I was a guest on James's Wonders of Web Weaving podcast and it was such a lovely conversation. We talked about old teenage blogs, how I found the IndieWeb community, why I think now is the best time to be your full weird self online, and I accidentally held myself publicly accountable for a side project.

This was also my first podcast ever, so I was a little bit nervous at the start. Besides my recent MC experience, I don't often do unscripted things, so there's always a small fear in the back of my head. What if I sound weird? Or what if I do some poor sentence construction because I can get quite excited talking? Or, the worst, what if I say a word out loud that so far I've only ever read?

Since then I've recorded another conversation for another podcast (which should go live soon), which admittedly I was far less nervous about and a lot more relaxed, and I have another one lined up. It can only get better from now on!

The other week I was the MC for day 2 of CSS Day conference. It was my first time ever being an MC for a conference! I was so excited and, honestly, very nervous at the start. My hands were shaking a lot, and it's no wonder, as Bruce Lawson had been the MC of the previous day, and that's a tough act to follow. And if I can’t be funny on the spot, I will try to make up for it in other ways.

I ended the day with the following:

Throughout the day, when introducing our wonderful speakers, I've highlighted their work outside their jobs: their passion, their blogs, their writing and their voice. As an IndieWeb person, I can't stress enough how having your personal website, blogs and sharing what you've learned changes your life. But, like Kevin said on his blog post I mentioned earlier, it's getting harder for folks to keep their motivation. Your LLM of choice only outputs things because of the sweat and dedication that people in this room have put in. And yet, I still want to encourage folks not to give up.

In the last two days, we saw amazing and creative talks that are the perfect reminder to let the computer do what the computer is good at. But the things you saw that got your heart racing and pumped with excitement were human-made and human thought. So, when you have a minute in the next couple of days, say thank you to the invaluable people in our community, or even better: go build something and share it far and wide."

Brecht De Ruyte has written a lovely, detailed write-up of the day if you want more technical insight into the talks from the two days.

See you next year... very likely as an attendee!

This article was originally drafted in 2024 but I struggled to finish it then. I was stuck wondering if I was just moaning over the past. Recently, Salma and Jo both shared thoughts that gave me the rage and energy to come back to this. Today is the day I finally have the courage to publish.

I can’t recall how many times I thought of writing something like this. I thought of riding certain waves inspired by other authors but most times the embarrassment got the best of me. During those waves this post could have been titled “When I leave tech”, “I’m still a woman in tech” etc. But today it is called “It's 2026 and women are still asked to teach others to think a little bit and not be a prick”. Temporary title.

Some weeks ago I went to a tech meet-up and one of the talks was about being a woman in tech and I am finally ready to put into words why I sat through it so uncomfortably.

It was a great speaker and everything they said was absolutely true and accurate. But I was annoyed that in 2024 we still have to teach people how to have basic human kindness, empathy, compassion and just not being a fucking prick. I was annoyed that, once again, a woman did that labour.

For every slide that brought an example of discrimination that happens, I recalled something I had either witnessed or experienced. It brought back many bad memories that I’ve tried my best to repress. It covered many examples that an HR training titled “how not to be a prick and avoid getting us sued” would cover but it mostly avoided one particular topic.

So the following isn’t a criticism to the speaker at all, or to anyone who has ever done a talk about the realities of being a woman in tech but, I have to address the elephant in the room:

A big part of the problems women in tech have is co-workers hitting on them. And the problems begin when those co-workers are rejected. And we can’t have a big slide saying “women who reject romantic advances from co-workers face retaliation nearly all the time”.

So I was just sitting there, nodding and agreeing that women are often dismissed, overlooked or ignored at work, especially if they are also caregivers in their personal life, while thinking about all the shitty things I also went through because I was once young and vaguely attractive.

But now that I am much older (I mean invisible), wiser and a lot more able to stand-up for myself (I mean I can afford to lawyer up) I can vaguely share how shitty it was to a woman in tech before it was shitty to be a woman in tech in a post-pandemic AI gobbling powered tech landscape. I could go on in very detail but it would be a really depressing post.

I started working in tech straight out of University and I would have been 21 years old. I was very junior and inexperienced with real-life complex websites. Physically, I carried a baby face for a little while so I actually looked young. I knew I was very junior and I really wanted to keep a job. I grew up poor in Portugal and all my life so far was hearing every day from my parents how we had zero money, hearing about the financial crash and how it left my dad unemployed for a very long time, Troika, and how no one my age could get a job at the time. I really wanted to do well at my first job. This was also seemingly the only place hiring around. I wanted to do well and be liked. I imagine now how some 30+ male co-workers could smell my naivety like a shark in bloody waters.

