Last weekend my husband and I started to watch Ted Lasso and as soon as the character Ted sets up their new home in Richmond, it reminded me of one of my worst job interviews because I’m pretty sure I cried in front of Ted’s local.

Let’s start from their (the interviewers) perspective. Here is what happened: this nice woman got through the first conversations and seemed okay enough to be sent a coding exercise to do at home. She sent back her exercise which wasn’t finished so they decided to have an in-person interview to go through it. A date and a time were suggested but never confirmed however she turned up anyway and then froze and couldn’t finish the coding exercise.

This is deeply embarrassing and I am still mortified that this will forever be the reflection of me in their eyes.

Now here’s what happened from my perspective: I was really happy at my job at the time until a snowball of events unrelated to me or the team I was in happened. Then a new manager was hired. This manager had control issues and quickly started to question all the team. This included doubting that people were absent for known medical issues (which wasn’t an issue before) to banning casual work from home without a justification that they deemed acceptable. Our team environment was severely impacted and people started to quit and the ones that remained were miserable. But the moment that I knew that I needed to leave was when he jokingly asked me in front of my teammates if I was thinking of getting pregnant while noting that it would be inconvenient for our future product release.

Needless to say, I was in a rush to get a new job. I couldn’t sleep and I started to completely forget about plans I made outside work hours. With everyone else quitting or some taking time off, I found myself alone managing contractors in a strange work environment where you could cut the tension with a knife. By the time this prospect company sent me the code challenge, my mental health had severely declined. I was also following people’s advice: do not tell the real reasons you’re leaving your job. The coding challenge was timed for two hours and I don’t actually remember it. I don’t remember doing it. I was crying while trying to do it. By the time the two hours were hit, I gave up. So I sent what I had done (which wasn’t enough at all), apologised and moved on.

A few days later they got back to me and suggested a day and time. Unfortunately, their office was in Richmond, which is on the other end of London. This meant that either I had to leave work early and risk getting transportation issues getting there because of rush hour or I could work from home (at the time I was living in Fulham) and I could work all day and leave after work and only take half an hour to get there. My heart was racing because it meant I had to ask this manager permission for either of these options. I replied to the email saying that it worked for me and I put in a request with my manager to leave work a little bit earlier. I was questioned a lot about it and it was incredibly stressful since a white lie was involved.

It’s the day of it and I prepare to make my way to Richmond. As I am leaving, I text my now husband to let him know and he says “oh, you didn’t tell me they had confirmed it”. My heart sank. I opened my email app. They never confirmed it. I never got a reply to that email. While in the tube, I went through all the scenarios in my head. I overthought everything and I was deeply ashamed. I tried to tell myself “maybe all will be okay and I am overthinking this”. Until I got there and they weren’t expecting me.

I wanted to hide forever. I thought “oh my god - these people have my full name and my Twitter handle… they now know how much I suck”. They were incredibly polite and welcomed me in. I’m sure I ruined their evening plans and I apologised. In the back of my head, I had another running task: “what other excuse can I come up with to tell my manager if this gets postponed?”. I held my tears and we sat in the room. We talked about how my exercise wasn’t finished and I said: “well.. That’s what I did in two hours”. What they didn’t know is that that’s what I did in two hours while having a breakdown. One of them mentioned how it is interesting because most people would lie about it. I tried to convince myself that was one small point in my favour. He then suggested “how about we finish it now together?” and I agreed. Except that I didn’t. I was bottling up all the tears and shame of my blunder, the build-up inside my head of even imagining having to ask my then manager to be excused and how I was mentally and emotionally drained from my current job. I don’t remember what happened next. I don’t remember what I told them. I just know we wrapped up and they left with the idea that I was really bad at coding.

I left their office and walked towards the park that is shown in the Ted Lasso series and I cried a lot. In the next few days, they followed up via email obviously explaining that I wasn’t on their top list but there was nothing but kindness from their end.

This interview still haunts me. I struggle a lot when I fail at something, especially when I fail “in public”. The idea of someone knowing that I didn't do something well breaks me but this was one of the very times in my life that I immediately forgave myself and treated myself with kindness.

Either way, I don't do well in interviews. The last time I went on another job hunt, I also failed at a few of them. I particularly dislike doing any code in front of others as so rarely I build projects/exercises from scratch. And guess what? So far I’ve always been employed.

