I want to read all the newsletters I subscribed to.

I want to read everything in the ten web dev community slacks I joined.

I want to read everything on the seven Discord servers I am on.

I want to read every blog post in the hundreds of feeds I follow.

I want to read every toot of the people I follow on Mastodon.

I want to find more people to follow.

I want to ensure I didn’t miss your cool and happy announcement.

I want to attend your conference/meet-up virtually.

I want to watch your livestream and support you.

I want to view the videos in the archive of this conference that I missed in person.

I want to listen to that audiobook that I’ve had for months.

I want to listen to your podcast.

But I need to work and live life outside of consumption and entertainment.

And then worry that I am behind.

Then, I worry that I must apply the latest knowledge and wisdom, but I probably have missed it.

And worry that pals could think that I ignored them.

I want it all, but it is impossible.

I cringe whenever I look back to the days I was the interviewer for roles at the companies I worked for. When I was just starting out my career at a company with hundreds of developers, I remember thinking and feeling that being the developer picked to interview someone meant that “you made it.” This is a true testament to how deeply insecure I was.

I am not a good interviewee either, as I shared before, but the good thing is that I never felt like I needed to use my rare experiences as the interviewer as a power trip. I was just happy to be there! To be included! I “made it”! They consider me “smart enough” now. But I really did suck at it.

It’s been over seven years since I last interviewed someone, and I remember the dread of looking up “front-end interview questions” beforehand. I was looking at them and remembering how much I hated them all. I remember how I hated those questions when they were asked me when I was the one looking for a job. Yet, I wasn’t confident enough to create a whole new process. I only had similar experiences. At most, I was just really keen not to have someone write code in front of me because I knew that was complete torture. Just after the last time I interviewed someone, one particular memory was, “I’m not smart enough to be doing this”. “Who the fuck do I think I am?”.

Obviously, I wasn’t just spitting random front-end questions out. I remember trying to ask how a task could be tackled on a high level, but honestly, I don’t remember much.

So many people have shared how the interview process is broken and how it sucks. I completely agree. I have no brilliant ideas of what to share to improve it.

I know that like myself many years ago, most of us are probably repeating what others have done to us, and that means we all suck at being interviewers.

I'm over the moon to share that I am one of the speakers for this year's WebExpo! It will be my first time attending WebExpo. I was impressed with how keen the organising team was on the community and the attendees' experience.

It will also be my first time at a multi-track conference, and the speakers list is so good! I know it will be difficult for me to choose what to attend.

Since I gave this talk at the State of the Browser and FFConf, I've been working on new experiments and sharing the things I've learned.

Tickets are still available; you should get them before they increase the price!

See you there?

The other weekend, I attended IndieWebCamp Brighton and had a wonderful time! I've been working from home for four years, and most of my friends have left London, so events like this excite me to see internet buddies! Like Jeremy said, I, too, feel like it was my RSS feed coming to life!

Notes from the event were masterfully collected in IndieWeb's wiki, but here are my write-up and thoughts on the sessions I attended. It was incredibly hard to pick which sessions to attend, as all the topics were interesting.

Day one - Unconference

Energy Efficiency

I started to follow this topic a few years ago when the carbon calculator came out. It impacted how I added certain things to my website, which also positively impacted its performance. In 2022, at FFConf, I saw a talk by Natalia about a greener web that mentioned how streams are a source of pollution. Frankly, it had never occurred to me and has been bothering me a lot. It was one of the decisions that led me to delete my Spotify account and made me think about what other waste I was making.

As captured in the notes, one of my comments was about how many automated processes are running in the background of running our personal websites. I could generate the HTML pages of my website locally and manually upload the files to my hosting. Instead, I have it on GitHub, which gets my commits and then triggers a build on Netlify and, later, a deployment. For all this cool tech to work, there are servers, energy consumption, data stored, etc.

On the other hand, I promote the idea that your personal website should be a place where you experiment and learn. In the grand scheme of things, my personal website does not impact the environment, the same way that deleting my Spotify account hasn't improved the world, but it makes part of me give up taking space on the web.

I've wondered in the past if I could create some videos or even stream, but not only do I have privacy concerns, but I also know I would feel guilty if I didn't feel as sustainable as I could be.

I really enjoyed the session, but I have a hang-up on feeling like I am doing too much digital waste instead of rightfully blaming the billionaires and their stupid private jets.

Site death

I love how I just carried on choosing slightly less happy themes. I loved that this topic was suggested, especially since I recently dealt with my dad's digital life.

My mind was in two places during this session: how would I build a dead man's switch on my personal website, and what do I even want to happen if I suddenly die.

I still don't have an answer. My tech content will undoubtedly be useless, and my personal notes will only prove that I existed and had thoughts and opinions.

