks my heart.

I am incredibly thankful of the lovely people around me, who really helped me through this mess, be it with a short walk, a zoom call, or a simple message.

One of my biggest challenges in 2020 (and always, really) was the constant noise in my head about all the things I should be doing.

To combat that, I have only two goals for 2021:

Improve my routine to include:
- Looking after my body.
- Looking after my mind.
- Space to be creative and do fun things.
- Space to maintain my relationships.
Be accepting when things don't go to plan.

I know 2021 is not going to magically be better, but all I can do is give myself the tools to navigate whatever life throws at me, so I can make it to the other side. I hope I'll see you there 💛

2019 in Review

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

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I really enjoyed doing my year recap last year, so thought I’d keep it up. It gives me a chance to look over the last year and relive my favourite bits, while figuring out what to go after this year 🙂

First I get to review the goals I had for 2019, and see how those panned out:

Do more community work/mentoring: I feel like I hit this one two-fold, as over the last year I’ve become an organiser of three community events: Tech Nottingham, Women In Tech and NottsJS; and I’ve been mentoring two lovely people on my team 💛
Conquer my fear of public speaking: throughout the year I learnt a lot about public speaking, through books, articles and a presentation skills course at work. I think I haven’t quite shaken the fear, but I practiced a bit. I gave short talks at Women in Tech Lightning talks, an internal event at work and at DevOpsDays London; and I gave my first full length talk at Women in Tech in November.
Learn more about diversity in tech: becoming more involved in Women in Tech Nottingham has been really great! I am also involved with the Women in Tech chapter at work, and have done my best to help out in this area whenever I’ve had the chance 🙂

So all in all, not bad! It’s so hard to tell what’s coming in the year ahead, but I feel I managed to focus on the things I set out to from the start. Now for the month-by-month highlights:

January

It was a quiet month, a month of getting back into the swing of things, while dealing with the cold, dark weather 🥶

I attended You Got This conference in London, and had such a great time! The talks were awesome, and I managed to squeeze some time with a friend to go out and eat lovely food.

I also had the pleasure of volunteering for New Adventures, a design conference in Nottingham. It had a stellar line up, and I still think about Ethan Marcotte’s closing keynote often, it’s such an important talk.

📖 Everyday Sexism - Laura Bates, Conversations with Friends - Sally Rooney, Little Black Book - Otegha Uwagba

February

February was a busy month! Went to a Capoeira event in Chester with some friends, had my family come over for a visit, went to see the Moon exhibit 🌕

Then Thom and I packed our bags and headed to Porto for a few days. I volunteered at NDC, and we spent some time exploring the city. It’s such a lovely place 💛

📖 The Amber Spyglass - Philip Pullman, Men Explain Things to Me - Rebecca Solnit

March

As soon as I came back from Porto, I shaved my head! I had been thinking about it for a while, so decided to just go for it. Turns out my hair is thin and weird, so I’ve had various “fluffy stages” since then 😅

📖 How to Own the Room - Viv Groskop, The Descent of Man - Grayson Perry

✨ Did a lightning talk at Women in Tech called Panic Driven Development - the title totally came from a wine-infused evening with Anna, Helen and Emma 😂

April

April was pretty chill. I attended Frontend NE and Women in Tech’s birthday event, where we had a lovely time with lovely cake 🎂

It was also Thom’s birthday, so we went to see the Kendall Mountain Festival on tour. We saw incredible shorts and talks about nature and sports.

🎮 Rise of the Tomb Raider

May

This May I turned 30! I used to dread ageing, but I’m luckily at a stage of my life where I’m happier by the day, so I don’t really mind anymore 🤷‍♀️

We also had our very own Capoeira group’s annual event, and I went to see the Guilty Feminist live with the awesome entourage of Nottingham feminists pictured below 💛

📖 No Hard Feelings - Liz Fosslien

🎮 God of War

June

Lots happened in June! Started the month with a weekend of Lindy Hop workshops in Leicester 👯‍♀️ then I volunteered at Hopper x 1 London.

After that, I spent a week in Oslo, volunteering at NDC and seeing the sights. Then I headed off to Israel for a week of sunshine, beach and Capoeira 🤸‍♀️

📖 Normal People - Sally Rooney, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - Gail Honeyman

July

Summer is here ☀️

In July I got promoted! It’s the first time I’ve been promoted, so I was excited for that 🥳

I also had a lovely weekend of camping with friends at Whistlewood Common, in Derbyshire, and took part in the Nottingham Pride parade 🏳️‍🌈

📖 An American Marriage - Tayari Jones

🎮 Super Mario Maker 2

August

After all the travel and excitement of the previous 2 months, I was glad to have a quiet August. We spent some time at Thom’s parents’ farm, and chilled out for a bit in the sun 😎

📖 As mentiras que os homens contam - Luis Fernando Veríssimo, I Had a Black Dog - Matthew Johnstone, Living with a Black Dog - Matthew Johnstone, Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

🎮 Shadow of the Tomb Raider

September

Back to full throttle in September 😅

Thom and I took my nephews to Eden Project for a couple of days, I got my first mechanical keyboard 🤩 and went to Alton Towers on a work outing 🎢

🎮Spider-Man, Stranger Things 3, Untitled Goose Game

✨ I gave my first (mini) conference talk! I got selected to do an ignite talk at DevOpsDays London, and I didn’t completely blow it 😄

October

I started October by flying over to Orlando to attend Grace Hopper Celebration. It was quite incredible to see so many women in technology in the same place.

I also visited Harry Potter World ⚡️ at Universal Studios, it was a blast!

To recover from the jetlag, I spent some days in Norfolk with Thom’s family when I came back, and it was lovely out there.

I also attended OggCamp for the first time, where Anna and Jamie both gave excellent talks 🙂

October also saw the first DDD East Midlands! It was a fabulous day, and I think it’s safe to say Jess and Moreton’s hard work paid off.

That was followed by another epic Hockley Hustle, where we saw lots of great acts, my favourite being the UFO Orchestra.

To close the month, I had my first BSL class 👐

Phew!

🎮 The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Stardew Valley

November

Early November was a blur, mostly frantically writing my talk 😅 Why do I sign up for these things?!

Once the talk was safely delivered, I had a couple of weeks of quiet time, punctuated by going to see Fleabag with friends (Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a queen 👸) and going to see The Dollop live with Thom 🙂

🎮 Heavy Rain, Luigi’s Mansion 3

✨ I was booked in to speak at Women in Tech long before I became an organiser, and having my first full length talk there was incredibly nice and life affirming 💛

December

Christmas started early in Nottingham this year, as we hosted the Tech Nottingham Christmas Party on the 2nd, and I think it was a total success.

Then, I headed to Paris with some tech friends for dotJS. We had a good time, and even snuck into our hotel’s ice bar 🧊

Once I was back, I started settling in for a bit of a (much needed) wind down for Christmas, doing very few “productive things” but having lots of time with friends and mulled wine 😄

I also got myself that cute baby ukulele pictured below, can’t wait to learn how to play it.

Wow, we made it!

🎮Cuphead, New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe

What’s next?

I still don’t know what I want to do long term. Every few months I toy with the idea of moving into DevRel, but haven’t decided to just yet.

For now, at least for 2020, I want to focus on my technical skills.

I feel like I gave a little bit too much of myself and my time in 2019. It was beneficial and I enjoyed it, but this year I’d like to carve out more time for myself. I’ll most certainly continue mentoring, running the events I do and speaking occasionally, but I’ll do my best not to overcommit.

I want to learn new things, and work on challenging problems. That’s it, gonna keep it simple this year.

As for my personal life, I have more ambitious goals:

Learn how to play the ukulele and guitar, and some music theory basics.
Learn to draw, and practice frequently.
Find a good balance for my exercise routine, and be consistent with it. I’m aiming for a mix of Capoeira, Yoga and weights 🏋️‍♀️

So if you’ve made it this far, here’s to a challenging 2020! 🥂

Messing about with Cloudcraft and Terraform

Thu, 11 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import bucket from "@images/posts/cloudcraft-and-terraform/bucket.png"; import objectFinderDiagram from "@images/posts/cloudcraft-and-terraform/object-finder-diagram.png"; import objectFinderUI from "@images/posts/cloudcraft-and-terraform/object-finder-ui.png"; import exportTerraform from "@images/posts/cloudcraft-and-terraform/export-terraform.png";

So, recently I set out to try and solve a problem:

S3 in theoretically infinite, so it doesn’t really offer any sort of object search within a bucket.

I needed an easy way of locating specific objects. Indexing the whole bucket is not feasible, or Amazon would do it themselves. But I can provide a narrow time window when my object was created, which should restrict the data to a manageable level.

Considering all the constraints I had, I ended up settling for the following architecture:

<Image src={objectFinderDiagram} alt="Small diagram of the application infrastructure" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> 🖼 Diagram created on Cloudcraft

I created a static site using GatsbyJS that will eventually hold the form to collect the start and end times for our search, and will display the returned objects with some filtering functionality. The site is served from an S3 bucket (labelled S3 frontend).

The site fires requests to an ALB, that is configured to use a lambda target group. The lambda then accesses the bucket and fetches the objects that fit the parameters provided.

This is what the first attempt looks like:

The UI is listing the keys of the objects stored in the bucket. No filtering is in place just yet, as I’m just proving out the connectivity throughout.

I wrote the infrastructure out on Terraform, if you’re interested in the code, you can have a look here. It’s not neat at all as it’s just a POC, so please reserve judgment 😅

So I kinda got what I was after. Neat! Job done ✅

But…

Around the time I got this working I saw an article on Twitter that I found intriguing 🤔

modules.tf — Convert visual AWS diagram into Terraform configuration

So I thought: can I replicate the infrastructure I just created by just creating a pretty picture of it? Will modules.tf be able to make a bunch of assumptions to get the connectivity to work?

After all, Cloudcraft doesn’t really allow you to add much detail around your elements, and the ALB does need listeners, VPC and subnet configuration to work.

With all those questions in mind, I went to Cloudcraft and created the diagram I included earlier in this post. Then I very excitedly clicked the Export Terraform code option and…

It broke 💻💥

I got a 502 response from modules.tf and the page just hung on the export step. Sad times.

There’s been a little bit of time between writing and publishing this post, and I decided to give it one last try before hitting publish. To my surprise, it worked! I managed to download some Terraform and Terragrunt files, but it didn’t seem to contain my infrastructure, and I couldn’t really get it to work with the documentation available. Maybe I’ll try again in a few months.

While I’m not sure Cloudcraft and modules.tf is the answer, it definitely feels like there’s a gap in the market for a tool that allows you to easily deploy infrastructure to try things out. Hopefully something will arise soon 🙂

Dark Mode 🌑

Sat, 19 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import darkModeCaniuse from "@images/posts/dark-mode/dark-mode-caniuse.png"; import screenshotLightMode from "@images/posts/dark-mode/screenshot-light-mode.png"; import screenshotDarkMode from "@images/posts/dark-mode/screenshot-dark-mode.png";

From the beginning, as soon as dark mode became a thing, I was hooked. Much to my own detriment, I use my phone in bed, and not having my corneas scorched every so often was definitely a level up in my life.

However, dark mode support has been trickling through our apps quite slowly really. Despite my best efforts, it’s still not infrequent that I’ll be scrolling on my favourite time sink, with duly dimmed colours, I’ll click on a link and it will open a website (in a webview, why is it always a webview?) and it will nearly blind me, as well as adding some strain to my relationship.

But fret not, browsers are now adding dark mode support, to the excitement of the whole web community (or maybe not, maybe it’s just me, but I’m excited 😄). It comes in the form of a media query, and it’s in draft status, unofficially supported by browsers.

Support is already in a good place, and there’s little else out there better suited for progressive enhancement. If your browser doesn’t support it, everything stays as is and it’s just browsing as usual.

This is the caniuse for the feature:

When I heard of it, I immediately decided to add dark mode to my site, and a mere 9 months later, here we are 😅

I have very specific ideas for the aesthetic of my site, despite having implemented none of them thus far. One of the things I’ve wanted to do from the start is support multiple colour schemes, so this felt like a good opportunity to explore that a bit more.

Since I use Gatsby for this site and it’s React based, I decided to use styled components, as I really like the idea of encapsulating styles along with the components, and it has a really powerful theming capability.

For the dark mode support to work with that, though, I had to access the prefers-color-scheme media query from JavaScript.

Huh 🤔

I gave it some thought, but nothing came to me (cause that’s not how tech works). So I googled aggressively and found this lovely function: Window.matchMedia() - Web APIs | MDN

So I had a play with those tools and got something working on Glitch:

<div class="glitch-embed-wrap" style="height: 420px; width: 100%;"> <iframe src="https://glitch.com/embed/#!/embed/styled-components-zen-garden?path=README.md&previewSize=100" title="styled-components-zen-garden on Glitch" allow="geolocation; microphone; camera; midi; vr; encrypted-media" style="height: 100%; width: 100%; border: 0;"

</iframe> </div> That’s my target for theming, but for now I only added light and dark mode support to the side. I’ll add more themes once I update the design and components - coming soon™.

It’s been quite an easy feature to implement, to be honest. I spent a great deal of time reading about different approaches and deciding how to go about it, but once I made up my mind, it was quite straightforward. And it was fun! I love playing with colours, so I had a blast doing this.

So here it is:

Hope this helps if you’re looking to add dark mode support to your site. And if you need any more support, give me a shout 🙂

DevOpsDays London 2018

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

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So, a few weeks ago I had the absolute pleasure to attend DevOpsDays London. It was my first time attending a big tech conference and the experience could not have been better! 🙂

I got a free ticket for this at Women in Tech Notts from the lovely Louise Paling, who was one of the organisers.

I also got the chance to spend some quality time with Tiff, who I’d been mentoring over summer. It was a really nice end to her internship, and I can’t wait for her to be back after uni.

<Image src={tiffAndI} alt="Tiff and I having some coffee ☕️" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> Tiff and I having some coffee ☕️

What immediately struck me was how inclusive this conference was. Our lanyards identified the pronouns we’d like to be addressed by and whether we’d be happy to be approached for conversation; there was also signing and captioning throughout the talks. It was really great to see the effort put into making everyone feel included 💖

All the talks were recorded, so I’ll leave the link to the videos here, in case you’d like to check them out yourself 🙂

DevOpsDays London - YouTube

Talks

The talks were fantastic, and I won’t cover them all as it’d make this post way too long, but I’ll mention my favourite bits:

Jeff Sussna, talking about neurodiversity and how there are “no full stack human beings”. Hiring only the top 1% is unsustainable, so we should “seek the wisdom in everyone” and we’ll have much more empathetic teams. Jeff’s talk really set the tone for the conference, it was an excellent way to start.

Euan Finlay gave a fantastic intro to being on call and how to handle incident work. It was titled “Don’t Panic!” and I highly recommend watching the video, cause it was insightful and super funny. He went over what you can learn from the ghosts of incidents past, present and future and how to do what’s within your reach without stressing too much.

Emma Button inspired us all to promote a blameless culture within our organisations. “Bad stuff happens”, so we should deal with those situations in a way that helps us improve. She also gave us improvement katas to implement in our processes to achieve that culture shift. She highlighted the importance of never punishing people for trying new things, and I found that to be excellent advice. We want our systems/processes to always improve, so we should experiment and take whatever learning opportunities we can. It was a great talk!

Denise Yu gave a particularly lovely talk on distributed systems. She went over some of the challenges one might encounter in those and how one needs to make an active decision on what strategy works best for their system. She explained the CAP theorem and other distributed database concepts in a really engaging way; her slides are all hand drawn and really funny, so we were all hooked!

Throughout the talks, I really enjoyed the fact that all speakers spoke about their own journey in a candid and deeply relatable way, and they all offered up their learnings in a way that one can easily take away and implement, regardless of their level of experience. It really felt like a community coming together and helping each other improve 😊

Ignite Talks

DevOpsDays London had a slot in each day for Ignite Talks. These are short talks in which the slides advance automatically every 15 seconds. All speakers did wonderfully considering the challenge of keeping up with the slides. I may be slightly biased, but my favourites were from local Nottingham folks:

Louise Paling did her fabulous “Agile Software Development: A Lego Star Wars Story” talk, in which she explains the Agile methodology through a Lego Star Wars themed Christmas wish. It is so much fun! 🎅🎄🚀
Jamie Tanna told us all about his “monstrously” over engineered personal website, and all the things he’s learnt from it. Looking forward to his blog post about it! 🙂

Open Spaces

After the talks, on both days, there were open spaces for discussion. We all came up with topics that interested us, and then dedicated a room to each topic. I had never attended a space in that format before, and I found it really worked. It fostered a healthy discussion that included everyone (it was well moderated), so people could participate regardless of the level of experience they had on the subject. I participated in the following spaces:

DevOps vs SRE
Sketch notes workshop run by Denise Yu
Kubernetes is not a silver bullet
How to get started with DevOps
How to get involved in other projects within your organisation

I particularly enjoyed the DevOps vs SRE space, as it’s a subject I’m really interested in. There were plenty of incredibly skilled people in the room with first hand experience in SRE, so I felt like I got a lot of value from that particular session. It even led me to do my first lightning talk ⚡️ on it!

The sketch notes workshop was a lot of fun! It was really good to have the assurance that as long as what you draw is recognisable, the quality of the drawing doesn’t really matter. I’ve been learning how to draw recently, so I really enjoyed it, and drew my journey into tech in it:

Wrap up

As I said at the start, my first big conference experience could not have gone any better. I learnt so much and met some really incredible people. Can’t wait for next year!

If you want an in-depth write up of the event, Jamie Tanna wrote an awesome blog post 🙂 Go check it out!

DevOpsDays London 2019

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

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This is long overdue now, but not overdue enough that I won’t post it out of shame 😅

In 2018 I went to DevOpsDays London for the first time, and I had such a great time! I found it a very welcoming space 🙂 If you want to read about it, here ya go.

So last year, when I saw the CFP pop up on Twitter, I thought to myself: “if I want to do my first conference talk this year, that would be a great place to do it”. So I decided to submit an ignite talk! 🔥

Ignite talks follow a very specific format: 5 minutes, 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide, and you have no control of them. If that wasn’t enough to scare me, this was: I got accepted 😱

As I expected, organisers and attendees alike were incredibly kind and supportive, and all around lovely. Everyone put up with my general state of anxiety, and it all went well (except for that slide I forgot - we don’t talk about that).

<Image src={dodLdnTalk} alt="Me on stage, holding a microphone" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> 📸 Action shot, courtesy of DevOpsDays London

If you want to see the talk, you can watch the video: Carolina Gilabert - Panic Driven Development - YouTube

The only less than ideal bit was the fact that the software used to auto advance the slides didn’t support gifs, so I had to make a static version of my slides. If you want to see the superior version of my slides, you can see it in full motion here.

I ended up spending a significant amount of the conference in anxiety land - I get very nervous about speaking - and it meant I didn’t take many notes about the talks and open spaces I attended.

For a comprehensive review of the event - at a whopping 63 min read - I recommend Jamie’s blog post.

I did have lots of great conversations with people throughout the 2 days, and learnt a lot from the sessions I attended. The bits I found most interesting were:

✨ Open space about testing infrastructure: this was a really enlightening discussion on where folks are at with testing infrastructure as code, and the challenges that arise from that. There I learnt about LocalStack, which I’m really looking forward to playing with.

✨ Deborah Wood’s talk, How and why we lowered our SLO: it was a really interesting session where she walked through her and Pivotal’s SRE experience over the last 3 years. Among her tips, she mentioned the GDS Service Level Indicator (SLI) workshop and it seems like a really good place to start.

✨ Open space about climate sustainability in tech: this was a great conversation about the impact of tech to our climate and possible solutions. We discussed how useful it would be to have a cloud hosting CO2 calculator, so we could have a tangible idea of what our systems’ impact is.

✨ Alex Stanhope’s talk, on fighting toxic working environments: he spoke about the difficulty in clearly identifying toxic behaviour, and the importance of checking that behaviour if we're in a position to do so (the power dynamics at play don't allow for this at times). He also covered the impact that toxic behaviour at work can have on our mental health. It was an insightful session, and I throughly recommend watching the recording.

✨ Tom Hoyland’s talk, on building and growing an agile team: this was a pragmatic overview of a team finding the version of agile that worked best for them. I found it quite relatable, as my team is quite introspective and prone to changing our process as we think it's needed. My favourite piece of advice was not to stick to one agile framework or another, you can always blend them to suit your needs.

<Image src={dodLdnWit} alt="Conference after party, a group picture of the Women in Tech Nottingham folks" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> 📸 Women in Tech Nottingham community representing 💁‍♀️✨

To wrap up, it was again a lovely event, where I’ve learnt a lot and enjoyed the company of friends new and old. Thanks again to the organisers for putting on an awesome event, and for affording me the opportunity to speak 💛

Until next time! 👋

FFConf 2018

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

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I first read about FFConf on Twitter, and everyone had only the highest praise for it. I decided to attend as I wanted to hear a bit more about the web side of things.

The conference is held in a lovely cinema, which meant that it was a bit dark but the seating was so comfy! ☺️

<Image src={picturehouse} alt="Duke of York's Picturehouse" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> 📸 Duke of York’s Picturehouse

Soon after I arrived, I met the lovely folks of Elixel:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"> ✨{" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/elixelofficial?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> @elixelofficial </a>{" "} team + Carol ready for{" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ffconf?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> #ffconf </a>{" "} ! <a href="https://t.co/iJ8IKVOBpy">pic.twitter.com/iJ8IKVOBpy</a> — Natalia Waniczek 👩‍💻🏋️‍♀️🐕 (@natkuTala){" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/natkuTala/status/1060829020114378752?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> November 9, 2018 </a> </blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"

</script>

And soon after that, we took our seats ready for some talks!

Talks

Mentoring: being the help you wish you’d had

Jo Franchetti kicked us off with a lovely talk on mentoring. She highlighted the myriad benefits for both mentor and mentee. Teaching others will help cement your own knowledge, and it will make your knowledge useful. Answering questions also increases your reserves of patience. She gave us tips on how to do better when mentoring: it’s very important to avoid assumed knowledge syndrome. She left us a powerful quote:

Assume zero knowledge and infinite intelligence.

From the mentee point of view, she advised we stop worrying about not knowing things, and used that energy to learn new things.

She concluded by introducing us to the concept of Firgun: genuine, unselfish delight or pride in the accomplishment of the other. 💛 It was a great talk, and it motivated me to find mentorship opportunities very soon!

The future of JavaScript and Machine Learning

Eleanor Haproff taught us all things Machine Learning in JS. She explained how ML works and what the differences are between it and Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. She put it in a very clear and concise way:

Artificial Intelligence: simulating human brain function.
Data Science: solving complex problems using data.
Machine learning: learning from data.

She then took us through how to use Tensorflow.js, and followed with some demos. Those were fantastic, and featured Asim Hussain playing Pac Man by moving his head into a quadrant among others. Eleanor also co-built aijs.rocks, which curates AI focussed JavaScript apps, and is a great place to get inspiration to build your own 🙂

Practical web animation

Lisi Linhart gave a really awesome talk on web animation 🙂 She went over the best situations in which to use animation, so that it can be a really powerful tool in our web experience, rather than a distraction or annoyance. Some examples are:

Attention & Feedback

This is perhaps one of the most important areas where animation can have a really great impact. Reacting to users’ input clearly and making system activity visible makes for great user experience, as users feel in control of the process. On the attention side of things, animation can be used to draw users to a particular action you want them to take, or even reward their engagement with something amusing 😀

Perceived Performance

Carefully choreographed animations can capture the user’s attention and provide a sense of fluidity that makes the load time almost imperceptible. On this subject, Lisi shared a great quote:

Human perception of time is fluid, and can be manipulated in purposeful and productive ways. -Chris Harrison

She shared a great example of this done well: Tom’s Wholesome Food Cafe

She also delved into the technical considerations of different types of animations, giving us great tips like what is cheap for the browser to animate: position, scale, rotation and opacity. She showed us how layers can help optimise elements that get animated frequently, and how to best use our tools to animate efficiently. Browser development tools are really powerful. For instance, they allow us to throttle CPU so we can test the user experience on low spec devices, or even to run through the repaints on each animation, so we can make sure we’re repainting only the intended element.

She went over different implementations of animations, from the classic CSS animations all the way to the brand new Web Animations API, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages. Her talk was full of great examples and resources, so I recommend you have a look 👀

Practical Web Animation

Is it possible to build a truly diverse community?

Jenny Wong told us about her experience organising WordCamp 2016, and her efforts to make the event truly inclusive. When pondering ‘What would an accessible event look like?’, the organisers decided to ask themselves the following questions when prioritising any aspect of the event:

Does [blank] make the event:

More accessible
Less accessible
Stay the same

If the answer was 1, it would get bumped to the top of the priority list; if it was 2, it would get pushed to the bottom and 3 would leave it somewhere in the middle. They found it a powerful recipe to work out what truly made a difference in making their event as accessible as possible.

There is no denying that having a big budget makes things easier, but there are things you can do for free. Crafting your content with care, using gender neutral pronouns and a suitable tone of voice goes a very long way to showing what kind of space your event is. Jenny also shared their experience providing child care at WordCamp. While it is costly and vetting professionals is difficult, it does make a big difference to parents. Their creche was under-utilised the first year, but having it in the first place let parents know that this was an event they could attend, and as a result the following year it was full.

Jenny also highlighted the importance of self-support. It makes things simpler for everyone involved if attendees can support themselves using the structure of the event. Providing specific spaces like a quiet room, lactation room, multi faith room and adequate signing help attendees navigate the space independently.