If there’s any lesson from this story, I’d say: don’t start job hunting when it’s officially really bad. Trust your instinct and begin leaving before you get desperate. Although I don’t regret the path I ended up taking because I’m pretty happy now, I regret that I sacrificed my mental health at the time and now have bad memories because I left it too late to leave a job that was making me miserable.

In the television show Masterchef there was an episode where the judges did a test on what they call “basic skills”. One of the judges often says that in order to be a “true chef”, you must know how to quickly and finely cut onions. It was really intense and they were looking for near perfection! I don’t know the industry well but I had a quick look on Youtube and cutting onions produced a lot of results.

So my immediate instinct, without thinking it through, was laughing and thinking: “hehe would they yell at me if I turned up with my onion chopper? Why does it matter how fast and how you chop your onions if the end result tastes good anyway?”.

I got an onion chopper because I don’t like how my hands smell after cutting onions, I don’t like how it makes my eyes tear up, I’m not very fast at cutting onions manually and I don’t have lots of space in the kitchen to set up multiple cutting boards.

This was really bothering me and I am stubborn so I wanted to win this fake argument really badly so I looked up why the way one cuts onions is important: as it turns out, the shape and even the surface area affect the end flavour. I thought the whole “chop chop chop” was about performance in the kitchen. Cut quickly to serve quickly! I was wrong.

It annoyed me, even more, when I realised how this applies to my industry: web development.

My onion chopper is great! Though, if I am being honest, it does affect the texture and flavour a little bit in the end. The thing here is that I prioritised how my hands would smell because the end flavour wasn’t really bothering me. And if we think about web development, I suppose that many tools that save us time… might output something a little bit different in the end regardless if it looks the same.

Back to onions! I can see why there was a dedicated test for it on this show (maybe I could dismiss the “quick” bit as part of the assignment, but I won’t get into that now). In real life, there will be people, like myself, who don’t know enough about the craft and won’t know why such tests exist and just buy an onion chopper.

You see where I am getting here? Anyway, analogies aside, my point is: front end interviews should really test basic skills like HTML, CSS and accessibility as it truly affects the outcome of a website. This also made me realise that the only time I’ve ever been asked in detail about HTML, CSS and accessibility in a job interview was when I was interviewing for a junior developer role. Since then, most of my interviews and job ads I’ve seen, completely gloss over basic skills and focus on tools/frameworks. And if we don’t know the basics, how can we know what is missing in the tools we use?

This post has a content note of miscarriage. Visit the link directly if you're okay with reading it.

The one year anniversary of the "never-ending" March has just passed. One year ago, my co-organisers and I were in limbo on whether the events we were running would happen in person or not. That week I was helping to run a London CSS and an IndieWebCamp. Both events were moved to fully online at the last minute.

I always feel anxious when running events, especially when it was London CSS. The IndieWebCamp crowd is smaller and more familiar to me so I always felt more comfortable - which is why I took on two big events on the same week.

As both events happened before official lockdowns, we didn't know more than what the official authorities were saying. I remember our exchanges with the venues, writing up and drafting guidances as best as we knew and trying to update our attendees. We didn't know if the venues would pull last minute. Even if the events went ahead, we were concerned and terrified that someone could get ill from attending. Since I was running two events, I was having quick lessons and sharing as much information as possible.

For both events, at that point, we all knew we had to be safe than sorry. Sending the emails to move to online-only was, to me, really bittersweet, but also gut-wrenching as we knew that some people had made travel arrangements to come to London.

While IndieWebCamps usually have an online stream by default, that wasn't the case with London CSS - yet. Kevin did a lot of work, just a few days before the event, to set-up everything so that our online-only event would go through. For IndieWebCamp, I bought a second-hand camera lens worth £600 for £79! I was over the moon with that find! Never got to use it...

Both events went really well. It was a brand new flashy thing! We were all excited! Little did we know that it would definitely last more than two weeks.

Calum and I also moved Homebrew Website Club to online-only. At some point, we did it weekly! I look back and I can't believe we had that much energy!