Do I want a banner at the top explaining that I died? Maybe I should renew my domains for ten more years? Should I print my personal posts? I am still trying to figure out what I want.

I keep thinking about the 80L plastic box at my mum's house with my dad's belongings that we picked that we wanted to keep. I wonder what he would have picked.

It also made me realise that because of digital cameras, only a few photos of me were printed from the age of 11 or 12 until my wedding. If I suddenly died, I don't think anyone would know about my teenage years. I wondered what my daughter would like to have from me. It is a digital dark age. Before worrying about my website, I should worry about my backups and create physical copies. See? More waste.

Hosting

I attended this session because I was keen to help if anyone had questions. I am trying to remember where I said this before, but deciding where to host your website in 2024 is awful. The search results are full of ads. Someone who wants their personal website to exist will struggle with this. No wonder websites like Squarespace have an extensive consumer base since they solve build and hosting. But their pricing is ridiculous.

I made a note that I would like to create a blog post where I try out and list free hosting services for anyone to host their HTML pages. Hopefully, this would help someone.

NFC

I really enjoyed this session with Terrence! I've seen people sharing cool experiments like having your oyster card on your nails, but I never thought about how it works. I suggested having an NFC tag on my cat and pointing to her website. As soon as I got home, I planned to put the NFC sticker on her AirTag case. And I did it! Except her AirTag is also an NFC, so they clashed when I scanned it with my phone. I will get back to this—there must be a way of having a tiny one glued to her collar at a distance from the Airtag.

But the question was: how would you apply this to the IndieWeb? We thought of the dead man's switch! Maybe an API/smart URL on the other side of the NFC tag that, when run, would update the website so that it knows I am still alive? Maybe an NFC tag that opens a URL that tells your website to deploy a type of webmention (like a check-in). That would be fun!

I noticed that my library books have NFC tags! I can't stop seeing them everywhere I go now!

Personal Website Pain Points

Maggie initially suggested this topic, and I suggested another topic loosely titled "tech debt" on your personal website. I proposed merging the topics into one session to make it easier to organise the unconference, and it worked out well.

Maggie was curious to know people's pain points on their websites because they are working on building a digital garden tool (which sounds incredible).

I shared how I have so many regrets about decisions I made on this website: URLs, asset locations, organisation, very old code that still hasn't been refactored, etc.

It was amusing to realise that the way I organise my blog posts' URLs, which I regret, is how many people wanted to do on their websites.

I've recently made better mental efforts to avoid allowing tech debt to paralyse me and make me feel like my blog codebase has to be perfect.

Day two - Hands-on

My day started by sitting down with Paul and trying out IndieKit. I've been dreaming of creating my micropub endpoint, but lack of time and confidence has stalled me. We got it working! It turns out that having sat down together to try to run it allowed us to spot some bugs and gave Paul a different perspective on how another person could use their tool. I loved it! Now, I need to work on my plug-in to ensure the templates are created for my specific needs. After that, I will be unstoppable!

This took a chunk of the morning, so I needed an achievable task after it. I decided to add a privacy page to my blog. A while back, through my analytics, I saw someone having thoughts and opinions on my analytics usage and the way it was worded made it sound like I used trackers of the invasive kind. It was time to add a page that clarified my analytics usage.

The day was wrapped up with impressive demos from everyone.

Thank you so much, Paul and Mark, for organising it! I had a fantastic time and hope it will become a frequent event.

More people wrote about their day, and you should check it out!

• IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024 by Mark
• Indie webbing by Jeremy
• What I created at IndieWebCamp by Tantek
• Plugging into the IndieWeb by Jon
• IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024 by Murray

This is clearly the result of living in a capitalist society. In recent years, people have felt the pressure to monetise their hobbies, so there’s a constant state of hustle. We all need money to exist in our society.

In the online communities and circles where I try to hang out, there is a slight pressure to “create content”. It is expected to bring you exposure and credibility within the community and job opportunities. Of course, this happens. It’s a big reason why I’ve even had the opportunities I’ve had so far. I created something, and people saw it and wanted to know more about it. It’s excellent, and it feels like a reward!

Now, it pains me when this reaches the concept of a personal website. People often say, “I have no content to put on a personal website”, and 1) that is not true, and 2) it should not be the goal.

The goal of a personal website is to be reachable. I have a simple landing page with information on how to contact me.

You don’t have to be a content creator to have a website.

Dang, I want us to start putting our personal website URLs in our lanyards when we go to conferences instead of social media handles! What is the difference between a personal website that doesn’t have “content” and a social media account where there aren’t many posts anyway? The only thing in common is being reachable.

Just put your name and email, and it’s good to go! That’s content! Maybe one day, expand with a link to LinkedIn or, even better, add a CV in HTML. It doesn’t matter!

Give yourself permission to exist and be seen regardless of whether you have a blog, side projects or “content” - whatever it means.