She went over a lot of steps you can take, and they’re too many for me to list here, but make sure to check out their playbook if you’re running an event:

WordCamp 2017 Organisers & Volunteers Playbook

Finally, Jenny talked about the impact of their work. I was shocked to see a screenshot of this very blog on her presentation! 🤯 I’ll explain: I blogged about the lovely DevOpsDays London 2018 conference, and I specifically mentioned how inclusive I found the event. It turns out Jenny had had a call with the DevOpsDays London organisers, to share her learnings on running inclusive events and help them apply those to their event.

It was quite interesting to watch Jenny’s talk and relate things to this experience I’d had fairly recently, only to find out later she’d been involved all along! 😮

It was a really great talk, and if you’re an event organiser, please use these learnings to make your event as inclusive as you can 💛

Back to the future of JS: the next features and amazing proposals

Willian Martins gave us a really hands on tour of a few proposals of new features for JavaScript. It covered the following features:

Bind operator ::
- It allows you to bind this to a function more easily and extract methods
- It has a unary syntax -> ::context.method()
- And a binary syntax -> context::method()
- You find out more about it here
Pipeline operator |>
- Syntactic sugar for function composition
- Allows you to pass a value through a series of functions
- Gets complicated if any of those functions require any more parameters
Smart pipeline #
- Allows for # to be used in functions with parameters subject to change
F# pipeline:
- Adds a new await step, which waits for the resolution of the previous step
Partial application:
- Allows you to ‘bake in’ one or more parameters of a function
- You can use the token ? for a single parameter
- You can use the token … for multiple parameters
- Works on template strings 😀

Throughout his demos, one things that caught my attention is that his code was running as he typed it in his editor 🤯 He mentioned he uses Quokka.js so that’s a new tool I’ll be adding to my IDE 🙂

It was really cool to see where JS is going, and if you do have the time, please check out Willian’s slides, they are beautiful 😍

Dear developer, the web isn’t about you

Charlie Owen gave an inspirational talk, that encompassed the whole history of the web, the good parts and the bad parts.

Her main focus was reminding us that HTML is incredibly robust. It’s what allowed us to be adventurous and innovative throughout the times. Whatever we wanted to build, HTML would accommodate.

But then the browser wars came, and innovation stalled as developers had to effectively create two versions of their site to reach all users. But then… the iPhone was created, and the necessity of building responsive sites brought web innovation back with it.

We’re now at a stage where web developers value more the ability to use new frameworks than the actual usability and accessibility of the site. So we ended up in a situation where the average site is ~2.5MB and relies on JavaScript by default, instead of our lovely and robust HTML.

Charlie also described the strategy used at Springer Nature, where she works. It’s a super interesting strategy, it’s called Cutting the Mustard, and was originally developed by the BBC. It consists of running some lines of JS to determine the features available on the browser being used. If those tests determine that the browser has all the latest features available, you’re then free to serve your site with all its bells and whistles. But if it doesn’t, you can serve them a basic version of site, and that way you don’t need to exclude anyone 🎉

<Image src={dearDeveloper} alt="Move at an appropriate speed and make things work" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> 📸 Charlie Owen

It’s so important for us as web developers to check our digital privilege, and make sure we concentrate our efforts in including rather than excluding.

She made her talk into a site that you can go and read yourself, and trust me, you should!

Using a modern web to recreate 1980s horribly slow & loud loading screens

Remy Sharp took us back to the 80s!

He told us about his quest to recreate the sounds and aesthetics of the Spectrum loading screens. From working out the pulse that the Spectrum generated and translating it into binary, to using his 1337 hacker skills (bitshifting) to draw the loading bars on a canvas, he managed to recreate the Spectrum loading experience to a tee!

He also did an impressive demo of his “image oldifying process” on an actual Spectrum! Check out the video below ⬇️

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"> Here's <a href="https://twitter.com/rem?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@rem</a>{" "} showing off his 1337 hacker skills ( <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/bitshifting?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> #bitshifting </a> ) by rendering an image he took of the{" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ffconf?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> #ffconf </a>{" "} crowd in an actual Spectrum! 😄{" "} <a href="https://t.co/7v0wxmGYcr">pic.twitter.com/7v0wxmGYcr</a> — Carol 👩‍💻 (@CarolSaysThings){" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/CarolSaysThings/status/1060939994259513344?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> November 9, 2018 </a> </blockquote>

The talk was really great fun, and showed just how much you can learn from having a fun idea and running with it 🙂

Weird web & curious creation

Tim Holman was our last speaker of the day, and he had us in absolute stitches the whole time!

I found his talk really inspired us all to take ourselves a bit less seriously, and build things that are fun! He showed us some of his quirky creations, of which my favourite was Elevator.js.

After each demo, he listed all the things he’d learnt from working on each of those projects, and those lists were super impressive.

His generative art documentation is insanely cool! Not only does it teach you how to create cool generative art, it also runs the code in each example while you scroll the page 🤯

Check out the awesomeness here.

Wrap up

FFConf was an amazing, information-filled day for me. It had interesting, innovative, inspiring, funny talks and individuals, and I really hope I can go back next year 💖

Frontend NE 2019

Thu, 16 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

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This may seem silly, but I kinda accidentally became a frontend person. My first job was around web and so I just kinda ended up here.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the web. But these circumstances mean I never made an active choice about where I’d specialise. I’ve been getting by as a generalist for about 4 years now, and it looks a bit like this:

But lately, I’ve been getting feedback that I should specialise, and become T shaped. It really does seem to be where it’s at 😅

<Image src={beforeAndAfter} alt="Before and after doodle: normal looking person to T shaped person" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> Before and after rendition: from my basic self to a flawless T shaped human

To be quite honest, I’m reluctant to specialise. It probably comes from my personality; I’m an open person, and I like to stir all the pots.

I also love learning, so in my head instead of going from this rectangle shape:

To this T shape:

I’d like to go to this rectangle:

I understand it’s not possible. But heck, I am nothing if not determined. And maybe a little stubborn. So I’m gonna specialise, but I’ll try and widen the T whenever I can.

I decided to specialise in peak frontendy stuff: React, CSS and the sort. Neat!

In the interest of specialising, I decided to attend some frontend specific conferences this year, and the first one was Frontend NE, in Newcastle.

It was a one day conference, but what a day! The talks were very good, and I realised I know nothing about CSS. Like, nothing. I definitely have room to specialise 😅

Talks

I’ll do my best to summarise the talks, but do try and catch these speakers elsewhere, as they were all brilliant!

I took some notes on the day, as I usually do in conferences, and I’ve shared them to Twitter for the first time. You can check them out here.

Going Offline

The opening talk was given by Jeremy Keith. It was a really insightful session, where he advocated for a more resilient web, and gave lots of practical advice on how to achieve that.

He focussed on utilising service workers to make your site offline first, going through some key concepts around service workers themselves and their lifecycle, as well as offering a few different caching approaches. He showed us caching being used in truly creative ways, to offer up custom offline pages, or offline content based on previous visits to the site.

His is this quite amusing quote:

A service worker is like a man-in-the-middle attack, but on your own site, in a good way.

It was a really interesting talk, and I’m definitely looking forward to applying some of those learnings to my sites 🙂

Chrome DevTools inside out

Next up was Katie Fenn, giving us an overview of her favourite features in Chrome DevTools.

Being a Firefox user myself, I was very pleased to see the new features added to Chrome DevTools since I last used it. The element selector now comes packed with great information, including the colour contrast ratio, which helps us make more accessible sites. What’s not to love?

She also went over the various different console methods. I’ve personally been using console.trace() for a while, so I loved learning about other useful tools like console.memory - shows you heap size - and console.count() - outputs how many times it’s been called.

She also showed us some amazing profiling tools: you can throttle your network connection and record the screen throughout, which helps you identify the best areas to optimise. You can also throttle your CPU to optimise animations and such, and you can now debug node apps 😮

Katie is one of my favourite speakers and this talk was really packed with great stuff 🙂

Using the modern web to recreate 1980’s horribly slow and loud loading screens

I had already seen Remy Sharp‘s talk at last year’s FFConf and I was delighted to see it again.

It’s such a fun talk, and it really shows how much you can learn from side projects that you’re passionate about 🙂

They left, now what?

Ania Bebb gave really compelling talk about preparing to leave, in a rather general sense.

She talked about the rush to document everything you do that comes after you hand your notice in, and about the UFO factor: the number of people that need to disappear before the business collapses 🛸

She then moved on to talk about documenting our wishes on the event of our death. What would you like to be done with your body? What will happen to your assets? How will people know which photos/things are important to you?

Clear documentation ensures smooth transition.

It was a touching and personal talk, approaching the subject from a really unique perspective.

Instant VR, just add browser

Ruben van der Leun followed up with a session about his adventures with WebVR. He had a demo you could try throughout the talk, and as a result I was most distracted 😅

Before the talk started, we all got handed cardboard VR headsets with the conf branding. How cool is that?

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"> So hype for the afternoon at{" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/FrontendNE?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> #FrontendNE </a>{" "} already 🥳 <a href="https://t.co/KPpEObqCqF">pic.twitter.com/KPpEObqCqF</a> — Carol 💁‍♀️✨ (@CarolSaysThings){" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/CarolSaysThings/status/1113421239257792513?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> April 3, 2019 </a> </blockquote>

He showed us how powerful WebVR is already and how easily you can build for it. It was a really fun talk! (As you can verify by my rudimentary drawing 😅)

Grids all the way down

Next up was Rachel Andrew, introducing us to subgrid, a feature included in level 2 of the CSS Grid Layout spec.

Rachel talked about grid itself, and how it’s not better or worse than flexbox, it’s another tool in your toolbox. She showed us an example that didn’t quite work with grid alone, and walked us through how subgrid fills that gap.

It was very enlightening to hear from someone directly involved in the CSS working group. She gave us some insight on the process of changing the spec, and encouraged us to ask browsers to implement subgrid.

It was a really great talk, and I’m very happy I now know of Rachel and her work. I have bookmarked ~80% of her blog posts 🤓

Even more CSS secrets

The closing talk was given by Lea Verou and it was a rundown of 10 CSS secrets of hers. Let me just say this: this talk blew my tiny little mind 🤯

After watching it, alongside Rachel’s talk, I feel like I don’t know any CSS. We went from the nitty gritty of how blend modes work to creating pie charts with pure CSS (!). The ease with which Lea demonstrated all of this during her live demos showed she knows the ins and outs of the browser and how CSS works. I was awestruck 🤩

There was a lot of content packed into this talk, so I’ll just pick out my top 3 faves:

1. Animated giant borders with SVG
2. Characters as SVGs - CSS rating system with meter tag
3. Cut out text effect

I’ve worked with the slides and reproduced these on Glitch ✨

Considering my recent resolution to specialise on the frontend, this talk has totally inspired me to do my best to become a CSS witch 🧙‍♀️🔮✨

Wrap up

Going to this conf was a bit of a trek for me, as Newcastle is quite inconvenient to get to from Nottingham, which meant a 4 am start 😴

It was so worth it, though! Lots of great content was shared and I met some lovely people there. Shoutout to my conf buddy Rahman 😄

I also got to catch up with the lovely folks from Nexmo Alex and Luke. All in all a great day 💛

Hackference 2018

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import mike from "@images/posts/hackference-2018/mike.jpeg"; import marta from "@images/posts/hackference-2018/marta.jpeg"; import terence from "@images/posts/hackference-2018/terence.jpeg"; import jess from "@images/posts/hackference-2018/jess.jpeg"; import anna from "@images/posts/hackference-2018/anna_hax.jpeg"; import jamie from "@images/posts/hackference-2018/jamie_trex.jpeg"; import impactHub from "@images/posts/hackference-2018/impact_hub.jpeg"; import whoDis from "@images/posts/hackference-2018/who_dis.png"; import teamAndJeremy from "@images/posts/hackference-2018/team_and_jeremy.png"; import teamAndSam from "@images/posts/hackference-2018/team_and_sam.jpg";

I’d heard really good things about Hackference from various Nottingham based folks, so when the super early bird tickets were released, I bagsied one straight away! It might even have been the first one, my ticket reference was DWZ0-1 🤔

The venue was very nice and had a cosy and chilled out vibe, which really helped me relax and meet some people before I even had my first coffee (!)

Talks

There were two tracks available, Innovate and Develop. I ended up attending talks from both tracks throughout the day, and I really wish I could have seen them all 🙈

<Image src={mike} alt="Mike Elsmore opening the conference" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> 📷 Mike Elsmore opening the conference

I’ll try and briefly summarise my takeaways from them:

Deno

Martin Sonnenholzer gave us an intro to Deno, a very, very new V8 runtime developed by Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js. It was originally written in Go, but has since been rewritten in Rust. It supports TypeScript natively, which it then compiles to JavaScript on execution. One of the main characteristics of Deno is the fact that it doesn’t use a package manager at all, scripts are imported directly through a URL. It is very much experimental, but worth having a play with 🙂

From cave paintings 🎨 to emoji 😀: a visual tradition

Lily Madar took us all on a visual communication journey through the ages, leading to emoji. She explored their origin, their current ubiquitousness in modern communication, how they help transcend language barriers and how they are another space in which representation matters 🙋‍♀️

That’s magic! Combining WebVR and WebSpeech API

Marta Bondyra shared with us her learning on WebSpeech and WebVR APIs, and how she used those to create an excellent Harry Potter VR game for the browser! 👦🏻⚡️

<Image src={marta} alt="Marta Bondyra" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> 📷 Marta Bondyra

She wrote a blog post about the game, with a recording of this talk, check it out:

Interactions of the future — Combining WebVR with Speech Recognition

Getting started with kubernetes

Bastian Hofmann taught us the essentials about Kubernetes during his session. It was an excellent session, but quite hard to convey without writing a blog post on Kubernetes myself, so I’m going to be lazy and link to a recording of Bastian’s talk in a different conference, so you can check it out yourself 😅

Bastian Hofmann - Getting started with Kubernetes

Why you should become an editor on the HTML5 spec

In the funniest session of the day, Terence Eden told us about his involvement with the W3C and collaborating on the HTML spec. He’s a very engaging speaker, and his talk encouraged me to open a teeny tiny PR on the html spec! He remarked on how the web is for everyone, and as developers we don’t often think enough about inclusivity and accessibility. By contributing to the spec, anyone can make a difference to billions of people.

His was my favourite quote of the day:

If you don’t have the budget for accessibility, you don’t have the budget for your product.

<Image src={terence} alt="Terence Eden" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> 📷 Terence Eden

Introduction to modern identity

Jeremy Meiss went over some modern identity principles with us. Namely, how identity is broken down into:

Authentication: the way you login
Authorisation: right access at the right time
Personalisation: tailored user experience
Security: protecting data in motion and at rest

He also went over different options to authenticate users, such as passwordless and multi-factor authentication. He especially reinforced that good MFA should rely on both something you have and something you know. Identity is incredibly difficult to get right, so Jeremy’s overall advice is that whenever possible, it’s better to buy than to build.

Serverless: the missing manual

James Thomas answered some of the most frequently asked questions about serverless, and told us all to:

Be lazy and embrace the cloud.

Some of the things I made a note of:

Where do I store my files? Object storage is a good bet.
How do I install my DB? Use a managed DB service, and make sure to consider event support and scalability.
How do I debug serverless? Logs and metrics.
Can I set cost limits? You can set up rate limiting and billing alerts, and you most definitely should!

Burnout and your meat computer

Jessica Rose closed the conference on a high note, encouraging us all to take care of ourselves, and do our best to avoid burnout. She shared a burnout checklist:

Have you become cynical or critical at work?
Do you drag yourself to work and have trouble getting started once you arrive?
Have you become irritable or impatient with co-workers, customers or clients?
Do you lack the energy to be consistently productive?
Do you lack satisfaction from your achievements?
Do you feel disillusioned about your job?
Are you using food, drugs or alcohol to feel better or simply not feel?
Have your sleep habits or appetite changed?
Are you troubled by unexplained headaches, backaches or other physical complaints?

If you said yes to one of these or more, you might be suffering from burnout 🔥 Congratulations!

<Image src={jess} alt="Jessica Rose" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> 📷 Jessica Rose telling us all to take it easy

The good news is that Jess also gave us lots of great advice on how to recover from burnout, like:

Do less, outsource what you can.
Start saying no. (That is a big one for me 🙈)
Be sparing with your heck budget.
Ask for help when you need it.
Practice forgiveness.
Don’t be a jerk.

She also gave us some great news:

You’re not an idiot whisperer.

Jess is a brilliant speaker, and I encourage you to attend one of her talks if you get the chance. A recording of this talk is available here.

Hackathon

Hackference hosts the conference on a Friday, and a hackathon over the weekend. I was lucky enough to team up with Nottingham tech power couple Anna and Jamie 👩‍💻👩‍💻👨‍💻

<Image src={anna} alt="Anna hacking" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> 📷 Anna mid hack

<Image src={jamie} alt="Jamie being attacked by a T-Rex" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> 📷 Jamie mid T-Rex attack

The hackathon was held at the Impact Hub in Birmingham. It is a lovely space, clearly aimed at collaboration.

For our hack, we decided to build a multi factor authentication flow, using one of the guidelines from Jeremy Meiss’ talk: something you have and something you know. Jamie had been telling us about IndieAuth as a way of gaining ownership over your own identity rather than relying on other services like Google or Facebook. So our initial idea was to use IndieAuth as the first factor, but because of typical hackathon time constraints, we ended up using Google login for that. For the second factor, we decided to call the user and get them to enter a PIN using Nexmo’s DTMF API, as it would allow the user to use their phone (something they have) and the PIN (something they know). For the implementation we used a React app for the frontend, and a couple of Lambdas to orchestrate the flow with Auth0 and Nexmo.

📷 Home page illustration for ‘New login, who dis?’ by our in-team illustrator Anna Dodson 😋

And… we won!

We won some really cool Auth0 Hacktoberfest t-shirts and we won an amazing Nanoleaf kit each from Nexmo!

<Image src={teamAndJeremy} alt="Our hack team with Jeremy Meiss, from Auth0" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> 📷 Our hack team with Jeremy Meiss from Auth0

<Image src={teamAndSam} alt="Our hack team with Sam Machin, from Nexmo" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> 📷 Our hack team with Sam Machin from Nexmo

During our hack time, we took a Hacktoberfest break, in which we scoured GitHub for good issues to close and get our Hacktoberfest PRs in. I’d like to thank Anna and Jamie again for helping and encouraging me to do it. Thanks to them, I got my first PR to an open source project done that day 💛

Wrap up

It was my first time at Hackference, but I’ll definitely make sure to come back. The talks were brilliant and informative, and the hackathon was super chilled out and great fun!

I also made a twitter moment to collect some of the 💛

Hopefully see you next year!

Hello World

Tue, 09 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Hello there! 👋

For a while now, I’ve been meaning to start a blog. My main aim with it is to document my learnings, but I’ll probably also ramble on about various things.

I have started-deleted-started-deleted the code for this site many times, always wanting to try something different 5 minutes after getting started. I did have things I wanted to write about though, so my ever-so-reasonable partner Thom recommended I started with something simple, and worked on it when I had the time.

So here we are: this is bare, but it’s just the beginning. Stay tuned 😉

How am I?

Tue, 18 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT

When I planned the holidays I’m in at the moment, I never deliberately planned to come on my own. My partner and I pretty much operate on the basis of: “I want to do this thing, would you like to come with?” Sometimes we do take the other one up on the offer, and sometimes we don’t.

This time Thom decided not to come, and to be honest, I probably would have been a bit anxious if he did. Don’t get me wrong, we have a wonderful time together, but I’ll be in a tech event for a few days, and I’d feel like I’m neglecting him.

I like being on my own. I’m a very social person, but I learnt to be on my own years ago, and I grew to like my own company. I also got to know myself, and think I’m quite self aware. I don’t know whether that’s a good or a bad thing, but it’s a fact.

I’m always doing a million things at once, and a lot of people around me think I should “spin fewer plates” and “focus more”. I get where they’re coming from, this is pretty sensible advice.

So since arriving in Oslo, I agreed (with myself) to try and focus on one thing at a time. I always have multiple stimuli going at once, any combination of podcast, reading, music, twitter. So for this week, I thought I’d try a bit of silence. So if I’m reading, no background music; if I’m walking, no podcasts.

It’s been less than 24 hours at this point, and I have to say I’m getting a bit overwhelmed at times.

I find creative endeavours hard. I don’t consider myself a creative person, and struggle to come up with ideas. I’ve read multiple times that for writing and other creative tasks, doing nothing is the best method. Sitting still and observing life around you gives you inspiration.

I’ve been saying to people that I need to get better at writing, at just putting my streams of consciousness into words. At the moment, when writing a blog post, I agonise over every word, and am still unhappy with the final result. I thought by transcribing my thoughts, I’d have a more fluid output that I could then shape and edit. But what do I do when it’s too much?

In my normal environment, writing feels like squeezing words out of my brain like one squeezes toothpaste out of a tube that’s nearly empty. It’s effortful, and doesn’t produce much output.

But now, with all the noise turned off, I can’t say it feels any easier. My brain feels like a hurricane of thoughts, and pinning down words is like trying to pluck a single leaf from the eye of the hurricane.

It feels counterintuitive to say that, as I’ve written all of this over the course of a single coffee, but I feel it only represents a fraction of what’s on my mind. I feel like I can’t ever manage to represent what’s on my brain fully. That my fingers can’t type fast enough. And the fact that my thoughts are messy and non linear doesn’t help matters much.

I think the conclusion I’ve reached is that my idle brain tires me. At the end of the day, keeping myself busy is a coping mechanism. Giving my brain multiple things to juggle helps me keep it in check; prevents it from wandering all around and screaming lots of different things in my ear. So I think that when people advise me to do less, they hope I’ll be calmer and more focussed, and I’m not sure that would be the case.

I have found two things that absorb me completely: good books, and good video games. I brought a Sally Rooney novel with me, and I’ve already polished 60% of it on the first day. I think because I have no control over the story, all my brain can do is keep reading to see what happens.

I don’t know what this post is for, but my brain made me write it. I’ve handed it the reins for now, so I’m just going with it. But I think I’ll visit a bookshop to stock up, just in case.

Impostor Syndrome and I

Thu, 23 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import impostorSyndromeChart from "@images/posts/impostor-syndrome/impostor_syndrome_chart.png"; import twoOwls from "@images/posts/impostor-syndrome/two-owls.jpg";

A few weeks ago, the Women in Tech group at work got together to organise the local section of our Women in Tech Experience, an enterprise wide event. They very generously invited me to do a short talk on impostor syndrome, something I’m familiar with, unfortunately 😅

I’ve decided to make the talk into a blog post, as it’s something I care about and talking about it really helps. I started feeling a bit nervous about doing the talk, so I decided to do some research so I could feel prepared. I started on Wikipedia, as you do, and it said this at the top of the page:

Not to be confused with Capgras delusion , in which a person believes that a loved one has been replaced by an impostor.

😱 This is terrifying, definitely scarier than doing a talk, so I did it. (I’ve been eyeing my family suspiciously for weeks now, though)

What is impostor syndrome?

Impostor syndrome is the name of a particular flavour of self-doubt, in which you perceive yourself as a fraud, and as having tricked your peers into thinking you’re more intelligent than you are. You also attribute your accomplishments to luck and other external factors 🍀

I found that early on it was thought to affect high achieving women, but studies conducted since have shown it affects men and women equally.

Humans are susceptible to hosts of cognitive biases, and are not great at self assessment. Impostor syndrome is one of those biases, and perhaps one of the most shocking cases of it is Maya Angelou.

This is her summarised biography, taken from her Wikipedia page:

Maya Angelou was an American poet, singer, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees.

She was an immensely accomplished person, and yet she grappled with impostor syndrome. This is one of her quotes on the subject:

Each time I write a book, every time I face that yellow pad, the challenge is so great. I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody and they’re going to find me out.’

If someone like Maya Angelou struggles with impostor syndrome, how can I not?

What does it look like for me?

For me, impostor syndrome feels like this:

My very talented colleagues sit at their desks, being talented, doing amazing things. Meanwhile I sit at mine tapping the keyboard and making it up as I go along.

Whenever I get stuck, I wonder whether I’m good enough for this job. Whenever I hear something I don’t understand, I wonder whether I should already know that, and quickly make a note of it to read up later. I constantly feel I’m not doing enough, not learning enough.

And yet I tell my mentees they shouldn’t worry about buzzwords; I tell them tech is vast and ever reaching, and they’ll never know everything; I encourage them to have fun and let go of their insecurities.

Why do I demand so much of myself?

This tweet from Ali Spittel I saw recently sums it up nicely:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"> Me to other developers: - You don't have to know everything - Have work life balance - you are awesome Me to myself: - You have to be an expert in all of the things - People work less than 80hr weeks? - at some point people are going to realize you actually suck at this 🙃 — Ali Spittel 🐞 (@ASpittel){" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/ASpittel/status/1113616884925194240?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> April 4, 2019 </a> </blockquote>

My self doubt doesn’t only care about the present, though. It scours my past, and makes intrusive suggestions: Did I get where I am because I got lucky? Am I a diversity hire? Do other people think I’m a diversity hire?

There is no denying privilege has played a part in my life. I come from a poor neighbourhood in a poor country, but I am healthy and able, almost white, I had able parents that worked very hard, I had access to food, clothes and education. I have Spanish citizenship, which gave me the privilege to move countries easily when I wanted to.