There are lessons to be learned though. As I gave some nerve-wracking intros in London CSS, I tried to give emphasis on how hard it is to be welcoming online. When we all meet online, there's a good chance we're meeting with people we already know and it is really hard to include people who are just joining from behind a screen. I tried to explain, maybe with an odd choice of words, that in community events, we should leave private jokes behind to welcome everyone. I was somewhat speaking from experience. It is already hard enough in person to get courage and ask to join a group in the social bit of a conference/meet-up, let alone online where everyone is typing faster than you or you're just too afraid to interrupt a video call to say "hello".

While hosting the Homebrew Website Club, I've been trying different ways to prompt someone new who joined our video call. Some people prefer to watch and don't say much. Others will present themselves. Others would prefer if the host prompts them for an introduction. We're all trying our best.

During this last year. there were lots of lessons on moderation. Lessons on how to use tools to apply the code of conduct online instead of in-person. But also, lots of opportunities to connect with people who wouldn't be able to join in-person. Not only people from other countries or cities but also parents or caregivers. There's still work to be done here: many parents of little ones, still need to work around dinner and bedtimes. Maybe we can push further and explore other timings for events that are not immediately after working hours.

Since March, I attended and bought a few tickets to other conferences. However, I didn't necessarily attend all of them. Knowing that the videos are there to re-watch anytime I want, mean that I have postponed that task. I've been drained and exhausted from being online, at home, all the time. I wonder if this is a trend among organisers.

As of this year, knowing that London CSS is in excellent hands, I decided to leave the organisation team and I don't personally plan on organising another IndieWebCamp. I may be biased, but I really recommend those events. I'm still around for Homebrew Website Club every two weeks (unless cancelled).

And while we don't meet in person, if you're an event organiser, spend some time and learn how you can make your future events safer.

Stay safe friends!

The thing about loss is that it just doesn't seem to end. It gets easier though. One day you wake you and you're feeling fine but one insignificant action somehow opens the gates for the sadness to creep in. And then that's it. The floodgates open and the tears come out.

If I thought the last months of 2020 were somewhat hard, January really proved me wrong. I do regret that I neglected my monthly bookmarks post. I've been wondering if I should start sharing the bookmarks individually like some folks do so that it doesn't pile up. I will think about it.

I'm sure I accidentally missed some bookmarks - a consequence of delaying sharing them. I hope that I can catch up on my missed bookmarks in my next post. It is also likely that I accidentally missed some posts from friends. Being online hasn't been a priority for me.

Take care friends.