Once in a while there would be chocolates on my desk, inappropriate unprompted messages sharing how sad they were to go home to their partners, drunk messages, all sorts of accusations, gossip and giggles if I was nice back to anyone. But “it’s best not to rock the boat when you know there’s no other jobs out there” I thought. I had my own hiccups at the time. Like I said, I was quite junior but I was also met with a lot of cruelty and a lot of people thought I didn’t deserve to be there so they treated me as such. The money to employ me wasn’t coming out of their own pockets but they acted like it was. I also had the typical mistreatment for being a woman: if someone asked a question and I answered, they deemed that answer wrong by default, for example. Any compliments or encouragement from men, were met with “he only said that because you’re a woman” comments from other men. I was never going to win so for a long time I kept smiling, being easygoing and surviving.

It’s hard to switch from this mentally when you grew up afraid, unsupported and full of shame. This people-pleasing trait I had stayed with me for many years, even when switching jobs. This was okay enough to keep me afloat but not when it came to rejecting romantic advances. That’s when, of course, eventually, someone takes things badly.

In male dominated fields, especially when there’s lots of them, statistically, the bad apples are there and they make your life a living hell. From suddenly getting poor performance reviews, to punishing everyone who is friendly with you so that you are isolated, to even making odd comments about what you did in your free time which implies a level of stalking and eventually, not allowing you to own features at work so that the poor performance accusations can have legs.

You see, most people think sexual harassment is a creepy guy just putting their hands on your shoulders and try to massage you. That’s what the HR training slides show with the stock pictures right? But for me, it was mostly retaliation.

And when I changed jobs, a new batch of unknown enemies would spawn. There’s nothing like starting a new job and going through onboarding with a male colleague and everything is going great until he asks “so, do you have a boyfriend?” and you know exactly what’s going to happen next. Half of the time, they would immediately stop being nice to me. No more bare minimum human kindness. No more answering my questions without implying I am an idiot. For them, I am not a colleague who will contribute to work. I am an object and if I am not single, I am of no use. And where do you turn after this? After all, they are the x10 developer that knows the whole codebase and they are super valuable and the HR person is also the office admin who claims we are all a happy family.

It’s undeniable (and normal) that people meet their partners at work. That’s how I met my husband. So this isn’t about that. And, as we all know, there is no patriarchy without women. The other type of bullying that surprised me was when co-workers perceived me as a romantic threat. That’s a pickle in any social situation but at work it has devastating consequences too. And when that wasn’t the reason for their bullying, other male centered reasons thrived. I’ve had women talk me down and micromanage every single thing I did disguised as care but it was all down to their bias, hatred, shame and fear. Turns out my strategy of trying to be generally likable was a threat to some. Retaliation soon begins too.

Sometime in 2013, I had the courage to interject in a conversation I was, technically a part of, where I was the only woman in. This was happening while everyone was working on their computers in our little team island. They were, as you do in bro-locker-room-culture, talking about honking their car if they see, what they perceived to be, a fit woman walking on the street. I, twenty-two years old then, said “well, don’t do that. That’s really scary”.

“Why? If I like what I see, I honk”, said the (probably close to his 30s) co-worker.

“Why do you have to do that?” I asked.

“Because. So that they know” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

“Okay, we don’t know if you’re going to stop your car and do something to us” I tried explaining while having my heart broken realising who I was dealing with.

“Okay, well I am not going to do that”

“Okay, and I don't know that!”

“But I am not!”

“For a very similar reason, I try to avoid getting in the lift alone with strange men”

“Really? That’s fucking weird” He laughed.

Almost everyone involved (and deliberately quiet too) in this conversation has had daughters since. I wonder if their views have changed.

And as I wrote this shitty real dialogue, I realised that we still fucking need women in tech talks being forcibly fed in javascript meet-ups because the fucking bare minimum probably doesn’t exist in their heads at all. Maybe we need to talk about the shitty things that they do rather than the things we have to do to stay and survive in the tech industry.

I’ve never had any harassment / basic human kindness HR training at a job. So far, I’ve only seen descriptions of that being retold on the internet as a meme or in a Code of Conduct at tech events that most people scroll past. But tech companies (and their parents) clearly are not teaching “heyyyyy bestie can you please not be a monster / creep / prick?” so of course that labour is going to fall on a woman in her free time at a tech meet-up.