Having said all that, I have worked very hard all my life, and while it’s very possible I was a diversity hire, I’ve never been made to feel like I have. Thinking rationally, I have no reason to think those things, and yet I do.

This all sounds really grim, I know, but there are some good news: I’m getting better at dealing with it. I don’t think it will ever go away completely, but I know the voice by name now, and I can turn the volume down on it.

Things that have helped me:

I thought I’d share some of things that helped me, hoping they’ll help someone else:

Getting feedback

I’m very lucky to work in a company that has a feedback culture, and that’s been immensely helpful. Feedback helps you in two ways: you get concrete proof that you are good at certain things, and you get what your peers think you need to improve on, which prevents your brain from running wild and telling you that you’re rubbish and need to learn everything. It allows to focus on the things that will improve your working life.

Talking to people about it

Preparing for this talk has been so helpful, as it made me talk to quite a few people about it. It was encouraging to know that a lot of people that I consider successful and skilful deal with impostor syndrome, and still manage to be awesome 😎

Unfortunately I’m not the only one to think about whether I’m a diversity hire or not, but I discovered there’s also another side to this story. When discussing this subject with my partner, he mentioned he often wonders if he’s got his job because he’s a white man, if he got to where he is because of his privilege.

Talking to people made me realise that impostor syndrome is quite common, and that being open about it helps yourself and others.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"> A good thing for me to do when I'm really struggling with impostor syndrome is know that the people I look up to really struggle with it too If we all struggle with it, then maybe the whole thing is bullshit, and we ought to be kinder to ourselves. 💕 — Ian Coldwater @ KubeCon (@IanColdwater){" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1115057344470298624?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> April 8, 2019 </a> </blockquote>

Keeping a yay list

I learnt about the yay list not too long ago from a talk, and I really liked the idea. It consists of keeping a list of all the things worth celebrating you’ve done. Sometimes it can be to get out of bed, sometimes it’s a big presentation you were scared to do.

I haven’t been doing it for long, but it has really helped. I’m guilty of moving my own goalposts a lot, moving on to the next thing as soon as I reach my objective. I think this happens a lot in tech; as soon as you learn something, you believe it to be obvious to everyone else, and that can be very damaging.

The list forces me to acknowledge the thing I’ve learnt/accomplished, and motivates me to set new goals, rather than constantly extend the same ones and end up feeling frustrated.

Being kind to myself

This has been by far the hardest step. With time, I’m learning to accept that I’m doing the best I can given the circumstances I’m in, as is everyone else.

I’m learning that I have a limited amount of time, and that I shouldn’t feel guilty about taking time to relax, do fun unproductive things, and just be idle. I’m talking to myself more kindly. There is a quote around this that I really love:

You wouldn’t talk to a friend the way you talk to yourself.

So be your own best friend 💛

Links

List of Cognitive Biases - Wikipedia

What is imposter syndrome and how can you combat it? - Elizabeth Cox - YouTube

Slapping back Imposter Syndrome - Alice Goldfuss’ Blog

XKCD - Impostor Syndrome

Lambda World 2018 - Imposter Syndrome and Individual Competence - Jessica Rose - YouTube

Perfectionism, Imposter Syndrome & Anxiety - Jo Franchetti You Got This 2019 - YouTube

Individuality and contemporary art

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import essaysJennyHolzer from "@images/posts/individuality-contemporary-art/essays-jenny-holzer.jpeg";

Last week I went to the Tate Modern for the first time.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"> Today i’m visiting the Tate Modern for the first time. I’ve only been here for a few minutes and i’m already /very excited/ 💛{" "} <a href="https://t.co/5zSJnkkc6l">pic.twitter.com/5zSJnkkc6l</a> — Carol 🤸‍♀️ (@CarolSaysThings){" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/CarolSaysThings/status/1224317612945002496?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> February 3, 2020 </a> </blockquote>

I always find museums and galleries take me to a reflective state of mind, and I quite enjoy it. My partner and I usually go together, so we end up tangled in deep conversations about our favourite pieces and how they relate to us.

This time I went alone, so I made some notes on my phone, and I think I owe it to them to try and arrange them in a sort of coherent sequence.

At times, when talking about art with friends, they often say they don’t understand art. I feel that’s partly because of the pressure to contextualise art and focus on the history of it. Art is also often seen as a high brow interest.

Personally, I think classic art is at fault. Historically, society connected with art through their awe over the form, over the immense talent it takes to produce hyperrealistic paintings, or to chisel fabric out of marble.

I can appreciate that skill and join in on the awe, but that’s not all there is to art. Not only that, I think that’s a small part of it.

I love contemporary art. I find it fascinating, because it feels reachable, personable, relatable. The function of art is to reflect human experiences back at us, and contemporary art does this best.

The way I see it, each of us has a personality and a set of experiences. Picture those as the different colours and shapes in a kaleidoscope.

Contemporary art allows you to look through someone else’s kaleidoscope, and find the shapes and colours that match yours. To me, seeing shared experiences through someone else’s lens is what makes art compelling and great.

Most people in society identify strongly with the groups they belong to. Be those related to your work, hobbies, politics, or whether you prefer tabs or spaces. So it can be easy to forget your individuality, the set of things/ideas/feelings that make you unique.

It’s also easy to group together people you don’t know well, or disagree with, effectively othering them. It’s far easier to dismiss people’s feelings and opinions if they’re not in the same circles as you, as painfully demonstrated by politics worldwide.

Art allows you to revel in your individuality, and connect with people with vastly different experiences. It lets you find the fragments of humanity that you have in common, and isn’t that lovely? 💛

<Image src={essaysJennyHolzer} alt="Stairwell at the Tate Modern, with Jenny Holzer's Inflammatory essays pasted on the wall" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> 🖼 My favourite piece from this visit: Inflammatory Essays - Jenny Holzer

I made my first iOS Shortcut 🎉

Tue, 18 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import shortcut1 from "@images/posts/ios-shortcut-alt-text/shortcut-1.jpg"; import shortcut2 from "@images/posts/ios-shortcut-alt-text/shortcut-2.jpg"; import execution1 from "@images/posts/ios-shortcut-alt-text/execution-1.jpg"; import execution2 from "@images/posts/ios-shortcut-alt-text/execution-2.jpg"; import execution3 from "@images/posts/ios-shortcut-alt-text/execution-3.jpg"; import execution4 from "@images/posts/ios-shortcut-alt-text/execution-4.jpg";

As I'm sure everyone is aware, I'm on Twitter a lot 👀

And one of the things that bugs me on the daily is that you can't tell whether an image has alt text if you're in the app. So I built myself a tiny tool to help 🤓

It was an afternoon's project, so it's a little rough, but here's a quick run down of what I did:

Part 1: Netlify function

To get the alt text out of Twitter, I opted for a Netlify function, because:

I'm lazy
I do enough on AWS in my day job 😅
They have great docs and local development experience 🙌🏼

The function receives a tweet ID as query string parameter, makes a call to the Twitter API to get the tweet's details, and then it loops the image metadata for the tweet, returning an array of strings with the alt text of all the images.

const fetch = require("node-fetch");
const { BEARER_TOKEN } = process.env;

exports.handler = async (event, context) => {
  try {
    const tweetId = event.queryStringParameters.id;
    const rawResponse = await fetch(
      `https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/lookup.json?id=${tweetId}&include_ext_alt_text=true&trim_user=true&tweet_mode=extended`,
      {
        headers: {
          Authorization: `Bearer ${BEARER_TOKEN}`,
        },
      },
    );
    const tweetData = await rawResponse.json();
    const images =
      tweetData[0] &&
      tweetData[0].extended_entities &&
      tweetData[0].extended_entities.media;

    if (images) {
      const alts = [];
      images.forEach((image) => {
        if ("ext_alt_text" in image) {
          alts.push(image.ext_alt_text);
        }
      });

      return {
        statusCode: 200,
        body: JSON.stringify(alts),
      };
    }

    return {
      statusCode: 204,
    };
  } catch (err) {
    return {
      statusCode: 500,
      body: `Whoops! Something went wrong -> ${err}`,
    };
  }
};

There were a few stumbles along the way, that I ended up working around, but they're worth mentioning as it might save someone somewhere some pain 😌

I found that when running my function locally using the functions:serve and functions:invoke commands, it didn't pull in my environment variables correctly. However, when running netlify dev it was all good ✌🏼
Unfortunately, the Twitter API v2 does not return the alt text in the tweet metadata, so I had to use the v1 API, in particular, this endpoint: GET statuses/lookup.
If you set the include_ext_alt_text parameter but still don't get the alt text back, make sure you also set tweet_mode to extended as helpfully documented in this obscure comment thread 🙃
When I first deployed the function, I got an error because I'd used the optional chaining operator, and even though I set an .nvmrc specifying node 14 and confirmed in the deployment log that node 14 was being used, Netlify still didn't like it 🤷🏼‍♀️

Despite those, I got the function working, so hooray ✨

Part 2: iOS Shorcut

This part was a little different, but pretty straightforward. The docs weren't particularly helpful to me in all honesty, but I did find this reddit thread full of great links 🎉

This is what the flow ended up looking like:

Here's what the blocks are doing:

Match text: does regex matching on the input (regex flavour is ICU).
Get group in matches: allows you to pick the output of a regex capture group, in our case, the tweet ID.
Text: sets up the URL for our Netlify function.
Combine text: allows us to concatenate the URL and the tweet ID.
Get contents: fires a GET request to the combined URL.
Show result: shows the body of the response in a modal.

Top tip: while you're adjusting the blocks and variables in the shortcut, scattering a few Show result blocks around might help to see what you're working with.

After I got all the blocks in order, I enabled my shortcut on the share sheet and took it for a spin.

Part 3: Profit

And it (miraculously) works! 🎉

There's tonnes of improvements that could be made, but I think I'll probably leave it there for now and go work on my other 35472 small projects 😅

Bye! 👋🏼

Lifenotes #1

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import thomAndI from "@images/posts/lifenotes-1/thom-and-i.jpeg"; import waterfall from "@images/posts/lifenotes-1/waterfall.jpeg"; import merlotAndI from "@images/posts/lifenotes-1/merlot-and-i.jpeg";

I've been meaning to start writing weeknotes for a while now. A week off seemed like a good place to start 🙂
So here's a breakdown of what I...

Did

Spent this whole week with Thom in a cottage in the middle of Craik Forest, in Scotland.
Went on loads of walks with Thom and Merlot (our host's dog).
We visited a few places in the week: Hawick, Moffat, St Mary's Loch, and the Talla and Megget Reservoirs.
Cooked lovely food.
Drank wine by the fire.
Practiced some drawing.
Bought the cosiest socks ahead of the winter 🧦

Played

🎮 Wordify (it was a bit rubbish)
🎮 Super Monkey Ball
🎮 Paper Mario
🎮 Animal Crossing
🎮 Trivial Pursuit

Read

📖 Queenie
📖 Women & Power
📖 The men who stare at goats
📖 The Book of Dust: Vol. 1

Watched

📺 Star Trek Discovery
📺 The Jinx
📺 Enola Holmes
📺 Jojo Rabbit
📺 Spider-man: Far from home
📺 Baby Driver
📺 The Rock 😭

Pics

<Image src={thomAndI} alt="Thom and I having a soggy stroll by Talla Reservoir" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> Thom and I having a soggy stroll by Talla Reservoir

<Image src={waterfall} alt="Thom and Merlot by Wolfcleuch Waterfall, in Craik Forest" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> Thom and Merlot by Wolfcleuch Waterfall, in Craik Forest

<Image src={merlotAndI} alt="Merlot and I having a cuddle" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> Merlot and I having a cuddle 💛

Lifenotes #10: May & June 2021

Wed, 14 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import may from "@images/posts/lifenotes-10/may.jpg"; import june from "@images/posts/lifenotes-10/june.jpg";

✨ Highlights

Second lockdown birthday 🥲 it was nice though, saw some friends the day before, and had a nice chilled day 🎈
Attended All Day Hey! and learnt a bunch 🤓
Learnt to vinyl print, and made a funny t-shirt for Jamie 😄
My mum, sister and nephews came to visit for a whole week! It was really lovely to see them, and it was the first time they've been over since we've been in the house. Having the space to host everyone was great.
I upgraded from my old and tired series 3 Apple watch to a shiny blue series 6 ⌚️
Our garden has been really lovely through spring and into summer. It's a little overgrown and has lots of different plants, but that means it's been flowering non stop and full of bees 💛
Saw friends for another garden gathering 🎉
Convinced myself I needed something a little more portable than my laptop and a bit bigger/better than my old iPad pro, so I got a new M1 iPad pro. So far I love it, and the new magic keyboard with the trackpad is so nice to use 😌

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

The West Wing: started watching it at Emma and Andrew's recommendation, and now I'm hooked!
The Economics of JavaScript by Mike Carter
Finished Why I'm no longer talking to white people about race, by Reni Eddo-Lodge. A brilliant book by any measure.
Promising Young Woman: this one'd been on my list for a while, but I was a bit nervous considering the topic (sexual assault). It is so good, though! It's so well done, highly recommend a watch.
JWT should not be your default for sessions by Evert Pot
Keith Haring on Creativity, Empathy, and What Makes Us Who We Are by Maria Popova
Booksmart: nice and easy comedy.
Friends reunion: was a bit of a strange one, but as a friends fan, I couldn't miss it.
Bo Burnham's Inside: it captures so well what life has been like for the last 18 months. However, in the ensuing time I've still not been able to get rid of the constant singing inside my head 😅 (🎤 CEO ENTREPRENEUR BORN IN 1964 IT'S JEFFREEEEY 🎵)
Substack's UI and 1Password just cost me $2,023 by Timmy O'Mahony
Conditionally loading a polyfill for :focus-visible by Alistair Shepherd
This thread about a Figma bug was great.
Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom with the nephews 😄
The dispassionate developer by Mark Seemann
Bo Burnham's Make Happy: I just wanna give him a hug 🥺
The right tag for the job: why you should use semantic HTML by Sophie Koonin
The Amazon That Customers Don’t See by Jodi Kantor, Karen Weise and Grace Ashford
I love Dick, by Chris Kraus. I’m pretty sure this is the first epistolary book I’ve read, and I enjoyed the format. I didn’t expect to connect to Chris as a protagonist, honestly, but then I guess she’s a heady and extremely honest woman, and of course, there’s the patriarchy. It wasn’t the easiest read, but I get the hype for it.
Kill the 5-Day Workweek by Joe Pinsker
It takes two: was looking for a good coop game to play with Thom and found this, it's great!
Companies are leaving neurodiversity out of their DEI conversations—and that’s a mistake by Nathan Friedman
Why diversity is important, and the Obvious way towards it by Rahul Gonsalves
Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away by Olivia Carville
Detransition, baby by Torrey Peters: only just started it, but so far so great 💛

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #11: July 2021

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import collage from "@images/posts/lifenotes-11/july.jpg";

✨ Highlights

We found a litter of hedgehogs living in our garden, so now we feed and check on them every day 🦔 💛
Our garden has started to fruit, we got potatoes, lots of raspberries and even our corn is starting to grow.
Seeing friends is always a nice treat 💛
Got promoted, I'm a senior now 🎉
Went back to Capoeira, it's been really nice to exercise and see my capo friends again 🤸🏼‍♀️

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Why senior engineers get nothing done by Swizec Teller: This article hit close to home, turns out I already do a lot of what is suggested, but I need to be better at documenting every answer.
In JS functions, the last return wins by Jake Archibald
Performance reviews by Lara Hogan
Questions I'm asking in interviews by Julia Evans
the component gallery: design systems
The perils of rehydration by Josh Comeau
Good meetings by Sarah Drasner
Clueless: I hadn't watched it before, and my only question after is: is Paul Rudd human?
Learning to succeed on large software projects by Denise Yu
How do you identify great engineers when hiring? by Yenny Cheung
Always be quitting by Julio Merino
A promise broken by L'atelier: this is beautifully done but a somber read.
Time to say goodbye - Enzyme.js by Piotr Staniów
How to learn stuff quickly by Josh Comeau
Simple things are complicated: making a show password option by Andy Sellick
How I think about career development by Cian Synnott
The Dig: nice film, I didn't know much about the Sutton Hoo dig so it was nice to learn about it.
Finished The West Wing! Really enjoyed it 😄
We don't do that here by Aja Hammerly

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #12: August 2021

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import collage from "@images/posts/lifenotes-12/august.jpg";

✨ Highlights

I painted a big triangle on my office wall 👩🏼‍🎨🎨
Got a proper haircut and colour 💇🏼‍♀️
We went on a lovely holiday to Craik Forest 🌲 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Why women in tech are so angry all the time by Emily Kager
New in Git: switch and restore by Dragos Barosan
Interviewing software engineers by Jennifer Moore - this quote really resonated with me:
- "Take home projects might be worse, because while they do potentially allow people to use their actual tools of choice, it also severs the tenuous connection they had to a member of the team."
How to break out of the thread of doom by Tania Reilly
My first CSS by Nathan Hardy
Tried a couple of TV shows that I didn't really like: Startup and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
Successful Slack by Justin Garrison
Stay alert by Rich Harris
Foundations by Jeremy Keith
Choice words about the upcoming deprecation of JavaScript dialogs by Chris Coyyier
Keeping it simple with CSS that scales by Andy Bell
On the design of women's spaces by Kat Marchán
JS async and await in loops by Zell Liew
Superstore: such a fun watch, loved it 🙌🏼
A Quiet Place part 2: good sequel, quite entertaining.
With the end in mind: amazing book, changed my understanding of death, has immediately quelled a lot of my anxiety about it.
La comunidad (common wealth): rewatched it after many years, still a fun watch. Lots of great actors, playing a bunch of unhinged people.
Witches, sluts, feminists: a really interesting read about the story of the witch through the ages and how it relates to misogyny and feminism.
Judas and the Black messiah: absolutely excellent film, great cast and powerful story.
Ted Lasso: started watching it and I love it so much 💛
The vanishing half: this book was impossible to put down, I read the whole thing in a single day! Really interesting story and well developed characters.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #13: September 2021

Sat, 02 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import collage from "@images/posts/lifenotes-13/september.png";

✨ Highlights

After a year and a half of remote working, I went back to the office! It was great to see and chat to people in person 💛
I finished up my time at Capital One, and I’m sure gonna miss my friends from there 🥺
Had a week off in between jobs, so went to London for a few days 😌
Went to CityJS Conf! A real conf in real life with real humans! It was great fun 🎉
Started my new job at Monzo! It’s already been really fun to learn a bunch of new things 🤓

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

The Cleaner: watched a couple of episodes, it’s a fun watch
Ted Lasso: watched most of Series 2 and I love it so much 💛
Arrival: quite an interesting film for a language nerd 🤓
Resilient management: I picked this up to learn how to be a good report, and to understand management better, and it was such a good read! It’s packed full of great perspectives and advice 🙌🏼
Friends again 🙇🏼‍♀️ (pls don’t judge me)
Reflections on burnout by Vaidehi Joshi
The danger of financial jargon by John Lanchester
Providing a public salary history page by Jamie Tanna: Jamie kindly shared his salary history, a great step towards more salary transparency, which helps minoritised folks bridge the wage gap. Thanks Jamie! 💛
Tech Team Weekly Ep. 5 - Talking openly about pay!
How does salary work? by Kevin Goldsmith
A profession is not a personality by Arthur C. Brooks
Sex Education Series 3 🥺💛🌈 this show just warms my heart, especially with the Ezra Furman soundtrack to boot 💕

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #14: October & November 2021

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import october from "@images/posts/lifenotes-14/october.jpg"; import november from "@images/posts/lifenotes-14/november.jpg";

✨ Highlights

DDD East Midlands was such good fun! And a great foray into IRL conferences again 🎉
Went into the Monzo office for the first time 🚀
Started attending BSL classes again, after a forced covid hiatus.
Went to React Advanced with my new workmates, it was great ✨
Family came to visit for a few days 💛
State of the browser was awesome. Got to meet some web twitter friends IRL and hang out ☺️
I succumbed to the hype (and the despondency over my 2018 MBP keyboard) and got a new mac! I ended up going for the 16" M1 Max, and this thing is so silent and fast 🤩
Caught up with a friend after a long time 💛
Went to a Brownies STEM event and it was so much fun! 🎉
First Homebrew back in person! 💛👩🏼‍💻

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Locus by Ethan Marcotte
Why flow matters more than passion by Sarah Drasner
What is a Staff (or Staff-Plus or Principal) Engineer by Mike McQuaid
Who is the bad art friend? by Robert Kolker
Have Single-Page Apps Ruined the Web? | Transitional Apps by Rich Harris
What the heck, z-index?? by Josh Comeau
Foundation: started watching it, it's okay
Ted Lasso: watched the end of series 2, can't wait for series 3!
Neurodivergent burnout: the cost of closing the gap by Abi Moorcock
Everything You Need to Know About GraphQL in 3 Components by Eve Porcello
Dave Chappelle's Betrayal by Saeed Jones
What you discover when you really listen, by Hrishikesh Hirway
We need to talk about money by Otegha Uwagba
GBBO! 🧁
Oceans eight: an entertaining watch
Dune: it was our first trip to the cinema in like, 2 years, and the film was great
O homem do futuro: watched with my mum and sis when they were over, quite a silly romcom, but I like the actors
Being the DRI of your career by Cate
Writing In Public, Inside Your Company by Brie at KoolAid Factory
How organizations are like slime molds by Alex Komoroske
Time is a Social Construct by Daniel Cousineau
How to take criticism by The School of Life
Crouching tiger, hidden dragon I hadn't seen this before, and it was really good, plus Michelle Yeoh is awesome
Derry Girls Series 2: I love this show so much, and it's so funny too
Is my ADHD real? - Factually! podcast
How We Built a Team with a High Net Promoter Score by Jamie Tanna

📸 Pics

October

November

Lifenotes #15: December 2021 & January 2022

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import december from "@images/posts/lifenotes-15/december.jpg"; import january from "@images/posts/lifenotes-15/january.jpg";

✨ Highlights

We adopted baby Juno! 🖤
Had my booster shot 🎉
Had a nice Christmas with my family staying over at my house
Got some more furniture for the house
Had a little holiday to break up January: visited Cambridge for a day, and spent another couple of days in a lakeside cabin in Essex 😌
My BSL classes are back in person, which is nice
Had an almost pre-pandemic normal weekend with a spa day and some shopping, and it was so great 💛

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley: my sister brought me this and it was a nice warm read
Ghost of Tsushima: got this on the Black Friday sale and hammered it through the last couple of months
The Beatles: Get Back
Modern Family
Beautiful world, where are you? by Sally Rooney
Die Hard: it’s not Christmas without Die Hard 😄
The Book of Bobba Fett
Shang-Chi
The Mitchells vs the Machines: I watched this with my nephews and it was so good!
know how your org works (or how to become a more effective engineer) by Cindy Sridharan
My first impressions of web3 by Moxie Marlinspike
Don’t look up
What happened to Monday
Planes, trains and automobiles
The office (again!)
Line Goes Up - The Problem with NFTs - Folding Ideas
Podcasts! Because I take Juno on walks every day, I managed to add podcasts back into my life, here’s some good ones from the last few weeks:
- Cute Little Monstrosities of Nature - 99% Invisible
- Zero - The Allusionist
- The case against loving your job - The Ezra Klein Show
Traces by Patricia Wiltshire

📸 Pics

December

January

Lifenotes #16: February & March 2022

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import february from "@images/posts/lifenotes-16/february.jpg"; import march from "@images/posts/lifenotes-16/march.jpg";

✨ Highlights

I did a series of accessibility workshops and learnt a bunch! 💙
Started the ADHD assessment process.
Got some new glasses ✨
Took Juno on a German Shepherd group walk 🐾
Had a fun social with my work squad 🏌🏼‍♀️
Caught some sunshine ☀️ 😎

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

I started listening to the Office Ladies podcast on my walks with Juno and it’s been a lot of fun.
A military veteran knows why your employees are leaving by Aaron De Smet and Adria Horn.
How we calculate balances by Basma Taha.
How to get away with murder was an entertaining watch.
Thom hadn’t seen Shrek & Shrek 2 so we had to right that wrong 😂
Horizon Forbidden West consumed my every non-work waking moment until I finished it.
I started Life is Strange: True Colours but it hasn’t hooked me in yet, so I haven’t made it very far.
Finished reading Traces, it was so interesting!
Universal Holdout Groups at Disney Streaming by Tian Yang

📸 Pics

February

March

Lifenotes #18: May 2022

Sun, 26 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import may from "@images/posts/lifenotes-18/may.jpg";

✨ Highlights

Went outlet shopping with a friend and had a lovely time 🛍
Turned 33 🎈
All Day Hey!
Back in the game with my NYT Crossword streak 💪🏼
- I’m finding it harder to do it on my own cause Thom and I have very complementary knowledge 😅
Saw a lot of friends this month! Dinner dates, walks, picnics... It was really nice 💛
A whole bunch of my squad came to the office this month for a social, it was lovely to see everyone.
After a year-long low iron timeout, I managed to donate blood again 🩸🎉