Bookmarks related to tech or web development

• 11ty Rocks by Stephanie Eckles.
• Accessibility of Content Management Systems – what’s stopping us? by Marie Manandise.
• Inside the fight to rid the world of abusive stalkerware by Helena Pozniak.
• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names – With Examples by Tony Rogers.
• GIFS and prefers-reduced-motion by Chris Coyier.
• Parsing Markdown into an Automated Table of Contents by Lisi Linhart.
• Accessibility Acceptance Criteria.
• 7 Tips for Career Advancement and Personal Fulfillment by Kim Maida.
• Why it’s easy to hate Facebook but hard to leave by Heather Kelly.
• Time to Cache Up by Chris Burnell.
• Plaiceholder by Joe Bell.
• A Dynamically-Sized Sticky Sidebar with HTML and CSS by Ryan Mulligan.
• The impact of online gender-based violence on women in public life by Web Foundation.
• Weaving Web Accessibility With Usability by Uri Paz.
• So you wanna create an eco-friendly website by Eric Bailey.
• Boomarks #3 by Steve Messer.
• Stop Giving af and Start Writing More by Joel Hooks.
• The Rules of Margin Collapse by Joshua Comeau.
• Web Alamanc - Accessibility by Olu Niyi-Awosusi and Alex Tait.
• Facebook Derangement Syndrome by Heather Burns.
• Accessible icon links by Kitty Giraudel.
• SVG Path Editor
• The coming war on the hidden algorithms that trap people in poverty by Karen Hao.
• How To Use The Spotify API and Netlify Functions To Build A “Now Playing” Widget by Henry Desroches.
• Alt vs Figcaption by Elaina Natario.
• Not Much by Ire Aderinokun.
• Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine by Adrienne LaFrance.
• Conditional JavaScript, only download when it is appropriate to do so by Umar.
• Using Airtable as a database to store realtime messages by Srushtika Neelakantam.
• Webbish by Remy Sharp.
• Interface localisation: adapting text fields for RTL languages by Mitya Kuznetsov.
• Search Engine Optimization Checklist (PDF) by Frederick O’Brien.
• Small b blogging by Tom Critchlow.
• This used to be our playground by Simon Collison.
• Designing with Empathy: Don’t by Doc Parsons.
• Content-visibility and Accessible Semantics by Marcy Sutton.
• Are your anchor links accessible? by Amber Wilson.
• Algorithms Behaving Badly: 2020 Edition by The Markup Staff.
• He spent 10 days in jail after facial recognition software led to the arrest of the wrong man, lawsuit says by Anthony G. Attrino.
• Inside the Strange World of YouTube Thumbnails by Louise Matsakis.
• Eleventy-Parcel by Michelle Barker.
• Eleventy Plugin Template by Stephanie Eckles.
• Give your Eleventy Site Superpowers with Environment Variables by Andy Bell.
• Thoughts on screen readers and image recognition by Léonie Watson.
• How To Make Seamless Patterns by Yuan Chuan.
• How I turned my Goodreads data into a self-hosted website with Eleventy by Hidde de Vries.
• Architecting data in Eleventy by Sia Karamalegos.
• The Art of Building Real-life Components by Ahmad Shadeed.
• Distributed toxicity and the IndieWeb by Fluffy.
• Simple Social Image Resizer by Chris Johnson.
• Front-End Performance Checklist 2021 by Vitaly Friedman.
• The Surprising Things That CSS Can Animate by Will Boyd.
• Grids Part 2: Semantics by Sarah Higley.
• SVG Crop by Steve Dennett.
• An AI saw a cropped photo of AOC. It autocompleted her wearing a bikini by Karen Hao.
• Why Generation X will save the web by Heather Burns
• Authentication by Jeremy Keith.
• Uniwidth typefaces for interface design by Lisa Staudinger.
• Create a generative landing page & WebGL powered background animation by George Francis.
• Command Line Basics: A Short & Sweet Introduction by Tae'lur Alexis.
• Exposing.ai by by Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace.
• How to Add Instagram Timeline To a NextJS Site by Monica Powell.
• Accessibility auditing and ego by Eric W Bailey.
• Finding an Element’s Nearest Relative Positioned Ancestor by Michelle Barker.
• Implement a Skip Link for Navigation-Heavy Sites by Ben Myers.
• Link Targets and 3.2.5 by Adrian Roselli.
• Improve the readability of the content on your website by Andy Bell.
• Create Responsive Image Effects With CSS Gradients And aspect-ratio by Stephanie Eckles.

Other bookmarks

• CoronaShock and Patriarchy.
• 80 percent of those who died of Covid-19 in Texas county jails were never convicted of a crime by Jerusalem Demsas.
• The Uncanny Valley of Culture by Damon.
• Hancock's former neighbour won Covid test kit work after WhatsApp message by Felicity Lawrence.
• The time has come to take the self out of self-care by Tanmoy Goswami.
• Reading list picks of 2020 by Steve Messer.
• The Real Reason Local Newspapers are Dying by Lyz.
• A beginner's guide to being an ally to trans people by Ted Ravago.
• The family with no fingerprints by Mir Sabbir.
• Trail cam footage of opossum and a skunk.
• Figuring Out What You Need To Flourish In The New Year by Nina Dearden.
• Compassionate action over empathy by Tatiana Mac.
• Lockdown ramifications.
• Why You Need to Stop Using These Words and Phrases by Rakshitha Arni Ravishankar.
• In Germany, your ex must destroy nude photos on request by Ben Knight.
• I Knew the Vessel Was Going to Have a Suicide Problem Years Before It Was Built by Audrey Wachs.
• Us vs them: the sinister techniques of ‘Othering’ – and how to avoid them by John A Powell.
• Twitter’s Most Infamous Stan Account Speaks by Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz.
• Far-right extremists take over UK land sales Facebook page by Alex Hern.
• In defense of disorder: on career, creativity, and professionalism by Chiara Amisola.
• How I recovered from imposter syndrome after changing career to software engineering by Frances Maxwell.
• Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You by Ken Armstrong, Justin Elliott and Ariana Tobin.
• Hoarding Is All Too Familiar To Second Generation Brits. Here's Why by Deborah Yewande Bankole.
• Content moderation won’t stop the spread of disinformation. Here’s why by Jillian C. York
• The Lies Hollywood Tells About Little Girls by Mara Wilson.