We have to spoon feed bare minimum and many times, they just don’t want to get it. I saw the faces around me during this talk. I saw many of them zoning out and on their phones.

But of course, our advice to women in tech is to lean-in!! Get a mentor!! Put yourself out there!! Work for free!! Be quiet!! Be the glue!!! Smile!! Be agreeable!!

No! Here’s an idea: let’s teach how to fucking gather the evidence of harassment and bullying and use the law to full extent to push HR to do something about the rockstars. Maybe, many years ago, many people would have learned a few lessons if I had the money and support to do so then. Because now I only live with hatred and disgust every time some of those people still, for a fucking wild reason or just lack of self awareness, try to engage with me on social media.

I can’t believe I am finally at a job where nothing bad of the sort has ever happened. So, at least there’s some hope. But, my god, how much I worry now wondering if there’s young women out there stuck in the same financial situation I was in the early 2010s because of AI layoffs and the manosphere and still putting up with this crap.

A couple of weeks ago we took a little break. The first adults-only break since my daughter was born. For that reason, we decided to do something that was quite close to home. I am still was quite nervous about being far away from her and I didn’t want to go abroad because of her seizures. So I figured that we should stay near London and a small train journey away. Ideally, a train journey that wouldn’t be too expensive and that we could go on the day without price difference. Since we’re based in South London, we chose to go to the New Forest.

I had a goal to be as offline as possible. I still posted some photos online and checked messages. But I was mostly offline without doom scrolling. And, it was great!!

We don’t have a car or drive, so we took the train. And to save some money, we split our stays between two places. The first few days in a pub and then ending the week in a spa hotel. Normally pub hotels are cheaper however they get a bit louder in the evening probably from Wednesday until Sunday. So we stayed from Monday until Wednesday in a room above a pub and it was lovely. From Wednesday until Friday, we stayed in a spa hotel. We were so lucky because, as anyone who's been living in the UK knows, up until then, it was basically raining every day. And it rained on the days we booked the spa hotel.

The first stop was Lyndhurst. We took the train to Brokenhurst and from there a short taxi taxi ride. Lovely town. We went to the local museum, which was super cute. I didn’t look up a single thing beforehand - I am the opposite of a type A holiday person. I’ve mentioned before that these days I’m quite interested in textile crafts and it was super interesting to see sections in that visitor centre that included a lot of embroidery and textile art featuring the forest and nature of it.

I spent a lot of time studying this frame because it used so many different styles, fabrics and scraps in different techniques. And it was deeply, deeply satisfying. And I took a lot from it.

We had fantastic meals and short walks on the first day. And of course, we saw many horses. It was tempting but I followed the rules and didn’t touch them. And we mostly settled in the main town to scout pubs.

The following day we rented a bike, and this was my favorite day. We spent basically 6 hours cycling through the north West of the forest. I had so much fun. I caught myself smiling when cycling down hills. I downloaded an app recommended by the bike rental shop and it would point out spots to stop by. So of course, I took a photo with the Portuguese Fireplace Memorial because you can get a girl out of Portugal but you don't get the Portuguese out of her lol.

We stopped for lunch in a little cafe that had a little garden to walk around and probably one of the best cakes I’ve ever had. This one had donkeys instead of horses and so I couldn’t help but take a few photos of them.

But of course, no big bike ride goes without little hiccups. Eventually a puncture happened at the end of the day when we were heading back to return the bikes. We were 2 miles out of the bike rental shop and it was the first time I ever used the 3 words app since installing it years ago! Previously we had been stuck in a bog (because we trusted the app rather than the physical signs in the park 🤦🏻‍♀️) so we couldn’t find the puncture to use the puncture kit. Anyway, two miles wasn’t the worst. It didn’t ruin our mood. During the day I was just cycling super fast, which was so exciting. I never do these things. Predictably, my bum was super sore, and there’s no chance I would be able to cycle the next day.

So day two was a perfect cycling out day, which ended with a wonderful meal, a little walk around the charity shops. Then the following day, we went to Leamington via train for a little seaside view, walk, check the little town and art museum.

I found a crafts charity shop which was immensely exciting. I wanted to spend hours there. I did buy a few things, mostly threads which came out quite cheap.

Middle of the week and it was time to check-in at the spa hotel. Again, surrounded by wonderful walk options with so many horses. I was still quite sore so it was perfect to physically relax, have great meals and spend a lot of time playing UNO, reading books, walking about, and resting. It was great.