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Lessons learned from the recent job hunt by Jamie Tanna
Ex Machina
Finished Killing Eve 😢
Rewatched Fleabag and bawled my eyes out.
Started Greys anatomy and only after realised it has 18(!) series.
The Google Incentive Mismatch: Problems with Promotion-Oriented Cultures by Zach Lloyd
Decoding the Wicker Man by Roger Light
Everything, everywhere, all at once: I loved this film so much! I am obsessed with Michelle Yeoh and she is fantastic in it 🌟
Finished The Mercies, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. I found the story a bit tepid but the setting was really interesting.
The seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. This was a page turner for me, I devoured it over two days.
The fourth language by Andrew Walpole
Scaling CSS Layout Beyond Pixels by Stephanie Eckles
Migrating millions of lines of code to TypeScript by Andrew Lunny
Not my job by Silvia Botros
Lost in Translation by Manuel Matuzović
Working hard, hardly working by Grace Beverley. I didn’t know who the author was when I bought this, and maybe if I did I wouldn’t have 😅 It was ok, some good tips and advice in there but not much that was new to me.
Severance (again!)
How much of these hills is gold by C Pam Zhang. I really enjoyed this, it was a touching story.
Stranger Things Series 4

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #17: April 2022

Sun, 01 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import april from "@images/posts/lifenotes-17/april.jpg";

✨ Highlights

We started being able to play fetch with Juno in the park off lead 🎉
I showed a friend around Nottingham and had a nice time.
I caught a cold and was out of action for a couple of days 🤧
I went back to Valencia and saw my lovely friends, and my old dog Maia after a few years 💛
I went to the IVAM while I was in Valencia and saw two exhibitions I absolutely loved:
- One was on Zanele Muholi’s work.
- The other one was on the design of the posters of Valencia’s clubbing scene in the 80s.
Thom and I broke up after ~6.5 years 💔
Finally met baby Cookie 🍪

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

This website will self destruct - Reply All
Molly’s Game
The Morning Show
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Ghosts by Dolly Alderton - this was a fun read, it always amazes me how relatable I find the woes of other millennials 😅
Severance - this was so good! Already hyped for series 2 🎉
Chasing Banana: one girl’s quest to find Britney Spears’ 2001 VMA snake by Crystal Bell
The present bias: why you keep sabotaging your future and how to stop by Amy Rigby
I finally got proper hooked into Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury and 100%ed it while on holiday.
Bridgerton - I binged this so much while I was on holiday, I devoured both series in ~48h 😅
Killing Eve - I had watched half of this a long time ago, but decided to restart now that all the series are out.
Russian Doll - I rewatched series 1 now that series 2 is coming out.
No Time to Die - was alright 🤷🏼‍♀️
The Mercies - started it while on holiday, haven’t made it very far yet.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #19: June 2022

Sun, 07 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import june from "@images/posts/lifenotes-19/june.jpg";

✨ Highlights

Monzo gave everyone the jubilee week off (Jubileave 🌴) so I went down to Devon with Juno to see my family for a few days 💛
Signed Juno up for a dog class, and it’s been great. He’s ok with commands but gets super distracted near other dogs, so it was good to practice that.
My friend Mark came to visit for a weekend ☺️
Took Juno to doggy daycare for the first time and he had a blast!
Went for yoga and brunch with Anna and it was sooo lovely 🧘🏼‍♀️
Monzo had a summer event for everyone in the company, it was a lot of fun to hang out with work friends in person 🎉 (incidentally, I need to up my limbo game)

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Nothing to hide: watched this with my sister, it was a fun watch!
Stranger Things Series 4 Volume 1: I love where the story is going, impatient for volume 2!
Piranesi: I really enjoyed this book, during the setup I wasn’t really sure, but I loved the way the story unfolded.
Are You Suffering from Toxic Productivity? by Kat Boogaard
Face Off: I’d never seen this one, so I watched it with a friend and it was so goofy! A fun watch, but hard to take seriously at all 😅
Derry Girls Series 3: this is such a fun show, I’m sad it’s over!
Business Value, Soccer Canteens, Engineer Retention, and the Bricklayer Fallacy by Ian Miell
Notes on maintaining an internal React component library by Gabe Scholz
Good luck to you, Leo Grande: I love this film so much! 💛
Everything everywhere all at once (again!)
in the kingdom of the blind by Bridget Kromhout
Factually: The Long, Slow Death of the Internet with Cory Doctorow
Crazy stupid love: I watched this while off sick and it ticked all the boxes for one of those days.
Kenobi: I enjoyed it cause it’s Star Wars but there wasn’t much jeopardy in the plot, cause you know where the characters end up 🤷🏼‍♀️ (getting glimpses of Vader at peak Vader is always fun, though)
Boy parts: this was a page turner for me, a slightly uncomfortable story well told.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #2

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import garden from "@images/posts/lifenotes-2/garden.jpg"; import jacket from "@images/posts/lifenotes-2/jacket.jpg"; import fog from "@images/posts/lifenotes-2/fog.jpg";

Hey friends! Hope you had a nice week and weekend. This is a bit late, but here's how my week went:

Did

Got back to work after a week away, couldn't really remember anything about my job 😅
Went to see the house we're buying again, and it's still lovely 💛 just have to wait for mortgage and solicitors and other boring things 🤞🏼
Had my first therapy session 🙌🏼
Got a new pillow, but I didn't really get on with it.
Started looking into micro frontends and potential architectures, very exciting 🤓
Started migrating my site to Eleventy 👩🏼‍💻
The Coding Black Females Takeover at WiT Notts was so good! Inspirational talks and speakers, and overall just great fun 💛
Got my flu jab
Biden won 🎉
Had a lovely zoom call with some of the Tech Nottingham Slack folks, and after our convo decided to watch a sampler of UK game shows. I watched: Only Connect, Countdown, University Challenge, Mastermind, Catchphrase, Pointless, Richard Osman's House of Games, The Chase and Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Did I miss any good ones?

Played

🎮 Paper Mario
🎮 Superliminal
🎮 What remains of Edith Finch
🎮 Horizon Zero Dawn

Read

🗒 What is the internet doing to Boomers' brains?
📖 The Book of Dust: Vol. 1
📖 The Guilty Feminist

Watched

🎤 Small Tech, by Laura Kalbag and Aral Balkan
📺 Star Trek Discovery
📺 Friends

Pics

<Image src={garden} alt="You can the back of a two storey brick house, a deck with a table and a parasol, some bunting and a blue wendy house." widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> The back garden of the house we're trying to buy

<Image src={jacket} alt="Me, with my back to the camera, wearing a teal bomber jacket, with pink embroidery at the back of a keycap and the incription: cute keyboard club." widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> My cute keyboard club jacket arrived 😍

<Image src={fog} alt="A foggy street, with a square and a brick building in the distance" widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> Spooky times are still going over here in Sneinton Market 👻

Lifenotes #20: July 2022

Sun, 07 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import july from "@images/posts/lifenotes-20/july.jpg";

✨ Highlights

Juno went on holiday with Thom to Scotland for 2 weeks. It was nice to have a little bit of freedom but I missed him 🥺
Started going to yoga more regularly and it’s been really great for me.
Went to Manchester to visit Mark. Saw a couple of museums, ate some great food.
Did a sewing class for beginners, and had a great time! I made a cushion cover and a tote bag, and now I’m excited to make more things 🎉
We ran the first in person Women in Tech in a really long time! It was really lovely to see folks old and new to the community 💖
Started learning to drive finally! It’s been a little hard, a little stressful, but also fun.
Went on some fun dates with cute and interesting people 😌

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Stranger Things Series 4 Volume 2: I really liked this series, but I didn’t like that it didn’t have a conclusion at all, and it will probably be a long while before they release the final series.
All about love: this book was an excellent read, can’t recommend it enough. It was tough at times, especially with where I am emotionally, but it was so worth it.
Russian Doll Series 2: it was ok, I definitely liked the first series a lot better though.
Depression is probably not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain – new study by Joanna Moncrieff and Mark Horowitz
Ended up rewatching some Black Mirror while at Mark’s. We watched San Junipero, Nosedive and Playtest. You know the drill, interesting but grim.
Went to Broadway for a double session with Meshes of the afternoon and Mulholland Drive. I’d never seen Mulholland Drive but I do really like David Lynch’s work, so I went along, and it was great!
Rewatched both Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2 with Thom on a lazy Sunday. In hindsight, not really worth rewatching 😂
Switching from Customer Service Representative to Backend Engineer by Kyle Campbell and Duncan Roberts
Documenting pull requests is as important as writing good code by Duncan Roberts
The gray man: perfect film for a day off sick. Lots of action and no discernible plot 😅
Stray: I’ve been going out more this summer, which is good for my mental health, but bad for my gaming time 😂 I still got this and am playing it in bits, it’s a really fun and relaxing game.
Pride: queer people and union action, what’s not to love?
Swimming pool: I got back on Mubi, and this was the first film of the day. I enjoyed it, especially the ambiguity of the ending 👀

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #21: August 2022

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import august from "@images/posts/lifenotes-21/august.jpg";

✨ Highlights

I went to Italy for a week, did a few days solo and then met up with my lovely sister and nephews. It was a lot of fun, and nice to disconnect for a bit 💛
Had quite a few fun outings with friends. Nice meals, walks, trips to the park, just all around enjoyable days.

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Nightbitch: this was a great read. It was an unusual story that hit a lot of relatable feelings.
BBC Radio 4, The Silent Mind: this was so interesting! I definitely have an inner monologue, but it was so fun to hear how different people’s experiences are on this.
Paris, 13th district: wasn’t super into it, but was an entertaining watch.
The dog who wouldn’t be quiet: I really enjoyed this film, short, sweet and a little weird, in a nice way.
All the crows in the world: this was a fun short I saw on Mubi.
Prima facie: this was a tough watch cause of the sexual assault theme, but it was really good.
QI Series S: always enjoyable, and also the reason why I now say ‘darling’ every other sentence.
Nope: watched this in the cinema when it came out and really enjoyed it.
Heartstopper: a friend had been recommending this for ages and I finally watched it, it was so lovely and heart warming 💖
Convenience Store Woman: this was a short and sweet holiday read.
5x2: I hated this film, a small part of the why is because I hated the husband, but mostly because of the gratuitous depictions of sexual assault that I don’t think were intended to be SA 😬
A thought experiment: what if we talked about the over-60s’ screen time the way we talk about young people’s screen time? by Heather Burns
Why thinking hard wears you out by Diana Kwon
The book of form and emptiness: started this while on holiday, and I’m not very far in, but I love the way the story is told.
Burnout in 2022: “Am I burnt out, or is this just life now?” by Chloe Laws
Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild: picked this up again cause it turns out I hadn’t completed the trial of the sword.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #22: September 2022

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import september from "@images/posts/lifenotes-22/september.jpg";

✨ Highlights

Passed my driving theory test 🎉
Had some lovely catch ups and hang outs with friends 💛
Had a treat yoself day with Anna 💅🏼
Started BSL level 2
Went to the Nottingham Contemporary exhibition launch and had a lovely time
Had a great dinner and cinema outing in London
- This is part of my effort to not be a hotel slob when I’m down for work, cause usually I stay in my hotel room eating junk food and watching crap 😅
- Also, if you're near Spitalfields and like middle eastern food, the food at Bubala is delicious!

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

ET: they did a 40th anniversary screening at Broadway so Thom and I went to see it.
Everything everywhere all at once (again again!) they did a showing at Broadway with some bonus content so I couldn’t miss it.
Disney's FastPass: A Complicated History: this is such a fun video essay on queueing at Disney parks and park operations in general, would highly recommend it.
Fear of a Black Hobbit
Double Indemnity: this had some very dated (aka sexist) scenes, but they were so egregious that it was more funny than anger inducing.
Dogtooth: caught this on Mubi and it was really good, a disturbing but interesting watch.
Finished The Book of Form and Emptiness: a sad but hopeful read. I really enjoyed how the story was told.
Got back on Fall Guys after a very long time. Don’t know why I ever stopped, to be honest, it’s silly, chaotic and colourful, a match made in heaven for me.
Finished Spiderman Miles Morales: I’d pretty much forgotten I hadn’t finished this game, so I was delighted to find out I stopped right before the final battles, so I had to do all those while remembering none of the controls 😅
Uncharted: I haven’t really been hooked by any games lately so I went to my library to see what I hadn’t played before that I might enjoy, so I started the Uncharted series.
Don’t Worry Darling: despite all the negative reviews, I quite enjoyed this. It was an entertaining film, and Florence Pugh was excellent. It was a shame she didn’t have more time with Chris Pine cause both of them had a great tension going.
Moonage Daydream: I went into this not knowing that much about David Bowie, and I loved it so much! I left the cinema completely awestruck. Do watch it if you get a chance.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #23: October 2022

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import october from "@images/posts/lifenotes-23/october.jpg";

✨ Highlights

Started therapy 😌
Went to a pots and pints evening with a friend and tried ceramics for the first time!
Helped run a hackathon at work to teach a group of kids the basics of coding 💛
Saw a bunch of web friends and learnt a lot at State of the Browser
My family came over and we took my nephews to Alton Towers for the first time 🎢
Went to a Lindy Hop social and danced for the first since before covid, it was lovely!

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

The Anxious Person's Guide to Non-Monogamy: this was a really approachable and pragmatic read about the realities of non-monogamy.
Uncharted 2
Uncharted 3
The Banshees of Inisherin: I really enjoyed this, but from the trailer I got mostly comedy vibes, and I found the actual film mostly sad. Was still really good, though.
Uncharted 4: after playing 1, 2 and 3, which were largely the same, 4 felt really new and fun, I enjoyed it!
Portrait of a Lady on Fire: had been on my list for a while, was a great watch.
Deathloop: I was drawn to this because the premise seems really cool, but I found the complexity ramp up a bit steep, it feels like a lot all at once. But we’ll persist.
Decision to Leave: I saw the trailer for this last month and decided to catch it when it premiered. It was really good, would highly recommend it.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #24: November 2022

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import november from "@images/posts/lifenotes-24/november.jpg";

✨ Highlights

Went to Brighton for FFConf and a couple of days off, and it was joyful! Was really great to hang out with lovely people, catch some sunshine, and have a little of time and space to myself 😌
Made some time to see friends, which was lovely, cause my friends are the best 💛
Finally started moving things to get the house on the market. Someone came round to take pictures, hopefully it will be listed soon 🤞🏼
Didn’t really get on with the therapist I’ve been seing through my health insurance, so I’ve decided to wrap those sessions up and go looking for a private therapist that fits what I’m looking for (basically not CBT).
Got a new piercing! I’d been wanting to get my septum done for ages, finally got off my arse and booked it in.
Started seeing someone really great 💛

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Great British Bake Off: I’m really happy Syabira won, she was my fav from the start.
Went to see Triangle of Sadness with my good friend Kevino (if you’re reading this I’m sorry this is your name now forever). I enjoyed it, but it was a bit on the long side.
Got proper into Deathloop and I freaking love it now (it’s on pause while I play God of War though).
We spoke with the last person standing in the floppy disk business by Niek Hilkmann & Thomas Walskaar
Wtf is an island and why is it in my website? by Rach Smith
Shein is even worse than you thought by Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz
The roles we play: this is such a beautiful book and story 💛 I really enjoyed the detail that each chapter came with a chosen track you could listen while you read.
The IndieWeb for everyone by Max Böck
God of War Ragnarök: haven’t had a lot time to get stuck into this, but it’s always satisfying when at the end of a long day you can cleave some fake creatures in half to unwind 😌
Went to see Black Panther: Wakanda Forever with Nisha and Rachael. Not the biggest marvel fan, but it was a fun watch and it was lovely to hang out with my mates.
Caught Aftersun after seeing a trailer for it earlier in the month. It was a good watch, and emotionally compelling, but I was really sleepy when I went to see it and there were a few dark, quiet scenes 😅

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #25: December 2022

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import december from "@images/posts/lifenotes-25/december.jpg";

✨ Highlights

Got Juno back in daycare after getting him the implant, so he can play with his doggy friends again.
Went to Manchester to see Kelly and Mark 💛
Had a lovely christmas meal with my team.
Caught up with some of the local tech pals at our Secret Santa social.
Went on a fun christmas dinner + drinks with some lovely people.
Caught covid a few days before Christmas 😅
Had a nice chilled Christmas with Juno, cooking, watching films, and going on long walks.
Went to my sister’s for New Years and hung out with my family for a few days 💛

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Bones and all - I wasn’t sure I’d like the premise of this but I really enjoyed it!
Every “chronically online” conversation is the same by Rebecca Jennings
The Crown Series 5 - meh
Taylor Tomlinson: Look at you - I love her so much, so relatable, so funny.
The Law of Stretched [Cognitive] Systems by Fred Hebert
I may destroy you - this was a hard watch but it’s so good.
Nope - went to a rescreen with some friends. It was a good rewatch.
Boiling point I really liked the style and pace of this film.
Who’s Afraid of Modern Art: Vandalism, Video Games, and Fascism by Jacob Geller
Always be my maybe - a bit meh but I do like both of the main actors.
Everything everywhere all at once - again, I know. Still love it.
Meet cute - this was fun, I enjoyed it.
Conversations with friends - I’d kinda forgotten the plot of the book by the time I watched this so I enjoyed the story almost anew.
Knives out - an entertaining watch, Daniel Craig’s accent is hella annoying tho.
Glass onion - entertaining too, but it didn’t really live up to the hype for me (sorry!).
Love, Marriage & Monogamy - Dan Savage & Esther Perel (I think I’m in love with Esther Perel)
Yard sale - The Pudding
ReDoS "vulnerabilities" and misaligned incentives by William Woodruff
Avatar - this was a hard watch, jesus, the white saviour protagonist irked me.
Avatar: The way of the water - I also didn’t like this, shocker.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #26: January 2023

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import january from "@images/posts/lifenotes-26/january.jpg";

✨ Highlights

The house is finally on the market!
Had a work trip to London that I extended to hang out, that was nice 😌

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Come as you are: I was in love with this book about 5 pages in, would highly recommend it!
Searching for Susy Thunder by Claire L. Evans
I am not a supplier by Thomas Depierre
Abbott elementary: watched series 1 and it was a fun watch.
Atlanta: I haven’t watched the 2 latest series so decided to watch it from start cause it’s a fun show.
Kaleidoscope: this was a bit meh, I don’t think the “random order” gimmick made much of a difference to the story.
Rashomon: a screening of this came up at my local indie cinema so I decided to go see it on the big screen, and it was great!
Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies by Baldur Bjarnason
History of Web Browser Engines from 1990 until today
The menu: I didn’t think I’d enjoy this going from the trailer, to be honest, but it was a great watch.
On the rocks: this was meh, but I was feeling meh, so wanted to watch a meh film, if that makes sense.
Crashing: this was short and sweet.
Disentangling Frameworks by Michelle Barker
Tiktok's enshittification by Cory Doctorow
A league of their own: a feel good, easy watch.
Feel good: I love Mae Martin, that is all.
Trevor Noah: I wish you would
Romesh Ranganathan: The cynic
The last of us: I don’t think it’s hitting me in the feels like it is everyone else, cause I played the game, but it’s still an excellent show.
The white lotus series 1: kinda fun, but overrated in my opinion.
The comeback: I really tried, cause people rave about this show, but gave up about 3 episodes in.
New Yorkers Never Came ‘Flooding Back.’ Why Did Rents Go Up So Much? Getting to the bottom of a COVID-era real estate mystery by Lane Brown

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #27: February 2023

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import february from "@images/posts/lifenotes-27/february.png";

✨ Highlights

Got Beyoncé tickets 💃
Accepted an offer on the house 🤞
My lovely family came to visit 💛
Went to a fun pots and pints evening with my pals and made some tiles
Saw a couple of my work besties for drinks and pizza
Hung out with Kevino and got to properly catch up

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

The bear: finally got around to watching this and it was great fun 🎉
Roman holiday: went my friend Rach to see it on the big screen, and it was lovely! Sometimes classic films have a level of misogyny that makes them hard to watch, but this one didn’t, it was quite sweet.
White lotus series 2: was a bit meh, to be honest.
Argentina 1985: watched this with my mum and sister when they came over and it was really good.
Braids and Bowlers: Indigenous Bolivian Women Skateboard in Style in Celia D. Luna’s Empowered Portraits
I tried using AI. It scared me. by Tom Scott
The killing of a sacred deer: I do like Yorgos Lanthimos’ films in general, but this one was a bit meh.
Top boy: summerhouse: loved this. I’d started the new series ages ago but only got through a couple of eps, so I went back to start from the beginning, and it was great. Made the new series better to me.
Shrinking: my sister recommended this one to me and I’m really enjoying it. A good 30 min feel good comedy.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #28: March 2023

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import march from "@images/posts/lifenotes-28/march.jpg";

✨ Highlights

Passed my driving test! 🚗🎉
Went to a really fun pigs pigs pigs pigs pigs pigs pigs gig in Leicester
Caught up with my friend Huai after AGES
Went to a fun R&B brunch with Nisha
Celebrated with Nisha her getting into the fire service 🔥
Had my first BSL exam - and passed 🎉
Went to a frontend meetup in Sheffield, to see Lex speak and make new web friends 💛
Went out for drinks with Jonathan’s lovely friends and had amazing pizza

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

This is going to hurt: this was a great show, but not gonna lie, it was kinda depressing.
Top boy: I’d started watching this a few years ago and sort of trailed off
Chelsea Handler: Revolution: it was ok, she’s pretty funny at times, but her humour is not super up my street.
Broker: this was so beautiful, totally made me cry a little at the cinema 😭
Abbott Elementary series 2: this was a really fun series, I really enjoyed it.
Why do we stop exploring new music as we get older? by Timothy McKenry
Nimic: watched this short on Mubi, cause I quite like Yorgos Lanthimos, it was cool and unsettling.
Rye lane: this was such a fun rom-com, would highly recommend it! Saw it with my friend Rach at Broadway ☺️
Black ish: I started watching this cause I was after a half hour comedy, but I didn’t really get on with it.
Loot: this was ok, not amazing 🤷‍♀️

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #29: April 2023

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import april from "@images/posts/lifenotes-29/april.png";

✨ Highlights

Went to a triangirls event and it was really great 🍹
Spent good friday in London doing fun things 😌
Bought my car! 🚙🎉
Attended our web day in the office and met some of my lovely colleagues in person 💛
Got diagnosed with ADHD (finally!)
Went to see Suzi Ruffell with Nisha and laughed so much my jaw hurt 😄

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

The crane wife by CJ Hauser
Ted Lasso series 3: was a fun watch as usual, and I enjoyed the ending 😊
Grace and Frankie series 7: was a fun series, but I think I’m kinda done with this show.
CODA: really enjoyed this one, I love Marlee Matlin, so was treat to see her as a lead.
Jury Duty: I started watching this cause the premise was funny, but I kinda trailed off halfway.
Atlanta series 3: this series had a bit more abstract / disconnected stories, but I really enjoyed them, as well as the main character stories, which were great as usual.
Fire of love: this is a beautiful documentary! I knew nothing about them or much about vulcanology, so it was really interesting, and all the imagery is very striking.
Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat: very interesting doc about how Basquiat started his career, and the people who surrounded him at the time.
Me before you: this was a sad romcom of sorts, but both leads were great in it, it was a good watch.
Finished God of War: well kinda, still need to kill the Valkyrie Queen and the Berserker King, but I got a little distracted by Zelda so I’ll do it later. This was great fun, the story was good, and there’s nothing more cathartic than cleaving monsters in half with a big fuck off axe 🤷‍♀️
Suits: wanted some easy background TV, and this fit the bill. It was most fun at the start, and then it jumped the shark a couple of times.
Nothing drains you like mixed emotions by Arthur C. Brooks
Smiling to death: the hidden dangers of being ‘nice’ by Joanna Cheek
How this woman creates God of War’s sound effects - WIRED
The Royal Tenembaums: this is Jonathan’s fave and I hadn’t seen it, so we watched it together, it was a really fun watch 💛
Make love not war: talking with the creator of the first software easter egg by “Critical Kate" Willaert
Horizon Forbidden West: Burning shores: I freaking love horizon, so any excuse to play more is a treat, plus we got 🌈 GAY ALOY 🌈

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #3

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Hey, friends! This week has been a quiet one over here. I spent a lot of it feeling under the weather (maybe because of my flu jab) so didn't get up to much.

Hope you had a nice one 🙂

Did

Tech Nottingham was great, we had an awesome talk on gender bias, and played some games with the community. Turns out people love to be given an opportunity to say: "Can I have a vowel, please Carol?" 😂
Saw friends and family on zoom this week, which was lovely, but contributed to my exhaustion, as I spent a pretty high proportion of my waking time on zoom this week 😭
So I ended up spending the rest of the time resting and recovering.

