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So, some drama happened recently that resulted in my personal info being sent out to an undesired context. Oh, don't worry. It wasn't anything targeted, or sinister. An honest fuck up by those who didn't mean ill. But it nonetheless threw me for a loop.

The info itself wasn't dreadful or violating. It was something that many of you already know. But having it blasted into a new area made me realise how much awful power that info has over me. The resulting fear and anxiety from the leak made me realise how much of a horrible semi-closeted life I lead on this matter.

It made me

UPDATE: just to clarify that any implication that Dan Abramov was having a Twitter break because of a tantrum was unwarranted. It seems he was taking a self-care break after dealing with all the awfulness of Twitter. We feel you, Dan.

So, #ReactGate has become a thing. What's been fomenting for a while blew up last week, with two prominent White Men In Tech having little tantrum Twitter breaks, and a wonderful woman of colour working as a dev/designer feeling she is no longer welcome in our industry and planni

Having spent a week DIYing, I find myself thinking of devs who claim "I can do anyone else's job, but no one else can do mine". Mate, as the daughter of a Trade family, I implore you go work on a construction site for a month. I guarantee that it will fucking BREAK you. You couldn't handle it. I say this as someone who grew up on building sites, who drove diggers, who learned to saw before she could write.

"But code is hard, and manual stuff is easy". Haha, NO. Code is currently WELL PAID, which is why you think it's hard. That's a very different thing from one ac

Dark matter permeates the universe. In fact it does more than permeate. It is the universe. 85% percent of everything that exists is actually dark matter. We can't detect it, we can't see it. But it's there. In fact, the universe that we actually perceive, what you and I are made of, is the so-called Baryonic matter, a mere percentage froth on top of the deep dark universe that we are scarcely aware of.

I was perhaps thinking about dark matter when I read this tweet from Andy Bell.

A11y Club is super fab, and I always love coming here. Here's some live notes.

Manuel Matuzović - Accessible React

8 tips for React apps.

1. Create a sound document outline

• Screen readers navigate by headings. Skip direct to heading.
• React heading component. Automatically sets heading levels.
• use tools to determine outline. Toberly?
• also benefits SEO

2. Hide content correctly

• You can hide headings visually.
• Don't use display: none as it hides things from a11y tree
• But

Quite possibly the most inspirational event that I've ever been to. I will 100% recommend Beyond Tellerrand Düsseldorf to anyone who cares about design and humanity and tech.

I'm trying to record my notes here for those talks I attend.

Let’s say I wanna bring back webrings. How should I build it?

First communities are gonna be #a11y, #PerfMatters, #CSSGrid, and #BoyBandWebmasters.

(ICYMI: Webrings were c

While I was away traveling last week I received slightly befuddling few tweets:

"Really glad that they made a show about @sonniesedge's username".

“@sonniesedge omg have you seen this thing with you in???”

Etc.

It wasn't until my return to Berlin that I was able to search for what they’re talking about and found a new Netflix series called Love, De

I spent most of this week travelling in the UK for work. As always, a visit to the motherland was simultaneously comforting and intensely weird. I always forget that London is enormous, and it can be utterly overwhelming after being in Berlin. I also forget that Londoners are decadent and spend-happy in a way that I would find disgusting in Berlin. I do not blame Londoners for this, but instead blame the prevalence of contactless payment cards, and the delicious food and drink everywhere.

My flight from Berlin to London was delayed and I was forced to spend seven unnecessary hours in

I've heard the phrase "week note" bandied about by some people. I love the idea: each week you sit down and you force yourself to write, summarising the previous seven days, and anything interesting you've found out during them. As someone who fancies herself as a writer (in the full Victorian sense), but rarely types anything more creative than a policy document, this f

I've always known that my family was Irish descended in some way. We're too prone to doughiness and large multi-generational households to be anything but that. What with Brexit looking to be an absolute shitshow and me wanting to, you know, make the effor to STILL BE EUROPEAN, I thought it'd be worth looking into my family history in detail.

Someone recommended ancestry.co.uk to me for this. I was skeptical at first, but my god it is actually incredibly useful. If you're interested in this kind of thing then pay the money for it - it's worth it. You can hook i

I have officially (lol, officially) migrated my blog from a Metalsmith static site to Craft CMS, hosted by Fortrabbit.

I really enjoyed working with Metalsmith and Netlify. It was fantastic to have such a small tiny core app that you could expand out as you needed to. Netlify made building and deployment an absolute breeze.

But it was a constant toil to get anything working in Metalsmith - it assumes you're going to write everything