Played

🎮 Fall Guys
🎮 The Last of Us Part 2: Finished it! It was a hard journey, but an excellent game 💛
🎮 Star Wars Battlefront 2
🎮 Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze
🖥 Geoguessr

Read

📖 The Guilty Feminist

Watched

📺 Great British Bake Off
📺 The Home Edit
📺 His Dark Materials

Lifenotes #30: May 2023

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import may from "@images/posts/lifenotes-30/may.png";

✨ Highlights

Had a really fun trip to Leeds for All Day Hey! and did some bonus birthday celebrating 🥳
Went for pizza and games with some friends to celebrate my birthday.
Had a fun little urban exploration walk with Juno onto the site of an old soap factory.
Took Juno on a german shepherd group walk.
Started to reap the benefits of learning to drive and buying a car, like impromptu Costco trips!
Went to Edinburgh with my lovely friends and sister to see Queen Bey 💃
- Took the new Carolmobile even though I was super nervous but the drive was fine!
- My lovely friends did share the driving though 💛
Drove all the way to Devon to see my family the week after, just me and dog.
My house buyers basically dropped their offer by £35k, and threatened to pull out of the sale 🫠

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Gris: this is such a beautiful game, tbh I doubt I’ll finish it, cause I never seem to finish indie platformers, but I really enjoyed playing it.
The square: full disclosure, I was really tired and barely paying attention, but I didn’t really enjoy this one.
Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? by Ted Chiang
Rich Harris on frameworks, the web, and the edge
The Deceptive World of Ghost Kitchens by Eddy Burback
The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling by ContraPoints
Midsommar: went to the see this at my local cinema, and it was a good shout, it’s a stunning film, so looked amazing on the big screen! I enjoyed the weirdness of it a lot.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: having loved breath of the wild, I was very hyped for this and it did not disappoint. It had all the good from BOTW plus some AMAZING new mechanics, this was so much fun.
Potato programming by Glyph
You’re wrong about - Flight 571: Survival in the Andes with Blair Braverman

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #31: June 2023

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import june from "@images/posts/lifenotes-31/june.png";

✨ Highlights

My lovely friend Victor came to visit me from Spain
- I showed him around some Nottingham spots, like my fav restaurants, Sherwood Forest, the castle, etc.
- I then went to London for work, and extended the trip by a day so we could hang out there too.
  - We went to a couple of good restaurants, Maene and Fallow - I found Fallow overhyped tho, wasn’t that good 😅
Had my BSL exams and we had a nice picnic after the last exam 😌
For Jonathan’s birthday I booked us a dinner + overnight stay + breakfast at Sat Bains, a local Michelin starred restaurant, and it was AMAZING.
The house situation got unfucked - we negotiated a way forward with the buyers 🎉

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Die hard 4.0: every christmas I watch the Die Hard films, but I never make it past 3. So went rogue with my friend and watched this one. It was ok.
Assassins creed: this was SO BAD. Both my friend and I fell asleep on the sofa with this on. No ragrets.
The handmaiden: this was SO GOOD! I love a story that manages to surprise me, and this film did just that, plus it’s stunning.
Catastrophe: I’d never watched the final series so I rewatched the whole thing. Such a fun - and sometimes a little heartbreaking - show.
Colin from accounts: this was a recommendation from Thom. It was a really fun watch!
Kendal mountain tour: the collection of films this year was ok, but not amazing. I did really enjoy the film about some dudes who decided to paraglide halfway up a mountain so they could scale to the top after. Insane stuff!
Asteroid city: the story wasn’t amazing, but it had a really great cast so it was a fun watch.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #32: July 2023

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import july from "@images/posts/lifenotes-32/july.png";

✨ Highlights

Got 2 piercings this month! Got my helix pierced and my left nostril, ready to try a chain from nostril to nostril once it’s healed.
Found a flat that I liked and signed a lease on it! 🎉

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Shiva baby: this was such a good watch! It kept a level of tension going the whole time, really fun film.
Bottle rocket: they showed some of Wes Anderson’s back catalogue at my local indie cinema, so Jonathan and I went to see this one, it was good!
Is React Having An Angular.js Moment? by François Zaninotto
Indiana Jones and the dial of destiny: went to see this with my dear friend Kevin. Seeing my friend was really fun, the film was fine.
Come as you are: this book is SO GOOD. In my opinion, should be required reading for women and people who have relationships with women.
Scrubs: was looking for an easy show, and this was it!
The guard: I really enjoyed this. Brendan Gleeson is just the best.
Annual Performance Reviews Ruin Everything by Elizabeth Ayer
The Power of Being New: A Proven Recipe for High Impact by Hazel Weakly
The Nuance of “Domain” by Jim Nielsen
I’m a luddite by Tom Humberstone
If books could kill: Atomic habits
If books could kill: The 5 love languages
99% invisible: Craptions
Off menu: Florence Pugh
A certain hunger: this was such a fun read! I clearly enjoy female rage novels, apparently.
You’re wrong about: the Dyatlov Pass incident
Barbie: this was a really fun film, really enjoyed it, especially the vibes in the cinema ✨
Oppenheimer: I think the 3 glasses of wine I had before watching this didn’t help, but I actually slept through most of this, in the cinema 😅

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #33: August 2023

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import august from "@images/posts/lifenotes-33/august.png";

✨ Highlights

I moved into my new flat 🎉
Jonathan and I broke up 💔
I had Juno castrated, hope he can forgive me.
Went to Valencia for a few days, to renew documents and see my friends and family 💛
- Was really lovely to get a bit of sun and catch up with my friends.
- I went to an open air cinema screening of Paris, Texas, with my friend Victor, and that was a highlight.
Had a little work trip to London straight after
- Went to another open air cinema session at the Barbican to see Paris is burning, it was so good!
Finally sold the house 😌

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

The bear series 2: this series was as good if not better than the first! This show is definitely a highlight of recent TV for me.
Bad sisters: I love Sharon Horgan so this was an easy yes for me, and the story is good.
Software as a Service is bad for job satisfaction by Eric Mackrodt
Energy makes time by Mandy Brown
Things you forgot (or never knew) because of React by Josh Collinsworth
Modus Operandi: Césio 137
Off menu: Tim Minchin
Off menu: Lily Allen
Survival of the thickest: this was a recommendation from Rachael and it was such a fun watch!
Tailwind and the Femininity of CSS by Elaina Natario
Heartstopper series 2: it was cute, but I found it less engaging than series 1. I mean, I’m clearly not the target audience, so there’s that.
The giant mechanical man: a sweet 90 minute rom com, with good actors and an unusual story.
Michelle Buteau: Welcome to Buteaupia
Grey’s Anatomy series 19: still a good background show 🤷‍♀️
Beef: I really enjoyed this, it’s my kind of storytelling. And the overall message was compelling to me too: you can ‘have it all’ and still feel a hole inside you; and being known and understood is all people want.
Atlanta series 4: another good series, the final one. I could easily watch a few more series of these characters, but I think it’s good that it was ended there.
How to keep house while drowning: a great book on how to approach cleaning your home in a way that works for you, instead of pushed by shame. I’d really recommend a read.
The favourite: Olivia Colman is always a treat, so I enjoyed this a lot.
Little fires everywhere: this was an entertaining read. It’s a well written character driven story.
Paris, Texas: this had been on my list for a while, so I leapt at the chance to see it in an open air cinema in Valencia. It was really great 💛
Paris is burning: I got tickets for this film on Barbican’s open air cinema months ago, and it was so worth the wait, the ambiance was great, and the film was SO GOOD. A real treat.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #34: September 2023

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import september from "@images/posts/lifenotes-34/september.png";

✨ Highlights

Started the month in London, and when I went to get the train back I discovered there were strikes, so I had an eventful journey home on the coach 😅
Had an initial assessment with a dog trainer, which left me feeling hopeful about the future with Juno - he’s very nervous and that makes things hard.
I took Juno to a secure field for the first time, it was so lovely to just play with him while he ran free, without having to stress about anything.
Went back to London, worked in the office for a couple of days and went to State of the Browser, so got to hang out with lovely work and web friends ✨

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

The unbearable weight of massive talent: wanted something easy to watch, and this fit the bill, plus Pedro Pascal is always a treat to watch.
Wild tales: I was after something fun, so I rewatched this, it’s so good.
Causeway: this was short and sweet, and Brian Tyree Henry was great as usual.
On the count of three: this was original and touching and funny, would highly recommend a watch!
Why We Don’t Recommend Ring Cameras by Adrienne So
Jedi Survivor: started this cause I haven’t really been playing much lately, haven’t made it very far, but it’s been good so far.
Melancholia: this was on my list, so when it came up at my local cinema, I went to see it. It was interesting and different, I enjoyed it.
Last night in soho: this was an entertaining watch, it jumped the shark a little, but the story was interesting.
Dumb money: whenever I go to London for work, I try and make some time to go to the cinema at the Barbican (best building in London!). This was a fun watch, I remember the whole Gamestop / Robin Hood situation happening, but I wasn’t super clued up on the details.
Everybody’s talking about Jamie: my friend Nisha invited me to come see this play and it was SO GOOD! Everyone was super talented, and the story was really sweet.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #35: October 2023

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import october from "@images/posts/lifenotes-35/october.jpg";

✨ Highlights

I went to DDD East Midlands and it was really lovely to see a lot of my friends from the local tech scene again after a long time.
My family came to visit and we did a lot of fun things with my mum, my sister and my youngest nephew.
- We went to Hockley Hustle which is always good fun, we went shopping, we went for lots of nice food and had a nice time.
My left nostril piercing healed enough to get my nose chain in ⛓️

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Stop making sense my local cinema advertised this as the best concert film ever made, so even though I wasn't a fan of The Talking Heads I went to see it and I really loved it.
Half A Million Kinksters Can’t Be Wrong by Aella
Sex education series 4: I watched this sort of all in one go when I was off sick with a bad cold. I really loved Aimee’s arc this series about finding her voice through art, and I found something to cry about in basically every episode.
Too much and not enough by Mandy Brown
The chair: I watched this because I really like Sandra Oh and it was short and sweet, and quite funny.
Little women: I watched this despite not loving period films but it was still really good fun, I enjoyed it. The actors were great and had a fun energy together.
GBBO: I did not enjoy this series as much as I enjoyed previous ones. I still watched it and it was still kind of fun but I think this is my last one.
The Most Important Management Concept You're Missing: Task Relevant Maturity by Jason Evanish
Men in black: While my family was over we were looking for a good family film to watch together, so we watched this. I'd forgotten just how silly and fun it is.
Foe: I went to see this at my local cinema (big up Broadway!) and while the actors were very good and they put out good performances, I didn't really love the story so found it a bit meh.
Hereditary: I watched this at home on my own, and Juno was asleep the whole time so useless company really. There are some shocking scenes in this film, but I don't really struggle with those. However, the way the film built lots of tension throughout made me actually have to pause it a few times to regroup before continuing 🫣
My year of rest and relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh: This was a fun read, it was more than a bit nihilistic but relatable.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #36: November 2023

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import november from "@images/posts/lifenotes-36/november.png";

✨ Highlights

FFConf was really great fun, as usual. I got to hang out with my lovely web friends and we had delicious vegan food at Bonsai Plant Kitchen in the lunch break. I loved all of the talks, but these two stood out the most to me:
- The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI - Maggie Appleton
  - I'm fairly skeptical of AI, so I found Maggie's talk a really good - and not hype driven - overview of where the field is and what the challenges are.
- Exploring the Potential of the Web Speech API in Karaoke - Ana Rodrigues
  - Ana's talk was just so much fun, it really shows how much you can do with web APIs and creativity.
I went to see Little Simz live with a friend in London, and she was incredible, unsurprisingly.
The eng christmas party at work was a lot of fun. There was a Dance Dance Revolution machine, nice cocktails, and I got to hang out with my work friends and chat.
I got to see my impossibly talented friend Sophie perform with her choir, they were so good!
I finally managed to get a bed ordered and delivered, so I'm no longer sleeping on a mattress on the floor 🎉
Started training sessions with Juno. We're working with a trainer to hopefully get him a little bit calmer, as he is a very nervous baby 🖤

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

The Fall: I'm not really big on mystery drama shows, but Gillian Anderson is amazing, as usual, and this is a good watch.
Strange way of life: This short caught my eye while scrolling Mubi, and it was a fun watch.
Good thanks, you?: Another short from Mubi, this one quite sad.
I want to die but I want to eat tteokbokki: I quite liked this book, it was interesting to read someone's therapy notes. While some of it was relatable, ultimately she's a very different person to me, struggling with very different things, and also doing a different style of therapy than I do, but it was still an interesting read.
Why Major Meal Kit Companies Lose 90% of Customers in a Year | WSJ The Economics Of
Dear Duolingo: Are any words the same in all languages?
Primer: I love time-travelling films, this was a very fun one I watched with my friend Hayden who recommended it.
The Morning Show series 3: A good series, but not much to say about it.
The Menu: I did not expect to like this film going in, but it was really fun and different, I loved it.
The internet con: how to seize the means of computation: A friend lent me a copy of this as they thought I might enjoy it. It was a great read, from the overview of how the tech industry evolved to making a case for interoperability as a way to dismantle huge tech companies.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #37: December 2023

Thu, 02 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import december from "@images/posts/lifenotes-37/december.jpg";

✨ Highlights

I went to Copenhagen at the beginning of the month. It had been on my list for a while, and it didn't disappoint! I had a lovely time, and here are my recs:
- Logistics pick: (i know, i know)
  - If you’re a museum babe and a public transport babe like me I’d highly recommend the copenhagen card. I got the 72h one for £99 - it covers all public transport and a lot of attractions, including all the museums, canal boat tours, castles, et al. One the biggest perks in my book was not having to learn / care about transport zones and fares, I just looked up the journey on maps and hopped on the train / bus / metro.
- Food picks:
  - Gro Spiseri → this is a communal table in a greenhouse in a rooftop urban farm. They only use organic Danish produce, and the food was divine!
  - Juno the bakery → I went cause it was well recommended and cause my dog is called Juno and - wow - their cardamom bun was life changing.
  - Pate pate → in the meat packing district, good wine and really tasty food.
- Attraction picks:
  - Design museum → I love design museums and this one was no exception! I particularly enjoyed the Future is Present exhibition - it even had a lampshade made of cow intestines - and it was cute, 10/10 would hang in my home.
  - Copenhagen contemporary → I made it there half an hour before it shut, but I still got to have a glimpse at some very cool exhibitions, including a giant video wall and the guardian angels exhibit.
  - Glyptoteket → the collection is great, but the building itself is incredible.
  - Botanical gardens → I like plants, that is all.
Here’s the full itinerary I did and I already have a couple of things earmarked for next time:
- Louisiana museum of modern art → I only spotted this in my 3rd day and it’s a bit far from the city, so it would have been a tight fit.
- Malmö → I did go over for a couple of hours, but I wish I’d gone for a day trip instead, it’s cute city! Maybe next time I’ll get to the museum of disgusting foods.
Had another work Christmas party, this time for the operations collective. It was great fun, and I won second place on the best dressed competition! (I dressed like a Christmas tree 🎄)
Went to Italy with my family for Christmas, which was really nice. We spent a few days in Peio skiing, and then went down to Riccione to spend Christmas with my brother in law's family.
- Learning to ski was really fun, and I LOVED going for a walk at night while we were in the Alps, you could see so many stars 🌠
- My sister's birthday is on Christmas day, so it was nice to be with her for her 40th!
After Christmas we all came to Nottingham and spent a few days in my apartment (all 6 of us + Juno!). It was nice to have a few more relaxed days, and I went to do a VR escape room with Bruno which was fun.
Had a very lovely chilled out New Year's Eve with my friend Alan and Juno 🥂

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Happy place: my friend Emma recommended this, and it was a great holiday read, an easy and enjoyable romance.
Chants of senaar: my friend Sophie recommended this game, and it's so interesting! I didn't get super far cause I've not been picking up my Switch much recently, but the concept of it is excellent, you essentially explore the map and slowly learn the language they speak from symbols.
Cleopatra and frankenstein: another fun romance novel. It's a bit dark, but I think that made it more relatable.
The Perfectionist's guide to losing control: this is a really interesting book. I definitely knew I had perfectionist tendencies, but I never saw myself as the stereotypical perfectionist I had in mind. But it turns out there are different types! This book goes a bit manifest-y in places, but it's interesting and worth a read I think.
Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé: I tend to walk tonnes when I go on holiday, so I took one evening to sit down and watch this at the cinema in Copenhagen, and it's so good! It was great to relive the concert and see a supercut of the best outfits (without the Edinburgh rain!).
That ADHD Story: my friend Mark recommended this podcast (cause we're ADHD pals!), was a good listen.
Bacurau: this was a good watch, I particularly enjoyed the southern (Brazilian) people being very on brand (I'm from the south btw, I can say that) and getting immediately shot (spoilers!).
Mario: The Infamous History of Level 5-2
The History of Super Mario Bros 3 100% World Records
Rare exports: when my family was at mine after Christmas we were looking for a Christmas film so I recommended we watched this one, I enjoyed it obvs, but both my nephews did too, so a win all around.
It's Not You, It's Them...But It Might Be You with LalalaLetMeExplain - Is Porn Making Men Bad in Bed?
Off Menu with Ed Gamble and James Acaster - Ep 215: Paul Rudd
The Adam Buxton Podcast - Ep.216 - Joe Lycett

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #38: January 2024

Thu, 02 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import january from "@images/posts/lifenotes-38/january.png";

✨ Highlights

Went on some fun dates, and had quite a few hang outs with my lovely friends 💛
My friend Hayden came to visit, and we went to Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which was really nice, and I could bring Juno 🐾
- I was so surprised to see some Ai Weiwei sculptures there, the very same I'd seen by a museum in Prague several years ago.
Went to Beat the Streets festival with my pals and saw some great gigs.
Our work team social was really fun, we did some painting together 🎨

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Saltburn: I missed this in cinemas in December so I watched it when it came out on streaming. It was really fun, I enjoyed it.
The Sopranos: started watching the Sopranos with my pal Alan, it's his favourite show and I'd never seen it before. So far I'm loving it, it holds up really well after all these years too!
Eraserhead: somehow I'd never seen this, so I gave it a watch and it was great, cursed baby and all.
The Good Wife: was after some mindless background watching so I rewatched this, aleays good fun.
Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley
Poor things: I do like Yorgos Lanthimos' films, so went to see this on the cinema and really enjoyed it, it was a fun watch and I loved loved loved the costumes. Still gutted I missed the costume exhibit at the Barbican.
Bottoms: silly and funny, good times all around.
Kind of annoyed at React by Cassidy Williams
React Server Components: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly by Mayank
Return of the Obra Dinn: started this with Hayden when he came to visit, and it's such a cool game! I love logic puzzles and the style of it is great.
They came together: ths had been on my list for a bit, and it was a great watch, it's a romcom that makes fun of romcoms, and does it really well.
Past lives: this was touching, and sad, and lovely 💛
Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Why Do Yorgos Lanthimos' Movies Feel So Weird? by Thomas Flight

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #39: February 2024

Thu, 02 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import february from "@images/posts/lifenotes-39/february.png";

✨ Highlights

I got back into crafting a bit, and made my hallway into a 'toddler art wall' with all the things I've crafted / made. The energy is the fridge door where you dutifully put up your child's ugly drawings.
Had a loooovely spa day with my friends Rachael and Anna, I'd had a very busy few weeks at work and it ended the day before our spa day so it was just ✨ the best ✨
Spent some time with Rachael and Nisha planning our trip to the US later this year, very exciting! 🎉

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

The Holdovers: this was a really sweet film, a feel good Christmas story.
Bonnie and Clyde: my local cinema showed this on Valentine's day, so I went to see it cause I never had. It was a good watch, and parts of it were genuinely funny, like every time they drove off, loud aggressive banjo played, regardless of the tone of the scene 😂
Taylor Tomlinson: Have it all: I like Taylor's humour, so I enjoyed this a lot.
Little Fires Everywhere: I read the book a while back, and it made me wanna watch this, it was good, if a bit flat.
My Cousin Vinny: I was off sick one day and looking for something light and fun to watch so I watched this, Marisa Tomei is just excellent in it.
Hacks: got a rec for this off someone I follow on TikTok and it was really great fun, I love 30 minute comedies and this is a very good one.
Perfect Days: went to see this in the cinema and loved it so much! Good music, good vibes, and touching characters 💛

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #4

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import mugshot from "@images/posts/lifenotes-4/mugshot.jpg"; import reindeerSelfie from "@images/posts/lifenotes-4/reindeer-selfie.jpg"; import festiveDesk from "@images/posts/lifenotes-4/festive-desk.jpg"; import nottTechParty from "@images/posts/lifenotes-4/nott-tech-party.jpg";

Hey there, friends! You're getting a 4 for the price of 1 special this time, as I've spent the last 4 weeks or so in an a bit of a hole. Good news is: I'm feeling a bit better 🙂

Maybe all I needed was to do absolutely nothing except play Assassins Creed for a really long time 😅

At any rate, not much has happened over here, but here are the headlines:

Did

Hyper Monday! This was on the 16th of November, I got so much done✝, but also, I knew the crash would come 🙈
In an effort to see the outside world a bit more often, I started playing Pokemon Go again, and it's been really fun 😄 (FC: 1437-9701-7400)
NottTechParty: It was such great fun, and lovely to see and catch up with everyone 🎉
I kicked off the process to get an ADHD assesment!

✝ Incidentally, I saw this tweet and felt very called out, because of days like this one 😅

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"> ADHDers feel like they have "unrealized potential" because they hyperfocused one weekend 4 years ago and are still chasing that feeling. — Robert Merki (@robmerki){" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/robmerki/status/1336453003788890116?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> December 8, 2020 </a> </blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"

</script>

Played

🎮 Star Wars Battlefront 2
🎮 Assassins Creed 2
🎮 Assassins Creed Brotherhood
🎮 Assassins Creed Revelations
🎮 Assassins Creed Black Flag (didn't finish it, wasn't really for me)
🎮 Assassins Creed Unity (WIP)

Read

📖 The Guilty Feminist - Deborah Frances-White - Finished it and loved it 💛
📖 Memorias de mis putas tristes - Gabriel García Márquez

Watched

📺 Star Trek Discovery
📺 The Mandalorian
📽 The Holiday
📺 Jeopardy!
📺 Schitts Creek

Pics

<Image src={mugshot} alt="A cream coloured mug with green vines all over and small daisies painted on it." widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> Bought myself a nice mug to make myself feel better

<Image src={reindeerSelfie} alt="A selfie of me wearing a pair of reindeer glasses: those are brown with antlers coming off the eyes and a red nose linked to them by a short chain." widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> Took a new Christmassy profile pic (pls ignore the deliveroo bag in the background 🙈)

<Image src={festiveDesk} alt="My desk, with some Christmas decorations: I put a santa hat and my reindeer glasses on the homepod, then there are a few baubles and paper trees on the right hand side. In the centre, a big monitor with a christmassy wallpaper of a pile of presents." widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> Entered a Festive desk competition at work

<Image src={nottTechParty} alt="Screenshot of a zoom meeting, with around 50 smiling people with varying degrees of Christmas decorations." widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> The lovely Nottingham Tech community peeps at #NottTechParty

Lifenotes #40: March 2024

Thu, 02 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import march from "@images/posts/lifenotes-40/march.png";

✨ Highlights

Caught up with a few friends I don't see often over drinks 🍻
Went to see Holly Humberstone in Leicester with my friends Nisha and Rachael, I didn't really know her, but she was great live.
My friend Rachael got us tickets to go to Arcade, an immersive audio experience. It was so goood! Would recommend it if it comes near you. It's essentially a choose your own adventure audio only game, and you're in complete darkness, so it feels really vivid. It was short, I would have totally gone back if I had time.
Spent a few days in Bristol with my lovely sister 💛
- We never get to hang out just the two of us, so it was nice to mooch around Bristol, have nice food, see the sights, and we even made it to a Jazz concert / Lindy Hop taster, which was really fun.
  - Some recs from our days there:
  - Ahh toots: excellent cakes.
  - Farro: everything was tasty, but I loved the cheese scones in particular.
  - Café Cuba: the food here was sooooo good! I had an avocado and tomato salad I'll be thinking about for a long time.
    - Filthy XIII: great music and cocktails, and some good looking hot dogs I'd like to go back to try.

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

This is how you lose the time war: it had been a while since I read science fiction, and I really loved this. It's short, really creative and a great story.
All of us strangers: this was so good, but so sad.
The quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend by Josh Collinsworth
Dune: I rewatched this before seeing part 2, and it's very pretty, but basically nothing happens.
Dune part two: ok everything happens in this one 😂 It's very well made, but it's not the kind of things that calls to me.
I think you should leave: a friend recommended this and I watched some, but it's not really for me I'm afraid.
Saturday Night Live: I started to watch some episodes from this year's season, and ended up fallng into a massive rabbit hole and watching lots of it.
Abbott Elementary series 3: I love this show, and am enjoying the new series too.
Blackberry: this was so good! I knew Blackberry was big back in the day, but I never realised how big. Really interesting and well made.
The growing backlash against AI by tante
‘I’m sorry to have to announce that my cancer situation has developed not necessarily to my advantage’ by Simon Boas
Superbob: I love Brett Goldstein, so I dug out this film from a while back, and it was a really fun watch. It's funny, short, and sweet.
Madame Web: ok I watched this just to see if it was that bad. Yes. Yes, it is.
Circe: I'd never read a historical fiction novel before, and I really enjoyed this! It was fun to connect the bits I knew to the rich story in the book. I enjoyed the genre.
Broad City: I was on the market for a 30 minute comedy, and this was great! Really silly and fun, I zoomed through it all.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: I was pretty tired after work on a Friday and I fancied a fun action film so I rewatched this classic from my youth. I'd forgotten how fun it was! My 3 main takeaways:
- It's so faithful to the games, which I played a lot growing up, so obvs I love it.
- If I was rich, I'd probably also spend it like a rich 10 year old.
- How did I not realise then that I was bi? Honestly baffling.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - The Cradle of Life: ok I obvs had to watch the second one the next day.
Hello World by Hannah Fry: I got into listening to audiobooks for my non-fiction books, so I can listen when I'm cooking, tidying up, or walking Juno. This was a good read, a nice high level overview of where algorithms do well and where they don't.
Hackers: how had I never seen this?! So good! Good music, good old timey computer visuals, and just generally good fun.
Tomb Raider I: rewatching the films made me do my semi periodic rummage to see if anyone remastered the old games for modern consoles, and guess what?! Some fantastic humans have now, so I started to play Tomb Raider I on my PS5. Initial thoughts: movement and camera controls back then were hard, y'all! I'm hoping I'll get a good hold of the controls before I get to my fav, Tomb Raider II.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #41: April 2024

Fri, 03 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import april from "@images/posts/lifenotes-41/april.png";

✨ Highlights

Saw Everything Everything live at Rock City with my good friend Sam, who I hadn't seen in years! They were really great, and it was nice to catch up with Sam.
I've been meaning to learn a bit about photography, so I got an old camera off eBay for £30 to learn the basics. It's a Canon Powershot SX120 IS.
Had a smol fire in my apartment, the thermostat in my boiler spontaneously combusted. I caught it early and shut down all the switches in the fuse box, so thankfully it wasn't much more than a big scare for Juno and I, well that and a flat full of black smoke and soot.
- Bizarrely this is when I heard from my landlord for the first time, they sent me flowers and a card that basically said 'soz there was a fire at your flat' 😂
I rejoined Nottingham Hackspace, hopefully this time I'll go in more and get to know people there 🤞🏼
- I'm joining the space's village at EMF Camp, so hoping that's a good start!
Started to tentatively look at houses to buy, given my lease is up in August.
My friend Nisha invited me to go see some stand up comedy, and it was really great fun, all the comedians on that evening were great.
- Two things to know:
  - Nottingham is a popular destination for stag / hen dos.
  - Comedians in small venues are savage at the crowd work.
- You do the math.
I'm dipping my toe into event organising again, helping to bring back Women in Tech Nottingham 💛 I find it really rewarding and I've missed it dearly, and I'm so excited to meet the lovely local friends I haven't seen in a while.

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Small Pleasures, by Clare Chambers: an interesting novel, I enjoyed it a lot, but the ending really caught me.
Nighthawks by Edward Hopper: Great Art Explained
Order from chaos, the everyday grind of staying organised with adult ADHD, by Jaclyn Paul: Now I've been on ADHD meds for a bit, I'm making an active effort of working out where I still struggle because of it, and how I can work with my brain instead of against it. This was a good read, and had some real gems, but a lot of the systems she shows are paper-based, so don't really work for me.
Monkey Man: I tried to get preview tickets for this a while back unsuccessfully so I went to see it on premiere day and I loved it so much! A really fun film, really well made, and watching interviews with Dev Patel after made me really appreciate how good it was for the budget (and all the mishaps) they had.
Couples therapy: my therapist recommended me this as a realistic view of what people discuss in therapy and I got SO hooked! I'd highly recommend a watch, it's great to see people working through problems, and it's very likely you'll see yourself in places. Also if you do watch it let me know cause I wanna compare notes on our 'faves'.
How to make an ineffective 404 page by Eric Bailey
You’re a Blogger, Not an Essayist by Barry Hess
Seattle and the internet by Cassidy Williams
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue: I saw a rec for this on TikTok and it's such a good read, it felt really close to home, and made me realise I'm slowly improving that side of myself with therapy 💛
The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health, by Camilla Nord: I listened to the audiobook and it's so interesting! It covers the brain processes that make up your mental health, studies on the area, how antidepressants work. I don't think I'll retain the details, to be honest, but it was a fascinating listen.
The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman: I got this a while ago, and while I'm not in a mystery phase at the moment, this was a fun read, the characters are loveable and the story had some good twists and turns.
How to with John Wilson: I got a double rec for this and it's really good fun! Love all the small details, the visual jokes, and the weirdos in each episode.
The Kite Runner: my friend Rachael invited me to come see this with her, and it was such a good play, the actors and musicians were excellent, but the story was so devastatingly sad.
2001: A Space Odyssey: this had been on the metaphorical list for a loooong time, so when I noticed my local Showcase was screening it I got tickets, I figured it would be worth watching on the big screen and woooow was that the right call! I absolutely loved it, and am still in awe at how beautiful it was and how impressive the effects were for the time. It's absolutely rightly considered one of the best films ever, I would highly recommend seeing it on the big screen if you can.
- Watching it predictably sent me down a YouTube rabbit hole, so here are some of vids I watched:
I went for an eye exam, and it made me want to understand the tests they do, so I went down another YouTube rabbit hole:
- Eye Exam, Understanding What the Eye Doctor is Doing
- How Does That Hot Air Balloon Know Your Eye Power? | A Look Into
- Air PUFF test for your eye (why?) | Optometrist Explains
history of the entire world, i guess
Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein: my friend Mark recommended me this book, and I'm loving it! It goes into the merits of generalism over specialism and where it can work better. I've always been curious about everything and not a specialist on anything really, so it's been nice to learn about the upsides.
Pete Davidson: Alive from New York
Pete Davidson: Turbo Fonzarelli
How social networks prey on our longing to be known by Jan Maarten
How someone stacked the odds in their favor to win a $95 million Texas Lottery jackpot by Eric Dexheimer
Tracker Beeper by Bert Hubert
Fern Brady: Autistic Bikini Queen
A simple guide to electronic components.
- I've been wanting to get into electronics projects, and I was going to dust off my old uni lecture notes to refresh my memory, but Big Clive here was a much better option!
Acústico MTV: Cássia Eller: I looove Cássia Eller, so every few years I rewatch this show and miss her a little 🥲

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #42: May 2024

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import may from "@images/posts/lifenotes-42/may.png";

✨ Highlights

Got promoted at work 🎉
Went to All Day Hey! in Leeds, aka birthday conf, and had a lovely time as usual. The talks were excellent, I particularly enjoyed Hidde de Vries' talk on building popovers.
- Leeds is a lovely city, and this time I enjoyed going to a couple of new shops in the Corn Exchange with my pal Sophie.
  - Colours may vary is an independent bookshop filled with lovely things, I ended up buying a delightful zine about dumplings.
  - Giant kitten is an independent clothing and accessories shop. Their stuff is so fun! I bought a few t-shirts, pins, and some very weird earrings made with the eyes of those dolls that can open and close their eyes 👀
I turned 35 🎈
Using my birthday as an excuse, I bought myself a TP-7 audio recorder, I'd been fancying it for a bit, and let me tell ya, it's a beautiful object and I love it already.
Went on some fun dates 💛
Got to see some auroras in Nottingham ✨
Went to a paint and sip with my friend Mark, it was really great fun! This is the second time I've tried painting, and despite not being very good at it, I enjoyed it a lot.
My friend Hayden came to visit, and we ended up doing an escape room at the Galleries of Justice museum with my friends Anna and Jamie.
- I hadn't been to that museum yet, and it was a fun way to explore, and the staff were great ☺️
Anna and I put on a Women in Tech Nottingham event for the first time in a looong time. The lovely Elle gave a great talk about UX, and we did some facilitated fun to get people chatting.
- We were both nervous, but the event went really well, and it was lovely to have everyone come together after such a long time.
- There were people that had been coming for years, but also a bunch of new people, which was really great to see.
- So thankful of Mica's support to help us put this on.
Juno and I went to Devon to see my family for a few days. It was lovely to hang out with them, and we got to go on a couple of day trips to Westward Ho! and Heddon's Mouth.

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Punch: As a sort of birthday celebration, I went to the theatre with my friends, Nisha and Rachael, to see this play. It's about a real story that happened in Nottingham, where a young man - Jacob Dunne - from the Meadows got into a fight on a night out and punched another young man, who died from that punch. The play is about that kid's life until the incident happened, their incarceration, and how towards the end of their incarceration, the parents of the kid who died got in touch and started a restorative justice process, and how that essentially changed their life. And now he and the mum of the dead kid do a lot of work to raise awareness to one-punch deaths. It was a great play, I enjoyed it a lot.
Her body and other parties, by Carmen Maria Machado: I loved all the stories in this book, but in particular I enjoyed the author's writing style, and the way she connects you to the characters.
The mental load, by Emma: I remember reading the comic 'you should have asked' when it first came out a few years ago and really liking it, so I got the book from my local comic book shop - Page 45 - and the whole thing is really good.
How to shoot in Manual by Simon d'Entremont: I got a camera recently, and while I have not done very much with it so far, I've started to watch some videos so I can learn how to use the manual settings, and this one stood out as a good explanation.
Succession: I'd been recommended this tonnes of times, and I did in fact enjoy it. It's a very good show. They are absolutely awful people, but it makes for very entertaining television, and the writing is just really sharp and funny.
The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier: This has been on my list for absolutely ages, so I listened to it as an audiobook, and it was a great read. I went into it mostly for the tech lead chapter, but I listened the whole way through, and learnt a lot about how other roles I interact with and how they operate.
Bonnie and Clyde: Went to see this with my friend Rachael. It was a really fun musical.
Indika: I saw a trailer for this a while back so I picked it up when it came out. I'm not very far in but it's been fun and different, I'm enjoying it.
Marc Maron: From Bleak to Dark: This was a good watch, very on brand for Marc Maron, dark humour and well paced story telling.
Writing for Busy Readers by Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink: Given how much I end up writing at work every day, this caught my eye as an interesting read. It's short and sweet, and it's full of really great, well-researched advice. I think I already do a lot of the things they suggested, but it was an good read nonetheless.
On the drive down to Devon, I listened to a few podcasts:
- The Dollop: Rupert Murdoch, Part 1 and Part 2
  - Given I was watching Succession, when these episodes came out it felt topical. And, oh god, it's so much more depressing when you know that it's a real person inflicting real harm on the world.
- If Books Could Kill: Lean In
  - I haven't read Lean In, but I've heard a fair bit about it, so it was fun to listen to a dissection of the book on where it gets things right and where it doesn't.
Official Competition: I watched this with my family when I was in Devon, it was an easy, fun-to-watch comedy.
The Birdcage: One of my work friends, Chris, recommended this to me a few months ago, so I put it on my list, and it was a really fun watch. I still haven't seen the original, but I will!
Hades: While I was in Devon, I played a fair bit of video games with my nephews. I helped them in their games where they were stuck, and then found some time to play a game myself, so I picked Hades. It was recommended to me by my friend Sophie absolutely ages ago, and it's such a fun game. I'm hoping this is the game that will pull me back into playing video games a bit more again.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #43: June 2024

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import june from "@images/posts/lifenotes-43/june.png";

✨ Highlights

EMF Camp: I finally made it to EMF this year and I had the best time 💛
- Some highlights:
  - I solved Clippy's murder with some friends, through several puzzles scattered across the site.
  - On the first evening I went to see Dune at the film tent, and before the film started a video of an owl flying towards the screen played and a 5 digit number flashed on. The owl reminded me of Twin Peaks so I wrote the number down, and then I found a black lodge themed table with a phone, and that set me off looking for owls like a lunatic 🦉
    - Here's a write up of the installation by the creator: # David Lynch Numbers Station Phone
  - I met a bunch of lovely people, hung out with old and new friends, learnt a bit about how synthesizers work, and even helped solder someone's eyelashes! (⚠️ not near their face)
Went down to London for this year's Monzo Mela, a summer festival thing work do every year. It was pretty good fun to hang out with my work pals, and to see some of them bop around on the world's smallest space hopper 😂
Went to Parklife festival in Manchester with my friend Hayden. It was really good fun, and I'm pleased I got to see Mahalia and Doja Cat live. It also made me more enthusiastic about electronic music, so I might need to find a nearby rave soon.
Got my offer accepted to buy a new house 🎉
Finally got some exercise back into my routine, found a yoga studio nearby and I'm hoping I can go every week.

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Dune: This was screened on the first night at EMF Camp, and it was, as always, an enjoyable watch.
Hackers: This was screened on night two of EMF Camp, and it included a Q&A with the director and the visual effects lead. It was really fun to watch this with an enthusiastic crowd of nerds.
Writing for Busy Readers by Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink: This is a short and sweet book with lots of good tips on how to communicate better at work. I found it good, but I also think I already do most if not all that they suggest, so I don't think I learnt much. I'd still recommend it though.
Finished Succession: This was very very entertaining TV, the writing is just excellent. Defo writing some quotes down for when I'm feeling particularly mean.
Abbott Elementary Series 3: Another great series, not much else to say to be honest.
Hacks Series 3: Same here, really enjoying this show.
Civil War: I only watched this cause I like Wagner Moura. It was fine.
Colossus: The Forbin Project: I missed this at EMF cause it was screened quite late, so I watched it at home and it's such a fun film. It's unintentionally funny and silly, would recommend a watch if you like sassy robots.
Bridgerton: as always, a very fun watch.
Fast Crimes at Lambda School by Benjamin Sandofsky: I remember following the drama when it unravelled, and being shocked by how overtly awful the founder was. This story lays it all out in one place and, whew.
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong: this is a beautiful, emotional story. I liked it a lot.
Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, by David Lynch: this was heavy on the benefits of transcendental mediation, but it was an interesting overview of how David Lynch got into art and how he sees ideas / film making, it was a short and fun listen
The Thick of it: This was a really fun watch. I have seen and loved Veep, so no surprises that I enjoyed the OG.
Peep Show: I've been recommended this sooo many times by the britishes, and I did give it a go, but it was too cringe for me.
Do the Right Thing: this was an excellent watch, would highly recommend it.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #44: July 2024

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import july from "@images/posts/lifenotes-44/july.png";

✨ Highlights

Had some fun dinners with my lovely friends 💛
Checked out the dinosaur themed crazy golf that opened.
Went on some fun dates.
Ran out of ADHD meds, and boy was it rough! It’s hard to tell when brain meds are working, because well, they just work, but I can tell you I missed them immediately 😅
Went to Steelcon in Sheffield with my pal Mark. Despite not being a security person, I had loads of fun and met many nice people. Also it was the same day as the Crowdstrike thing, so the jokes were on point.
I decided to take a break from therapy. I feel like I made a bunch of progress and want to spend a bit of time ‘just living’ to see what that’s like.
I’m managing to stick with yoga, which is very exciting.
Went to Pride with my pal Nisha, she let me crash the firefighters’ section and we had some fun watching drag shows after 🌈

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

You’re the worst: I’ve been recommending this to friends recently and it’s made me rewatch it. Still makes me laugh, and still makes me cry a little.
The Bear series 3: It was a good series, but I don’t have much to say about it.
Kinds of kindness: This was a really fun watch, Jesse Plemons in particular was excellent in it.
Why is Chile so long? - Uncharted Territories
Oldboy: They were showing this at a local cinema, so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. It is still so good!
James Acaster - Cold lasagne hate myself 1999: I’d seen a bunch of clips of this already, but it was still a fun watch.
Hannah Berner - We ride at dawn: Again, I’ve seen her on TikTok a bunch, so this was more of that in long form.
What they don't teach you about money by Claer Barrett:
- One of the main ways ADHD affects me is impulsive spending. It makes me steal from my future self and goals for an immediate dopamine hit. So I read this to inform some steps I want to take to manage that a bit better, and it's a most excellent read.
- I listened to the audiobook version, and I can't recommend it enough. It covers a lot of ground, and does so in a clear and non-judgmental way.
Search party: I like the premise, I like the cast, but it fizzled out for me a bit, I watched the first series and started the second, but left it there.
Other people's clothes by Calla Henkel:
- At first I was a bit wary of the annoying protagonists, but I did really enjoy the story, and once I was about halfway through I ended up staying up late to see what happened at the end!

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #45: August 2024

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import august from "@images/posts/lifenotes-45/august.png";

✨ Highlights

Went on a lovely day trip to Sheffield with my friend Alan
- We went record shopping, to the cinema, had delicious food, just a lovely time 💛
Went to London a couple of times for work
- On one of those trips I went climbing with my friend Hayden, which was a lot of fun! I hadn’t tried it before, and it was great to have someone to help me figure out how things work a little bit. Although, my nails were a bit too long so they didn’t fit in some of the holds properly 🙈
Went to my friend Hugh’s 40th birthday party, got to see him and a lot of my friends, which was lovely 💛
Decided to go on a nice walk to exercise a bit, miscalculated, ended up walking for two and a half hours with no food and no prep 👍🏼
Went camping with my family by the Forest of Dean for a weekend. It was a really lovely place, and Juno did very well sleeping in the tent with me.
Got a last minute haircut and dyed my hair lavender-y before my US trip.

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Challengers: I enjoyed this, BUT, I was assembling a sewing pattern while watching it so I don’t think I gave it the attention it deserves. I think I need to watch it again properly.
Dead man’s shoes: I saw this in Sheffield with Alan, and I loved it so much! This is such a good film, cannot recommend it enough.
Superstore: Wanted something easy to stick in the background while I did other things, so a rewatch of this hit the spot.
Wild tales: convinced my pal Hayden to watch this, cause it’s a lot of fun, so we watched it ‘together’ remotely. Still such a fun watch.
Seinfeld: I have a friend whose opinion I respect, and who loves Seinfeld, so I’m giving it a try.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #46: September 2024

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import newYork from "@images/posts/lifenotes-46/new-york.png"; import chicago from "@images/posts/lifenotes-46/chicago.png"; import newOrleans from "@images/posts/lifenotes-46/new-orleans.png"; import uk from "@images/posts/lifenotes-46/uk.png";

✨ Highlights

I went on an excellent trip to the US with my friends Nisha and Rachael. We spent 2 a half weeks between New York, Chicago and New Orleans, and we had a lovely time! (despite the hurricane 🌪️) Some highlights from that:
- I went to the Guggenheim in New York and it just so happens that their exhibition was from an artist I really like - Jenny Holzer - so that was nice. I also did the 99 percent invisible audio tour and that was excellent.
- Chicago is a truly stunning city, and I particularly enjoyed the architecture boat tour, this exhibition we saw at the Chicago Cultural Center, and the italian beef I had at Mr. Beef (yes, I waived my veggie-ness for that).
- In New Orleans we ended up having to spend a couple of days holed up in our apartment because of a hurricane (!!) but thankfully when it hit land it slowed down into a tropical storm. I still managed to eat my body weight in beignets while I was there, and see some lovely jazz at The Spotted Cat and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the latter in their temporary premises sadly.
Thom told me he can’t share custody of Juno anymore, so I need to get ready to become a single dog parent 😅
Went to see Jamie XX with my friend Hayden and it was such a good gig! I danced so much.
Went to the exhibition launch at Nottingham Contemporary, for their new Donald Rodney exhibition, which is really good.
Whenever I get breakfast with my friend Alan at Wired, I always say I could eat another cob, so the other day he challenged me to actually do it, and I’m happy to say I succeeded 💪🏼 2 veggie sausage and special eggs cobs is my current PB.

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Terminator: I wanted something a bit mindless to watch on the plane, and I’d never seen Terminator, so I gave it a watch and it was a really fun film!
American Fiction: I looooved this one. I’d been recommended it by a few friends, and they were very correct.
Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller: I really enjoyed Circe so I picked this one up and it’s also very good! Am finding I quite enjoy historical fiction.
The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood: This one was a recommendation by the lovely bookseller in 192 books in New York, and it was a great read.
Shrinking: I’d been wanting to rewatch Shrinking, and the whole hurricane sheltering business gave us plenty of time to do that. My friends loved it, and I enjoyed revisiting it.
The incredible Jessica James: Another feel good sheltering rewatch.
Homecoming: a film by Beyoncé: Honestly, I rewatch this at least once a year, it’s so good.
The Moral Implications of Being a Moderately Successful Computer Scientist and a Woman by Irene Y. Zhang
Turning red: I’m not the biggest fan of animated films, but this was a nice watch.
Babes: Watched this on the flight back, it was a short and sweet watch.
Drive away dolls: Another flight film, it was a fun watch and Margaret Qualley is always a treat.
Fremont: A really lovely film, full of emotion and warmth.
Paul Graham and the Cult of the Founder by Dave Karpf
Emily the criminal: I really enjoyed this one, it felt different.

📸 Pics

New York

Chicago

New Orleans

Back in the UK

Lifenotes #47: October 2024

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import october from "@images/posts/lifenotes-47/october.png";

✨ Highlights

Went on a work trip to Cardiff with my team. It's a really lovely city and had a fun time 😌
The house sale seems to be moving 🤞🏼
I went to Liverpool for a few days with my family, we hung out there for a few days and then they came to stay at mine for a bit too 💛

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Cult Classic, by Sloane Crosley: This was quite a weird book. It was a fun read, but largely unremarkable.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor: I'd enjoyed the previous game in the series, so I decided to give this one a go, it’s also really good fun. It's very cathartic to slice through aliens with a lightsaber.
I went to see a marathon of the Star Wars original trilogy at my local cinema - Broadway. It was a fun, chill day.
Why GOV.UK’s Exit this Page component doesn’t use the Escape key by Beeps - This was an insightful read. I learnt a few bits about the web and about a great feature.
Why, after 6 years, I'm over GraphQL by Paul Bessey
The Unfettered Selfishness of Digital Nomads by James Greig
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen: I really loved this book. I read it cover to cover pretty quickly, I'd highly recommend it.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #5

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import mug from "@images/posts/lifenotes-5/mug.jpg"; import laptop from "@images/posts/lifenotes-5/laptop.jpg"; import sprout from "@images/posts/lifenotes-5/sprout.jpg"; import shed from "@images/posts/lifenotes-5/shed.jpg"; import swans from "@images/posts/lifenotes-5/swans.jpg";

Happy Christmas, friends! Turns out I'm not disciplined enough to write these every week, who knew?

Maybe the weeknotes title is not the most appropriate, but I'm not sure where they'd live otherwise, so bear with while I think this through 🤔

Did

On the wind down for Christmas, I did the Design for Developers course on Frontend Masters and oh my, it's the absolute best! Thoroughly enjoyed it all the way through, so thank you Sarah Drasner ✨
Tech Nottingham Secret Santa was great, really enjoyed going round people's doorsteps to drop off presents and wave from afar 🎁
Christmas was enjoyable, despite not being able to go see my family 💔
After doing exactly one crafty thing, I've gone full Carol and bought a heckton of crafting equipment, so now I'm obvs praying I retain my focus long enough to do at least one more thing 😅

Played

🎮 Assassins Creed Unity (WIP)
🎮 Super Mario 64 (WIP) - this camera control is messed up 😭
🎲 Ticket to Ride
🎲 Bananagrams
🎲 Poetry for Neanderthals

Read

Nothing! 🙈
Shame!

Watched

📺 Star Trek Discovery
📺 The Mandalorian
📺 Jeopardy!
📺 Schitts Creek
📺 His Dark Materials
📺 The Good Place - rewatch 🙈
📽 Home Alone
📽 Ghostbusters
📽 Die Hard
📽 Alien

Pics

<Image src={mug} alt="Dark green and red leopard print mug, with pink writing that says: Merry Christmas Ya Filthy Animal." widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> Got myself a nice Christmas mug 🎄

<Image src={laptop} alt="Cute little yellow laptop made of clay, and the screen has pink letter that read WiT." widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> My Tech Nottingham Secret Santa made me the loveliest little laptop in my favourite colour 💛

<Image src={sprout} alt="Felt tree ornament of a little green brussel sprout, with a smile and a golden crown." widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> Decided to try some crafting, and I love it! This is my imperfect first child ☝🏼

<Image src={shed} alt="The big shed, with patterned sheets hung on the walls, some fairy lights, bales of hay as seats, and a metal wood burner in the middle." widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> Thom's family made out the big shed for us to have a corona-safe Christmas Day chat, it even has a homemade wood burner 🥰

<Image src={swans} alt="The lake shore on a sunny winter day, with lots of swans on the shore." widths={[600, 900]} sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" /> Sunny day walk on Attenborough Nature Reserve ☀️ 🦢

Lifenotes #6: January 2021

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import collage from "@images/posts/lifenotes-6/collage.jpg";

Hey pals! I clearly cannot be trusted to write every week, so I'm turning my weeknotes into monthly reviews. Here are the headlines for January:

😄 Good stuff

We got some snow here in Notts. It was a nice little shake up to the lockdown routine.
I got into hand embroidery and it's great fun!
Had a call with the mental health nurse at my GP surgery, and "aced" the ADHD triage questionnaire, so I'm being referred for a proper assessment.
Got some good speakers for my desk, so the vibes have gone 📈 📈 📈

☹️ Bad stuff

Our house buying process is dragging on, the bank is being nitpicky about documents, and everything takes an age.
My setup has been really annoying lately. I managed to get the monitor replaced, but I'm still having some issues, so now to figure out if it's the cables or the macs.
My routine hasn't been great, which in turn makes me feel not great.

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

We whizzed through AC Origins and are now making our way through AC Odyssey. I love Kassandra! She's rad, and hits on everyone, sometimes at very inappropriate times, which is hilarious 😄
Started reading Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, and I'm really enjoying it. Thanks, work secret santa 🙌🏼
Thom told me all about the Royal Institution's Christmas Lectures and we watched a couple of them. They're awesome!
We've been mostly rewatching films instead of watching new ones. The ones we rewatched in January were Die Hard 2, Falling Down and The Big Short - such a great film.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #7: February 2021

Sun, 07 Mar 2021 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import collage from "@images/posts/lifenotes-7/collage.jpg";

Hey friends! February was another locked down month, so not much happening beyond work and generally surviving 😅

😄 Good stuff

Attended Web Stories Conf and saw some great talks.
Pancake day! 🥞
Got my hands on a PS5 💥
Finally ordered a Cricut and started making cute things with it.
Relaunched my site! 🎉
We have a moving date 🥳

☹️ Bad stuff

Nothing comes to mind 😱 ( personally, of course, the world at large is still a 🗑️🔥 )

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Great read from Jeremy Keith on autocomplete for OTP on the web.
This article on dependency confusion was a good read.
This article on the buzzfeed-ification of mental health was very interesting. Not sure I agree with all of it, but it was a good exploration.
This article about impostor syndrome is a great read. It brings a different perspective on the issue and shifts the focus onto why women suffer from it.
Watched Zodiac for the first time, good film.
There was that one Friday where we all watched the Handforth Parish Council meeting and collectively lost it 😂 (I stan Jackie Weaver ✊🏼 )
Watched The Queen's Gambit and absolutely loved it! The story, photography, wardrobe, actors... all great 💛
Started watching The Crown Series 4.
Rewatched The Prestige, and even having seen it before, was still delighted at the twists and turns of the story. #TeamAngier
Started playing Super Mario 3D World, it's great fun!
Started playing Assassins Creed Valhalla on the PS5, and it's really pretty, but I think I hammered AC a bit too much recently, so not as enthused 😅
Really enjoyed reading about Ana's typical day ☺️
To take a break from AC, started playing Jedi Fallen Order, and even though it's buggy and has some weird mechanics, it's still a good Star Wars game.

📸 Pics

Lifenotes #8: March 2021

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import collage from "@images/posts/lifenotes-8/collage.jpg";

✨ Highlights

We’re got the keys to our house on the 18th! 🎉
I took two and a half weeks of work to move and disconnect for a bit, and it was lovely! Although, I might have disconnected a bit too much and slightly resented coming back to my status of 'cog in the capitalist machine' 😅

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

AC Valhalla: still plodding through it 🤷🏼‍♀️
Jedi Fallen Order was great fun! Although some of the mechanics that are meant to make it harder actually just made it annoying 😅 I'm a busy woman, I can't spend my life traversing these planets, just give me fast travel!
The men who stared at goats: I read the book a few months ago and it made me want to watch the film. Was alright 🤷🏼‍♀️
This was a great read on what's wrong with NFTs.
Guns akimbo: wacky and fun 😄
This article hit hard for me cause I do really miss all the folks I have more casual friendships with 😢
Tenet: I enjoyed it, very on brand Nolan film, had me entertained trying to anticipate the twists.
Maquette: Had a quick go at this but it didn't really grab me, to be honest. Some aspects reminded me of superliminal, but overall was a bit meh so I ditched it.
Finished reading Girl, Woman, Other. It was a great read, full of lovely stories, and I particularly enjoyed the way the stories were threaded together.
Parasite: finally got around to watching it and it was so, so good! Just a superb film.
Key & Peele: started watching it from the beginning, will prob do a little bit at a time in between watching other stuff.
Naked gun: went looking for something fun to watch and ended up watching this. Silly and fun until I realised one of the main people in it is OJ Simpson 😑
This was a good read with some great advice on interviewing.

📸 Pics

We went for a walk by the river early in the month; the rest are from the move, and the generalised chaos of the situation 😅

Lifenotes #9: April 2021

Fri, 07 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import collage from "@images/posts/lifenotes-9/collage.jpg";

✨ Highlights

Had to go back to work after my long holiday, that was traumatic 😂
Saw friends in our garden and it was lovely!
It was Thom's birthday 🎈
I've been enjoying the big kitchen, did some baking this month 😌
Got my first Books that Matter box 💕
Finally got a stand up desk!

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

Started reading Why I'm no longer talking to white people about race, by Reni Eddo-Lodge. Such a great book, lots of UK historical context which has been really interesting.
Notorious: still really enjoy watching Hitchcock films, but I'm finding it very hard to get past the misogyny 😬
Black books: started watching this as Thom likes it, it's great fun!
Parks and rec: we're rewatching this and omg, still makes me cackle regularly 😂
Lost in translation: it's one of Thom's faves and I hadn't seen it, so we fixed that. It was nice!
To catch a thief: another Hitchcock one, pretty good.
This article about FLoC by Jeremy Keith was a good read, explains the issue pretty well.
Another great read by Lara Hogan, this one encouraging managers to adjust their Q3 roadmaps to accommodate for folks' burnouts and general weariness accumulated over the last year and a bit.
This blog by Jessica Kerr was quite interesting, not sure I'd do away with PRs completely, but it sure is an interesting perspective, and I agree with a bunch of her points.
This article by Eric Bailey (included in Cassidy Williams' newsletter) was super interesting! I guess I'd never thought too much about 404 pages and their purpose/impact. Would highly recommend a read 🙂
Control: I only played a tiny bit, but I'm already in love with the aesthetics! The fonts and colours are ✨ magical ✨
I saw this article linked amongst the fallout from the Basecamp debacle and it's a really good read on cancel culture.

📸 Pics

Little stumble with styled components

Wed, 27 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT

I’d been seeing “caching issues” for a while with this site. Whenever I deployed it, it would show outdated styles, and on refresh turn back to what I expected.

Ah, cache invalidation… the hardest thing in software engineering.

Right?

😭

Well, I haven’t found cache invalidation to be that hard, probably because tooling has improved so much. But as it turns out, my issue wasn’t related to caching at all. The symptoms were just similar.

A few weeks ago, I updated my site to use styled components, and I didn’t realise I needed a plugin for it to work correctly with Gatsby. So it looked fine on the dev server, but the build is server side rendered, so it fell apart.

Once I realised that was the issue, it was piece of cake to fix. Because Gatsby docs are awesome, they had a detailed explanation of styling a Gatsby site with styled components.

So all I had to do was an npm install. Whoops! 😅

PS: that means my dark mode is not working as I intended. Because of SSR, it renders the light theme by default and switches as you move around. Gonna have to dig a little to sort that one out 🛠

Looking for a job while looking after yourself

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import notionPage from "@images/posts/looking-for-a-job/notion-page.png"; import behaviouralQs from "@images/posts/looking-for-a-job/behavioural-qs.png";

Last year, I found myself quite burnt out with my job, and with a lot of pandemic stress. I felt like I really needed a change, but I didn't feel like I had the energy for it.

After a few months psyching myself up, I decided to go for it, but to go for it at a pace that worked for me, and that I wouldn't find overwhelming. This post is about the things I did during that job search that I found useful, and you might find useful too.

I’ll break them down into steps:

1. Figure out what you’re optimising for

The first thing I did was stop and think about what I wanted to change, what I wanted out of this new job that I didn’t have at my current one.

When looking for my previous job, I optimised for a specific technology stack, because I wanted to learn it, and that worked pretty well for me. This time around however, I’m in a different place in my career, and for me right now, the thing I value most is working with kind people in a company with values I can get behind (a tall order, eh?).

Figuring this out upfront will help you throughout the job search process, when deciding where to apply, what questions to ask your interviewers, and finally which company to choose when weighing up offers.

2. Prepare, but not too much

I've definitely fallen into the trap before of thinking “I'm going to look for a new job, must learn all the new JavaScript frameworks and tools”. But with consistently low energy levels, this time around I didn’t even entertain that thought.

Instead I focussed on briefly refreshing the knowledge I already had, and organising my past experiences in such a way that I could easily recall and articulate it during interviews.

The chief upside of remote interviewing is that you can keep notes open throughout the interviews, so your brain doesn’t have to work quite as hard, and you can be more relaxed during them.

I use Notion to organise basically all the contents of my brain, so I made a little job hunting hub, where I put all the information I prepared and gathered throughout the process. This is what the main page looks like:

This homepage has a few sections to it, so let’s go over these:

Two minute pitch

This is a very short paragraph about me that I can copy and paste into emails, application forms or wherever it’s useful.

Documents

In this section I have my CV and cover letter. They’re both very simple and concise.

My CV is a one pager, I tried to keep it lean and to the point. I treat my CV as a conversation starter, so it has the companies I've worked for and the role that I was doing, along with the stack for each of them, so people know what sort of technologies I'm familiar with.

My cover letter is more of the same. What I did with it was to write a few paragraphs about myself and use that as a template. So when I needed to submit a cover letter with an application, I would add a couple of paragraphs that were about the company itself and why I wanted to work for them. Having a base to work from made it so much easier, because for a new application I only needed to write two paragraphs instead of reinventing the whole thing.

Resources

This section has a few pages I prepared so I could refer to during interviews.

The first one is a list of questions I want to ask interviewers throughout the hiring process. I gathered these over the last couple of years from blog posts like Julia Evans’, friends’ suggestions and some I came up with myself.

Those questions help me get a good gauge of several aspects of the company, from what their culture is like to the health of their systems, and their approach to testing and tech debt. Getting an understanding of how the organisation works is really useful when weighing up offers, or figuring out what role makes the most sense for the current stage of your career.

The second one is a notice letter template that I saw online and I thought might be useful to hold on to. It’s to the point and neutral, so when you’re at the point where you want to quit, which can be quite stressful, you can save yourself some mental bandwidth and send that pre made letter to your employer.

The third one is an onboarding checklist, it has a list of things you might want to do during your probation period to make sure the company is what you expected and there are no red flags. It has things like expensing an item to see how that process works, checking your payslip to make sure payroll is done correctly, among others.

Both the notice letter and the onboarding checklist were shared by Corey Quinn on Twitter.

The last page in this section is a table I prepared for behavioural interviews:

I went over a few projects from my career and laid them out on a table so they were easy to reference. The table is set out so that each project is broken down into four parts: nugget — a one liner about the project — situation, action and result. I also tagged each project with some categories, as most projects can be brought up for more than one question.

This layout was really useful to me, especially having the information in order, so when it came to an interview situation where I might be quite nervous, I could start by reading out the information in front of me until I eased into the answer and could be a bit more articulate.

Job applications

And now let's dig into the last bit, which is where the job applications are:

This is a simple board with the name of the company and where in the hiring process I am. But the way Notion works is that everything is a page, so each of those cards is a page where I take notes throughout the process with that company.

I start before I even apply by getting my prep organised. At that stage, I typically look at:

The job listing itself, and check it aligns with what I want. I like to download a copy as a PDF, since some companies take down the listing page once they get enough applications in.
The company values, to ensure they align with mine.
The progression framework, if they have a public one, to see what they expect of the level I’m applying for, and where I think I’d place myself, which might help when negotiating an offer.
Their tech blog, as it usually has a good amount of information about the tech they use and how their systems are built, and sometimes even about their hiring process and what they look for in engineers.

Then, throughout the interviews I note down answers to the questions I ask and any other information that might help me make a decision at a later stage. I also make a note of any feedback I get from the interviewers, and offer details if I get one.

3. Execute, slowly

With all the prep out of the way, it’s time to put it in motion!

As I said earlier in this post, I wanted to go through this job search without feeling overwhelmed, so when it came to actually applying for jobs, instead of applying for all the jobs at once, I decided to choose three companies I really liked and start with those. If that didn’t work out, I’d select another three, and so on. That way, you can reap the benefits of being in more than one process at once — such as buying yourself some time, or leveraging other offers when negotiating — without making it too stressful for yourself.

I also spaced out the interviews a fair bit. Instead of taking a week off work and clumping all my interviews together, I took every Monday off in a month and made those my interview days.

That really helped me, as I had at most two interviews in a week, and it gave me time between those to rest and prepare.

Bonus tips!

Figure out what you’re worth

If you get asked what salary you want, you don’t have to answer, I promise. Hopefully the company will have shared the salary range on the job listing, but if they haven’t I recommend asking for it as early as you can, to avoid wasting both parties’ times on interviews, when they might not be able to offer what you want.

To figure out what you want, do some market research on what your skills and experience are worth. You can check public sources of salary information like levels.fyi or Glassdoor as a first port of call, but if you can, ask your peers and contacts what they make, as that can give you a better idea of how your skills relate to theirs and therefore how much you can ask for.

If it’s helpful at all to you, you can take a peek at my salary history.

Save your job listing

I mentioned earlier I like to save the job listing as a pdf in case it gets taken down during the interview process. It can also be immensely valuable after you get hired, as a measure of what you were originally asked to do when you joined the company.

So if you find that 18 months down the line your tasks and responsibilities have grown, but your title or salary hasn’t, you can have an informed conversation with your manager and ask for your compensation to be adjusted to match what you actually do.

Don’t be afraid to walk away

If at any point during an interview process, you realise you don’t want the job anymore, walk away from the process. You don’t need to go through with interviews to “be polite”.

Save yourself and the company the time and politely withdraw from the process. I promise it’s fine.

I didn’t think I had it in me to switch jobs last year, but I’m really glad I did, and without completely losing my sanity! I hope this helps you do that too, you got this 💪🏼

PS: here’s my Notion Job Hunting Kit Template, in case you want to use it too.

The opposite of depression

Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Does anyone know what the opposite of depression is?

I’ve had a couple of encounters with depression in my life, almost in passing. Like a big weight that I take around on piggy back for a few weeks, and then it dissipates.

My feelings numb, like someone turning down the volume all the way to mute, and my motivation fizzles.

Over the last couple of weeks, however, I think I’m experiencing the opposite of depression, of my kind of depression anyway.

I feel all of the feelings, all of the time.

Reasons I cried over the last couple of weeks:

The last few chapters of The Book Thief: cried a lot over this, as I struggle to comprehend that humans are capable of things as monstrous as the holocaust
Some passages of Ordinary People
The Grenfell Story episode of Have You Heard George’s podcast
Final episode of The Good Place
A song in a cafe reminded me of a happy memory and made me well up

All my emotions just seem to be on their highest setting. I’ve been ecstatic, completely exhausted, extremely calm.

It’s like living life with a really vivid filter on.

I guess part of this is due to having spent some time on my own over the last few days. I am a very social person, so I very rarely get time on my own. When I do, I savour it, and it helps me feel centred and calm.

There’s no conclusion to this post, I guess. Sometimes writing is arduous and slow, and sometimes the words just drop from my brain, slide off the tip of my tongue and crash land into the keyboard. All on their own, and all at once.

I guess this is it.

It’s been emotional.

Pandemic diaries

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import githubContributions from "@images/posts/pandemic-diaries/github-contributions.png"; import theWorkweek from "@images/posts/pandemic-diaries/the-workweek.png";

It feels like a lifetime since I last wrote a blog post. So much has changed since the last one! 😅

So I thought I'd write a short update on how this rollercoaster of a year is playing out for me.

I remember way back in February, when I was prepping our office auditorium for NottsJS, being in the empty canteen and seeing that the TV had been left on. There were reports of how the Coronavirus was spreading through China.

It felt eerie, like the reports they play at the beginning of a zombie apocalypse film, a foreshadowing. And now here we are, hard pressed to imagine a future where we can just hug people willy nilly like it's 2019.

I miss hugs 😭

The beginning wasn't too bad: the switch to remote working was new and interesting, being at home a lot felt nice.

I'm pretty sure I had the 'rona way back in March/April, as I lost my sense of smell and taste for a couple of months, and had a really persistent headache for a few weeks. So not great, but if that was it, I got off easy.

I also spent a bunch of time early on with the Tech Nottingham team figuring out how to move things online and still be there for our community during this transition period.

Since then, things have been a bit of a blur, to be honest. I can account for some of the time, but not all of it. I've been rewatching old shows I like, as I'm sure the anxiety crew already knows, watching stuff you're familiar with is comforting. Since March I've watched: Frasier, Brooklyn 99, The Office, and now I'm watching Friends for the millionth time 😅

Somehow I played 440 hours (!) of Animal Crossing. That is frankly excessive, even for me.

I went through a tiny phase of going to lots of online events, but zoom fatigue hit pretty quick, so I backed off from that.

More than anything, this new normal has killed my joy of doing tech things on my spare time. I built a really lovely environment for myself at home, but now that I have to work in it all day, I resent spending any extra time at my desk.

Exhibit A: my contributions chart for this period

This situation also changed my relationship with where we live. Our apartment is lovely, but after being stuck in it for 7 months without access to a garden, now I want out.

So we're in the process of buying a house, which brings its own stress into the mix.

I'm not gonna lie, this year has not been great. I've been pretty depressed since this whole thing started, and the constant onslaught of misery coming from the news hasn't helped.

Trying to concentrate and do work while the world is literally and figuratively on fire has been challenging. Against the backdrop of the pandemic, the racism and violence against Black people, the murderous mismanagement of both my home country and the country I live in, the climate breakdown, the violence against SARS protestors, and whatever other horrors I missed, the things I do at work seem pretty inconsequential.

This lizandmollie illustration sums it up well:

Having said all that, things are starting to look up for me a bit. I appreciate I'm immensely privileged, and there's still so much wrong in the world, but I have to get a little joy from where I can find it.

Here are some of the things keeping me hopeful:

We found a house that we love, and are in the process of buying it.
Tried some changes to my routine, and that is really helping with my sleep.
We just spent a lovely week in Scotland, in the middle of a forest, with lots of walks and dog cuddles.
I took a lovely SVG Animation course, and that's sparked my joy for making fun stuff again.
I just had my first ever therapy session, and I really think that's going to help.

I hope to put some more stuff on here soon, but I may not. I've been using a lot on my energy in just existing, and I think that's ok for now.

Stay safe 💛

ReactJS Girls 2019

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

As I mentioned on my Frontend NE write up, I’m hoping to specialise on frontend technologies going forward. I want to get to know the browser and the things we put in it in depth, so ReactJS Girls felt like a good opportunity to expand my knowledge in that area.

As well as the conference itself, I signed up for the Advanced React workshop with Manjula Dube the day before the conference, and it was really valuable. I formalised my knowledge in some of the React patterns I already use, learnt some new ones, and got in on the hype with React hooks.

The conference had a really good selection of talks and speakers, and all around amazing women everywhere.

It was hosted on my birthday, and it felt really great to spend the day surrounded by talented women in my field 🥳

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"> Look who I found at{" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ReactJSGirls?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> #ReactJSGirls </a>{" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WiTNotts?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> #WiTNotts </a>{" "} 💛{" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/aimeegamble?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> @aimeegamble </a>{" "} <a href="https://t.co/89HGmjBMKM">pic.twitter.com/89HGmjBMKM</a> — Carol 👩‍💻 (@CarolSaysThings){" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/CarolSaysThings/status/1124267687482396675?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> May 3, 2019 </a> </blockquote>

So far, when writing up conferences, I’ve been doing my best to summarise every talk and capture all the details of the event. I don’t think it’s working for me, as it ends up taking a long time for me to write the post, and I end up rewatching talks multiple times and obsessing over details. So I’m going to start cutting my write ups short, so I can put my thoughts into words while they’re still fresh, and highlight what I took from the event, as these posts are for my own reference, really.

ReactJS Girls had an MC, the very talented Eve Porcello. She did a fantastic job throughout the whole day, but my favourite part was the introduction. Eve and the speakers recreated the launch of Windows 95, down to the outfits, awkward dancing, and “developers! developers! developers!” chants. She also shared some stats about men in tech, and appealed to the audience to do their best to include our fellow technologists. If you do have a few minutes to spare, I recommend you watch it, as the whole thing is hilarious.

ReactJS Girls LiveStream - Intro

Talks

All the talks were of a really high standard, and I’ve decided to pick a few to write down some notes about. I chose the ones that resonated with me the most, due to the content and how closely it relates to the things I’m working on at the moment.

If you do have the time, I recommend giving the talks a watch, there was a lot of good stuff! 🙂

ReactJS Girls Conference - YouTube

Building a design system with React

Emma Wedekind was the first speaker, starting us off with a really good talk on building design systems.

I’ve been thinking about this subject a lot recently, and the best way to approach it. So her talk came just at the right time 🙂

She outlined the benefits of having a design system within your company, and summarised those as:

Design systems give designers and engineers the ability to build consistent user interfaces without wasting a ton of time and energy.

She then went on to define what a design system is, and what elements it’s comprised of: a design language, a component library and a style guide.

Her talk focussed on building a component library, but it was very valuable to have that work contextualised, to see how it fits into the bigger picture.

It was a great overview of what the process should look like, who should come together for it, and what the output can/should look like.

The how and why of flexible components

Jenn Creighton followed up with an excellent talk about practical ways of breaking down unwieldy components. She explored different options, each with their upsides and downsides.

She showed good practices on refactoring a complex component, and carefully explained her reasoning. It was a great technical talk, and as I’ve been seeking to deepen my React knowledge, it added a few new tools to my toolbox 🤓

Jenn wrapped up the talk by going over two interesting concepts:

Know your traps

We all have “traps”. For some engineers, like Jenn, the trap is to go all in with all the latest patterns, even when they might not be the best fit.

For other folks, it might be too much reticence on adopting new patterns. The point is - know yourself - so that you can be flexible, and so write better components.

Kill your darlings

Once you’ve written your components, are you too attached? Can you let go and refactor or delete your code if that’s what’s best?

I thought this conclusion to the talk was great, as being a flexible engineer feels like the first step in building flexible components ✨

Empathy driven development - a live accessibility audit with React.js

One of my goals this year is to learn more about accessibility, so Marcy Sutton’s talk was a godsend 🤩

She walked us through a pre built app, highlighting the most common accessibility bugs out there. She then showed us the fixes for those issues, sharing resources and tooling as she went.

The main automated tool in this process was axe. It’s available as a browser extension that will highlight issues on the page when you inspect it; it also has an API that can be plugged into your UI testing framework for automated testing.

Her demo is available in this repo. I highly recommend a visit, as it’s packed with examples and resources on accessibility in practice.

Architect your culture like you architect your code

Kate Beard’s talk centred around the culture in the coding bootcamp she attended, Founders and Coders (FAC).

She talked about psychological safety being the base upon which we can build a good trusting environment within our teams. She also shared FAC’s code of conduct, that gets revised by each cohort at the end of their course. There were lots of gems in there!
These were my favourite:

💎 Don’t make assumptions
💎 Ask questions as opposed to telling people what to do
💎 Spread positivity
💎 Don’t underestimate your teammates

It was a really insightful talk on the active effort you need to put in to create a good culture. It doesn’t happen on its own, but with good norms and established behaviours we can make our teams and communities safe and inclusive spaces 💛

Wrap up

It was a lovely, busy day where I learnt a lot, made some new friends, and was inspired by badass women. What a birthday present!

Speaking of, I got an actual birthday present, a copy of Eve Porcello’s book Learning GraphQL. How cool is that?

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"> I just got a kickass birthday present from{" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/eveporcello?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> @eveporcello </a>{" "} 🎁 Thank you so much! 💛{" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ReactJSGirls?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> #ReactJSGirls </a>{" "} <a href="https://t.co/Ag95EZxV8J">pic.twitter.com/Ag95EZxV8J</a> — Carol 👩‍💻 (@CarolSaysThings){" "} <a href="https://twitter.com/CarolSaysThings/status/1124315636598018048?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"> May 3, 2019 </a> </blockquote>

Extra stuff:

Emma mentioned during her talk that she uses Object.freeze() to prevent properties from being added/removed/updated in an object. She used it to define component behaviours and things that shouldn’t be mutated throughout the app.

I hadn’t heard of it before, so I thought it’d be interesting to include it here: Object.freeze() - JavaScript | MDN

Rebuilding my site - Part 1: Eleventy

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Almost a year ago, I got caught up in the enthusiasm of having all this free time at home (before it got consumed by existential and other assorted dreads) and decided to rebuild my website.

It took me a while, but I'm doing it now 🎉

Why Eleventy?

I decided to ditch Gatsby in favour of Eleventy, for a few reasons:

I want the code for my site to be as lean as possible, and I want it to have very little JavaScript. Gatsby renders all my pages beautifully on the server, but then proceeds to require them to be downloaded again and rendered in JS. Why? 😩
I wanted to wrangle fewer dependencies. A few months ago I wrote a blog post after months of not touching my site, and I immediately had to spend time debugging dependencies that broke for no reason. Not fun.
I wanted to build every aspect myself and learn things in detail in the process. I accidentally ended up working at "the back of the frontend" and I really wanna learn more about "the front of the frontend", so why not on my own site?

But first, learning

I had my first go at the rebuild by reading the Eleventy docs, and I got pretty far, but felt like I needed a more comprehensive walkthrough before I could really get stuck in. Because Eleventy is so flexible, I felt a bit overwhelmed by choice, and a bit lost.

Fortuitously, Piccalilli came out with an Eleventy course at just the right time, and it's great! You should totally check it out: https://piccalil.li/course/learn-eleventy-from-scratch

Doing the course really helped me see all that was possible and how the different parts of the site might hang together. After I finished that, I was ready to go.

My second go was a lot more successful, as I'd learnt a bunch in the course, and was able to reference a bunch of Eleventy-built websites and learning materials that popped up in the meantime.

My favourite sources for this were:

Eleventy docs
The site we built on the Eleventy from Scratch course
11ty Rocks
Max Böck's site
The a11y project's site

Building time 🛠

My site is pretty simple, so there's nothing too special going on. It's also public on GitHub, so you can always go have a snoop 👀

Having said that, let's go over some aspects of the migration:

Layout

Eleventy allows you to use and extend layouts, which is awesome! It means I can set up my base layout with my navigation, footer, and all the good stuff, and then create a page as simply as:

{% raw %} --- layout: base.html ---

<h1>Hey there!</h1>
{% endraw %}

Isn't that neat?

Navigation

I used the Eleventy Navigation Plugin to manage my navigation. It's really simple and works well. All you need to do is add a couple of properties to your frontmatter, like so:

{% raw %} --- layout: base.html eleventyNavigation: key: My Page order: 4 ---

<h1>Hey there!</h1>
{% endraw %}

It then adds your page to its navigation collection, that you can loop through to render your navigation menu.

Partials

Partials allow you to extract common blocks in your site and reuse them. They're super useful and easy to use. Once you've created a partial file, all you need to do to use it is:

{% raw %}
{% include "my-partial.html" %}
{% endraw %}

Environment variables

One of the things I needed was to be able to conditionally include a partial based on an environment variable. I use Fathom on this site for analytics, and only wanted to include their script for production builds of the site.

I managed to set that up using a JavaScript data file. These are the relevant parts in play:

"scripts": {
    "dev": "ELEVENTY_ENV=dev npx @11ty/eleventy --serve",
    "build": "ELEVENTY_ENV=prod npx @11ty/eleventy"
}

These are the scripts I set up in my package.json.

module.exports = {
  environment: process.env.ELEVENTY_ENV,
};

I then exposed my environment variable through a data file, in my case, site.js.

{% raw %}
{% if site.environment == "prod" %}
{% include "fathom.html" %}
{% endif %}
{% endraw %}

Eleventy in turn exposes the contents of the data file under the file's name, so I can access my variable through site.environment.

Image optimisation

Image management was by far the biggest hurdle. Gatsby for sure has a lot of drawbacks, but it handles images very well. Fortunately, while I was in the middle of struggling with it, Eleventy creator Zach Leat published a blog post on the subject.

The first issue I ran into was the location of all my images. I used to colocate blog post images with their respective markdown files. But in order to use Eleventy image plugin, I had to move all of those to a centralised images folder. If you're interested in how I did this, check out the notes I added at the end of this post.

Once I was set up with the image plugin, I ran into the second issue: even though I set up different sizes for my images, and a media query to pick the right size, my images were still being displayed at the narrowest width. I'm using the image plugin's generateHtml utility, which outputs markup that looks like this:

<picture>
  <source
    type="image/avif"
    srcset="/images/6cccb4ec-600.avif 600w, /images/6cccb4ec-900.avif 900w"
    sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w"
  />
  <source
    type="image/webp"
    srcset="/images/6cccb4ec-600.webp 600w, /images/6cccb4ec-900.webp 900w"
    sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w"
  />
  <source
    type="image/jpeg"
    srcset="/images/6cccb4ec-600.jpeg 600w, /images/6cccb4ec-900.jpeg 900w"
    sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w"
  />
  <img
    src="/images/6cccb4ec-600.jpeg"
    alt="My lovely, lovely picture."
    loading="lazy"
    decoding="async"
    width="600"
    height="400"
  />
</picture>

I reached out to Zach, who kindly helped me out. As it turns out, you need a CSS reset to make the images fluid, and allow them to stretch beyond the smallest size.

He recommended this article by Ethan Marcotte, which was a great read. I also ended up living on the responsive images MDN page for a little while, it's really good.

Ultimately I decided to leave the reset out for a little while, as I'm leaving the site HTML only for now. I guess it surprised me that you need CSS to get the picture element to behave adequately, I expected the solution to be HTML only.

I did learn a bunch from this experience, which was exactly the point, so good times all around 🎉

While I was writing this post, Zach published this excellent blog post, detailing the whole situation and providing solutions. Highly recommend giving it a read 🙌🏼

Next steps

I'm quite happy with the content migration, so I'm putting this new version of my site out there. I'm excited to build on it, and learn some more lessons along the way.

I'll do my best to document my progress, for myself, and for whoever else might find it useful.

Next I'll be looking at microformats, fonts and some basic CSS ✨

See you there! 👋🏼

PS: Relocating images

As I mentioned earlier, I started off with my blog post images in the same folder as the markdown file:

├── pandemic-diaries
│   ├── github-contributions.png
│   ├── index.md
│   └── the-workweek.png

So I needed to do the following:

Move all images into src/images preserving their parent folders
Rename all markdown files after their parent folder and move those up a level
Replace all the markdown image tags with my new nunjucks shortcode

1: Moving the images

Disclaimer: these commands and scripts are what I used to do it on a Mac, your mileage may vary.

Copy the whole posts folder into the images folder:

cp -r src/posts src/images

Remove the markdown files from each post folder:

find . -name 'index.md' -delete

2: Renaming and moving the markdown files

For this bit, I wrote a little Node script. For each post, it pulls the markdown file out of the folder, renames it to match its old folder name, and deletes the folder (along with any images that were in it).

Since the images are no longer located with the posts, it makes sense to flatten it all into a single directory.

{% raw %}
const fs = require("fs/promises");
const path = require("path");

async function doIt(startingFolder) {
    const allPostsDirectoryPath = path.join(__dirname, startingFolder);
    const postFolders = await fs.readdir(allPostsDirectoryPath);
    postFolders.forEach(async (postFolder) => {
        try {
            const postDirectoryPath = path.join(
                allPostsDirectoryPath,
                postFolder
            );
            const postFiles = await fs.readdir(postDirectoryPath);
            postFiles.forEach(async (file) => {
                if (path.extname(file) === ".md") {
                    // rename the markdown file with the folder's name
                    // and move it up a level
                    await fs.rename(
                        path.join(postDirectoryPath, "index.md"),
                        path.join(allPostsDirectoryPath, `${postFolder}.md`)
                    );
                }
            });

            // delete old post dir
            await fs.rm(postDirectoryPath, { recursive: true, force: true });
        } catch (e) {
            console.error("Whoopsie! Guess that was a folder xD ", e);
        }
    });
}

(async function () {
    try {
        await doIt(".");
        console.log(`successfully rejigged things`);
    } catch (error) {
        console.error("there was an error:", error.message);
    }
})("/tmp/hello");
{% endraw %}

3: Replacing the image tags

I also did this step through a script, using a regex to find all the image tags, retain the path and alt text of each, and then place those in a shortcode. At some point, I'd like to go back to using native markdown image tags, but that means I need to mess with the markdown parsing library, so I'm leaving it for now, in an attempt to keep things simple.

{% raw %}
const fs = require("fs/promises");
const path = require("path");

async function doIt(startingFolder) {
    const allPostsDirectoryPath = path.join(__dirname, startingFolder);
    const posts = await fs.readdir(allPostsDirectoryPath);
    posts.forEach(async (post) => {
        if (path.extname(post) === ".md") {
            const postSlug = path.basename(post, ".md");
            // find all images
            // replace with same but with extra path
            let postContents = await fs.readFile(post, "utf8");
            postContents = postContents.replace(
                /!\[(?<alt>.*)\]\((\.\/)?(?<filename>.*)\)/gm,
                `{% Image "src$<filename>", "$<alt>", "(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w" %}`
            );
            await fs.writeFile(post, postContents, "utf8");
        }
    });
}

(async function () {
    try {
        await doIt(".");
        console.log(`successfully replaced images`);
    } catch (error) {
        console.error("there was an error:", error.message);
    }
})("/tmp/hello");
{% endraw%}

Hope this helps! 🙂

Rebuilding my site - Part 4: Fonts & Basic CSS

Tue, 13 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import wakamai from "@images/posts/site-rebuild-fonts/wakamai.png";

Hello there! It's finally time to add a little bit of ✨ spice ✨ to this site.

Today we're adding custom fonts and some basic CSS.

Let's go!

Fonts

Header

I knew I wanted a bold and curly font for my headers, so after browsing for longer than I should have, I settled on Norando.

It's nice and readable at bigger sizes, and it has ligatures, for that extra curly goodness 😌

It was my first time working with ligatures in CSS, so I spent a bunch of time on the MDN page on ligatures, of course, but I also found a website that is absolutely magical when dealing with fonts: Wakamai Fondue 🧀

Once you drop your font file in it, it analyses the font and gives you a lot of information about it, like: a list of all the characters, description of all the font features, and some CSS to utilise all those features. So nifty! 🌟

In the end, all I needed to use to enable the ligatures was one line of CSS 🤩

em {
  font-feature-settings: "ss02" on;
}

Body

For the body, I wanted something simple and legible, so I went with Atkinson Hyperlegible, by the Braille Institute, aimed to support folks with low vision.

CSS

Since I was adding some CSS to handle the fonts, I thought this would be a good opportunity to add some very light touch styling to the site 💅🏼

Sass

After repeatings tags many, many times on my first selectors, I decided to reach for Sass. I hadn't used it before, but folks who have swear by it, so I thought this was a good opportunity to learn.

I used Stephanie Eckles' 11ty Sass Skeleton as a reference for the build scripts, and had a quick watch of Jesse Showalter's Starting with Sass video series, and that was enough to get me going. I was so pleased to find quality educational content, especially in concise formats, so I could learn enough to do what I wanted to do in well under an hour 🙌🏼

Basic layout

After a considerable time of being CSS naked, I wanted to add a tiny bit of structure to the site. This is by no means the finished product, rather a foundation for whatever comes next.

I used a chunk of Piccalilli's Modern CSS reset as the base, and then sprinkled on some grid here and flex there to make the pages easier to read, and to give lists a bit of room to breathe.

My absolute favourite read when working on this was Every Layout's units page, it taught me a lot about the fundamentals of sizing on the web, and it gave me this gem of a CSS line, that instantly made all of my blocks of text vastly more readable:

p {
  max-width: 60ch;
}

Lessons learnt

This slow, layered, and focussed approach to rebuilding my site continues to pay dividends. Instead of continuously working around problems, I'm greatly enjoying the process of digging a little deeper and working through the problems.

I had a couple of issues this time:

Squashed images

As I added some CSS to make images fluid, it meant that they all became bigger, as they were previously falling back to the smallest size (I covered that a little on this post). However, they all looked a bit squashed, so I set out to figure out why.

The issue was cause by the max-width I set on the paragraph tags. Turns out my markdown was wrapping all the images in paragraph tags. But why, do I hear you ask?

After some intense ducking™️ I found this StackOverflow thread that had the answer:

It seems that an image is an inline element and that if Markdown detects an image that is not inside a block element such as <figure></figure>, <div></div> or other similar block elements then it will apply a  tag to wrap around the image.

So I ended up tweaking my image shortcode slightly, so it now wraps the picture tag in a figure tag, and if a caption is passed, it gets added as in a figure caption tag.

Squashed images, part 2!

Having solved the squashed images issue, I did a bit more testing and found that when the page was resized and became narrower, the images were getting squashed again 😰

This one turned out to be a lot simpler: the image tag within the picture tag has defined height and width attributes, as it should. But, the fluid image CSS only changes the width, so when the image is made narrower, the width adjusts accordingly, but the height remains fixed to the attribute's value.

Whew, that was a mouthful! To understand what I mean, it might be helpful to look at the image markup:

<picture>
  <source
    type="image/avif"
    srcset="/images/16865246-600.avif 600w, /images/16865246-900.avif 900w"
    sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w"
  />
  <source
    type="image/webp"
    srcset="/images/16865246-600.webp 600w, /images/16865246-900.webp 900w"
    sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w"
  />
  <source
    type="image/jpeg"
    srcset="/images/16865246-600.jpeg 600w, /images/16865246-900.jpeg 900w"
    sizes="(max-width: 600px) 600w, 900w"
  />
  <img
    alt="Example alt text."
    loading="lazy"
    decoding="async"
    src="/images/16865246-600.jpeg"
    width="900"
    height="635"
  />
</picture>

As you can see, the picture tag sets the width and height of the image tag based on the sizes attribute of the sources. Our image CSS reset in turn, looks like this:

img,
picture {
  max-width: 100%;
  display: block;
}

When the image's container changes width, the width of the image is recalculated to remain at 100% of the container's width, but the height remains anchored to 635px in this case, as set in the height attribute. Setting height: auto on the CSS image reset was all it took to get it all working properly again.

Cool web stuff

The web never ceases to amaze me, and this week is no exception, so I thought I'd include a couple of interesting tidbits I learnt about while trawling MDN:

Text decoration skip ink: you can set whether the under/overline crosses through under/overhanging glyphs (think gs, hs, etc) or whether it leaves a gap.
Media attribute on link tag: in the same way you can specify a media type on a link tag like print or screen, you can use a full on CSS media query to determine whether the resource is linked or not.

Isn't that great?

That's it for today! Up next: a little splash of colour 👩🏼‍🎨🎨

Rebuilding my site - Part 2: Microformats

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Something I never got around to doing on my old site was to thoroughly annotate the content with Microformats. In rebuilding it from the ground up, I wanted to correct that.

Microformats are a standard for annotating markup on the web, making it more meaningful. This makes your site machine readable, which is useful for things like RSS, but also for standardised interactions among websites.

IndieWeb? What? Why? How?

The IndieWeb in a nutshell (at least for me) is the idea of owning your own space on the internet and owning the content you put out there. Other folks much smarter than I am have shared some great stuff on the IndieWeb. In particular, I'd recommend these three resources:

Jamie's Tech Nottingham talk on the IndieWeb Movement: it's a comprehensive overview of what the IndieWeb is about and how you can get involved.
Ana's Smashing blog post on autonomy online and the IndieWeb: it makes a strong case for the IndieWeb and gives you both an overview of it and tools to get started yourself.
Heydon's Webbed Brief on the IndieWeb is great fun, has amazing production values, and really drives home the why.

indiewebify.me is a good starting point in terms of implementation. It's likely that you'll need to reach for more docs, but at least it gets you going 🙂

Microformats

If you'd like to annotate your site using Microformats, check out the official docs. There are some good blog posts on the subject out there, but what worked for me was to follow these steps:

Review the content on my site.
Read the wiki pages to see available items and properties.
Look through a few sites in the wild to see how they're done.

🕵🏼‍♀️ If you want to snoop into people's sites, I recommend parsing their site here and then looking through their markup to see how they structured their properties.

Some folks whose lovely sites I snooped on: Jamie Tanna, Ana Rodrigues, Max Böck, and Jeremy Keith.

Nothing about my implementation is unique or groundbreaking, but if like me, you fare well by looking at real world examples, here are my snippets:

Personal Card

A while back I implemented RSVPs on my site, with help from Jamie's blog post. For that, I created an h-card that I hid from the page. I'm keeping that same setup for now. It looks like this:

{% raw %}
<section class="p-author h-card" style="display: none">
  <a href="https://carol.gg" class="u-url">
    <img src="https://carol.gg/avatar.jpeg" alt="my face" class="u-photo" />
    <span class="p-name">Carolina Gilabert</span>
  </a>
  <p>
    You can say hi at
    <a href="mailto:hello@carol.gg" class="u-email">hello@carol.gg</a>
  </p>
</section>
{% endraw %}

In future, I'd like to make a feature of the h-card on my homepage, kinda like Jamie has done at the top of his site or how Ana has on her site's footer.

Feeds

I have a couple of feeds around my site: the latest posts section on my homepage and the blog page. For those, I'm using h-feed:

{% raw %}
<ul class="h-feed">
  {%- for post in postList %}
  <li>
    <article class="h-entry">
      {% include "h-card.html" %}
      <a class="u-url" href="{{ post.url }}">
        <h2 class="p-name">{{ post.data.title }}</h2>
      </a>
      <span>
        <time class="dt-published" datetime="{{ post.data.date | isoDate }}">
          {{ post.data.date | date }}
        </time>
        · {{ post.data.readingTime }}
      </span>
      <p class="p-summary">{{ post.data.subtitle }}</p>
    </article>
  </li>
  {%- endfor %}
</ul>
{% endraw %}

Blog Posts

For the posts, I'm using h-entry and my layout looks like this:

{% raw %}
<div class="h-entry">
  <h1 class="p-name">{{ title }}</h1>
  <p class="p-summary"><em>{{ subtitle }}</em></p>
  <span>
    <time class="dt-published" datetime="{{ date | isoDate }}">
      {{ date | date }}
    </time>
    · {{readingTime }}
  </span>
  {% include "h-card.html" %}
  <div class="e-content">{{ content | safe }}</div>
</div>
{% endraw %}

Events

As I mentioned above, events were what I implemented first on this site, way back on the Gatsby days, so I could RSVP to IndieWeb events. This is what that partial looks like:

{% raw %}
<article class="h-entry" id="{{ event.id }}">
  <a class="u-url" href="https://carol.gg/events#{{ event.id }}">
    <span role="img" aria-label="chainlink emoji"> 🔗 </span>
  </a>
  {% include "h-card.html" %}
  <span class="p-rsvp" value="{{ event.value }}"> {{ event.value }} </span>
  <h2>
    <a class="u-in-reply-to" href="{{ event.url }}"> {{ event.name }} </a>
  </h2>
  <time datetime="{{ event.date }}"> {{ event.date }} </time>
</article>
{% endraw %}

What's next?

This is a pretty good starting point for layering more IndieWeb functionality onto my site. I'll probably do some basic styling next, and then re-implement IndieAuth.

It might happen next week, or next year, but it's coming. See you then! 😄

Edits:

added a missing p-name class on the title tag in the feeds code sample
changed the p-description class in the post code sample to a p-summary, to align with the feed properties

Rebuilding my site - Part 3: Plugins

Fri, 07 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

This part should be super speedy! There were a couple of plugins I wanted to get added early on, so I'm getting them in now:

RSS

This one was very straightforward, straight from the docs onto the site 😄

In future, as I add more IndieWeb functionality and therefore different types of content, I might split feeds, but for now, a simple one will do 🙌🏼

Code highlighting

This one wasn't necessarily hard, but it had a bit more ✨ spice ✨ to it 😄

Again, I used the 11ty plugin listed on their docs with all the default settings, so hooking it up was a breeze!

For the theme, I decided to go for a PrismJS adaptation of Night Owl, by Sarah Drasner ✨ It wasn't CDN hosted, so I pulled the file and included it in my site.

This is my first CSS file, so I ended up adding a hatch into my base page layout that makes it really easy for me to include CSS and JS files only on the pages that need them. I got it from Evan over at the Piccalilli Discord 🙌🏼

Here's the code I added to the base layout:

{% for script in extraScripts %}
    <script src="{{ script | url }}></script>
{% endfor %}

{% for stylesheet in extraStyles %}
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ stylesheet | url }}" />
{% endfor %}

Then I added this to the blog post layout:

extraStyles:
  - /styles/code.css

And done! Said it was gonna be quick 💨

Rebuilding my site - Part 5: Font Tweaks, SVG & Colour

Sat, 23 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import curtain from "@images/posts/site-rebuild-svg-css/curtain.jpeg";

It'd been a little while since I made any progress on my site 🙇🏼‍♀️

I think aiming to document everything has really been slowing me down, so I might cut this series short in future.

For now though, let's get into it:

Font adjustments 🔡

As soon as I finished the last post, I immediate started hating the header font 😅

So I set out to find a new one!

I browsed all my favourite font sites, and even found a new one: Beasts of England has some really great fonts, but unfortunately they're not licensed for web use.

I settled on Briston in the end, cause it had some smooth curls ➰

I also realised my font sizes weren't great. So I reached for Utopia, a fluid typography system recommended by Andy Bell on his Eleventy course. I know nothing about typography scales, so it was super handy to have something that looks good out of the box ✨

Utopia was super easy to use, I’m happy to report. You choose one of their scales and get some CSS out, simple as that! Here’s what I ended up going for:

:root {
  --step--2: clamp(0.91rem, 0.89rem + 0.1vw, 0.96rem);
  --step--1: clamp(1.09rem, 1.05rem + 0.21vw, 1.2rem);
  --step-0: clamp(1.31rem, 1.24rem + 0.37vw, 1.5rem);
  --step-1: clamp(1.58rem, 1.46rem + 0.59vw, 1.88rem);
  --step-2: clamp(1.89rem, 1.71rem + 0.89vw, 2.34rem);
  --step-3: clamp(2.27rem, 2.01rem + 1.29vw, 2.93rem);
  --step-4: clamp(2.72rem, 2.36rem + 1.83vw, 3.66rem);
  --step-5: clamp(3.27rem, 2.75rem + 2.56vw, 4.58rem);
}

Colour 🎨

Ok, let's get this out of the way, I suck at design 😅

But I did want my website to be colourful, and I’m in a really big pastel phase, so you can see where this is going 😄

A few months ago I found some fabric that went well with the pastel decor in my office, so I made it into some curtains:

I really loved the pattern so I decided to try and recreate it in SVG! It took me a while cause I suck at Illustrator, and because I spent some time trying to make it a generative pattern, but I got there in the end 🙌🏼

While I didn’t succeed in making this pattern generative — mostly because I wasn’t sure how to cram the shapes very close to each other — I did have a great time playing with generative SVG 🥳

If you wanna give it a try, I highly recommend George Francis’ Generative SVG Starter Kit. It’s a great tutorial to get started and the Codepens are really helpful for you to experiment with ☺️

CSS 💅🏼

Once I had the pattern in, I did some light CSS-ing, mainly to spice up the header bar and navigation, and the blog post links.

I kept it light for now, but I’m excited to experiment with some animation in the near future 💫

And that’s it for now, folks! See you next time 💛

You got this! 2019

Sun, 10 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

import { Image } from "astro:assets"; import joFrank from "@images/posts/you-got-this-2019/jo_frank.jpg"; import paulaMuldoon from "@images/posts/you-got-this-2019/paula_muldoon.jpg"; import taylorMorrison from "@images/posts/you-got-this-2019/taylor_morrison.jpg"; import samMorgan from "@images/posts/you-got-this-2019/sam_morgan.jpg"; import transcription from "@images/posts/you-got-this-2019/transcription.jpg";

This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for way too long. I’ve been feeling guilty about not finishing it for a while now, but I should be focussing on the fact that I had a brilliant few weeks since this conference, where I did a lot of chilling and non techie things, which I also love 💛

I found out about You Got This! conference on twitter, by accident, only a few weeks before it was held. As soon as I read the premise, I was sold.

The early stages of any career can be hard, but it feels like getting started in the tech industry can be particularly challenging. The field stretches infinitely in all directions, and it’s very easy to get lost in the amount of things to learn.

This conference did such a good job on focussing on putting folks in the right mindset to thrive, regardless of their role, within this industry.

Talks

The talks were all very good and I learnt a lot throughout the day. I was quite tired and under slept that day, so unfortunately I didn’t socialise as much as I would have liked. Instead, I focussed on taking it all in.

I’ll try and briefly summarise them:

Perfectionism, Impostor Syndrome and Anxiety - Understanding your fears and learning to be kind to yourself

They keynote was brilliantly delivered by Jo Frank. The topics she covered could not have been better, especially considering the audience.

She talked about the seemingly ubiquitous issue of impostor syndrome, and the best strategies for dealing with it. She also touched upon perfectionism, and how destructive it can be to our personal and professional lives; after all, perfect is the enemy of good.

I particularly not-enjoyed realising I have a certain level of anxiety going on. While I’m not consciously stressed about anything in particular, I do struggle to sleep and grind my teeth at night 😬

We all tend to be pretty hard on ourselves, so one of Jo’s quotes really resonated with me:

Would you talk to a friend like you talk to yourself?

You know nothing… or do you?

Sascha Wolf followed up with a great session on knowledge sharing. It was really empowering, as he encouraged us all to document our journeys through tech, however we liked: blog posts, talks, mentoring, or providing support online.

He stressed the fact that we’re not a walking tech stack, and that we shouldn’t be code ninjas, or rockstar devs, we should be wholesome 💛

Where did all my money go?

Next up we had Paula Muldoon, who started by serenading us with the violin. It was absolutely breathtaking!

Her talk was on money management, and should be required viewing for folks entering the industry. She gave lots of great advice like understanding your relationship with money, budgeting, and looking out for free money 🤑

Junior.next()

Tara Ojo gave us lots of great tools to stretch ourselves into the next level. Self-promotion is hard, especially at the beginning of our careers, when we feel we learnt about 1% of what’s out there.

She went over her strategies for keeping track of her accomplishments. For instance, she has a trello board that she uses to track her personal and professional goals. It’s an excellent idea, as it’s good solace for when we’re feeling a bit down, but it’s also great ammunition for the time performance reviews come around.

I thoroughly recommend giving her talk a watch, it was full of gems 💎

Self-care: Beyond the hashtags

Taylor Morrison told us a bit about self care, and why it’s important. She covered the rituals that worked for her, and encouraged folks to find what works for them. Hers was this brilliant quote:

Self care is listening to your body and responding in the most loving way possible.

Morality and Ethics - Caring is Everything

Sam Warner’s session was focussed on ethical tech. He defined it as causing no negative social impact, and striving to cause social good.

He told us 79.6% of developers believe they have an obligation consider the ethics of their code. Those are good numbers, but personally I don’t feel we’re all as encumbered by this as we perhaps should be.

To that end, Sam shared good resources on learning more about this, chiefly among those the Ethical OS Toolkit. He also discussed ethical debt, the importance of accessibility and diversity in teams, and how caring is everything 💛

Understanding and Cultivating Independence

Violet Peña talked about independence. More specifically, how to get support from you peers without relying on them for your every move. It was a really good perspective, as it put the onus on the person seeking help, which in turn makes the support more concise and helpful.

It means that the person learning has more agency over their tasks, and can get help that enables them, rather than asking for someone else to just do the work on their behalf.

She also gave really good pointers on how to ask for help:

Give context
Ask a specific question
Show your progress
Say thanks!

The transformative power of junior developers

The closing keynote was given by Sam Morgan. He gave a really inspiring talk on the power of junior developers. He remarked on the value brought to the table by fresh perspectives and the questioning mindset of folks early in their career. He also gave a lot of really valuable advice ranging from requesting feedback, how to best approach self learning and assess yourself.

I’m not going to attempt to summarise it, as I wouldn’t do it justice, definitely give it a watch yourself 🙂

Wrap up

I really enjoyed the fact that this conference had an MC. Scary Boots was really funny, and they did a fantastic job of keeping the audience engaged throughout the day. They also had the best lab coat dyeing tips 🙂

There was a lot of care put into making the event accessible and inclusive. All of the talks were transcribed, which led to this hilarious exchange:

The highlights page for the event has the video recording, transcript and sketch note for each talk. I’d highly recommend checking that out.

I absolutely loved it, and I’m looking forward to next year’s edition 🙂

📸 Photographs by Paul Clarke, with a CC-BY-SA license.