I barely checked my phone. I didn’t check the news. I was so happy.

It really is the stupid phone ruining everything isn’t it? The stupid screens of doom and the stupidity of the world isn’t it?

Anyway, I hope to do more things like this soon. One thing I’ve realised last year is that I was so overwhelmed with my house move and renovation, then writing a talk that I forgot to take holidays. And that’s something I don’t want to repeat this year so we’ve been more proactive at booking time off even if it’s just a stay at home and just enjoy those days offline. That’s it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

So I’ve been thinking, when was the last time I’ve experienced some sort of burnout from a community. And I had forgotten that tech was not my only interest, or the only thing I’ve been deeply enthralled with. While I started making websites when I was 13, I wasn’t always stuck on only thinking about web development as a hobby and career.

I used to be quite obsessed with films and filmmaking. I spent a great chunk of my young adulthood watching films and analysing them. I had semesters in university dedicated to it. I even used to organise a film festival! I was really obsessed with films! From watching the latest and obscure films, going to film festivals abroad and participating in shorts competitions. And the worst: even dated a filmmaker! It was a thing I used to love and even envisioned making my own. And at one point, like an ick, my interest in it disappeared instantly.

And I’m reflecting now because I was washing my dishes after having scrolled for a little bit on BlueSky. Stupid AI has mentally ruined me and my peers. It’s like everything has lost meaning. And I was thinking about how I technically also feel that burnout, that tiredness, that sadness, and that has been going on for years now. But to me, it started with the React world. It started when everything was done with a JavaScript framework, ignoring the web platform, the craft of back-end developers and dismissing the skills of front-end developers. And that’s when my burnout and my existential crisis in the web development community started.

Despite admitting online that I had a whole big girl cry over AI and the future of my career (and bills), I was reflecting on why this sadness doesn’t feel very strange to me. And I’ve realised it’s because I’ve been through this before with my previous passion: films. And I was trying to pinpoint the moment. When did this happen?

I have a very vivid memory of how there were photographers and cinematographers that started to get quite upset when DSLR cameras became more affordable to the public. I have this memory of people complaining and saying, “Oh, now everybody can call themselves a photographer. They buy a very expensive camera and they call themselves a photographer!”. And I remember seeing those posts online and feeling sad and rejected, because technically, due to my age, it was literally impossible for me to have started earlier in that industry. So yeah, I landed in a time where certain devices were more affordable to the public to buy. And people who had been there in that industry for so many years were not happy about how things became easier for newcomers. We see this in web development as well. I mean, web development has both sides of the coin: it’s either extremely open in teaching, welcoming and educating and breaking barriers for people to get into the industry, but it also can be extremely gatekeeping, mostly for self-preservation. While this was a bitter memory I quickly brushed it off as this wasn’t it. This wasn’t what made me leave. In fact, me and my colleagues at the time were thinking: “okay, some people are moaning about us not being real photographers because we are having it easier now. Okay. Our work will speak for itself.”.

Then it came to me. The exact moment I disconnected and it was like a black-and-white situation where my feelings vanished completely.

I went to a horror film festival that I used to love. I used to love horror films. I used to enjoy ghosts, aliens, zombies and monsters and anything that was unnatural or unrealistic. And then the selection of films I watched that year all involved sexual assault. That was the horror. I remember during one particular film that had an explicit brutal scene, I started to look around me in the theatre, and nobody was flinching. Nobody was uncomfortable or twisting their body or looking at their watch or their phone or wanting to leave their seat. Everybody was actually watching it as if that was entertainment. And I was disgusted. I was repulsed. I was uncomfortable. I felt I had lost respect for everybody around me. I was confused about why a daily thing that happens, a crime, a horror, was entertainment. And that was the moment. That was the moment I just never set foot in anything related to films again. And I know it’s not a representation of all films, all categories, all themes, all festivals. But I felt disconnected… mostly from the audience. Hundreds of people.

This is my peers' moment with web development with AI. They (and so am I) are disgusted by the lack of ethics, environmental consequences, the horrible uses of AI on the daily, horrible companies, horrible people. And we are looking around and everyone else is eating it up and enjoying it. This is the tipping point. And I get that.

For personal reasons, or whatever life reasons, I’m quite familiar with disappointment and lack of values being matched and having to move on. I can see that we will see people forced out of the industry or just move on to something else for their own sake. We will lose good people in exchange for cheap, quick and shit outputs. Quick horror film? Woman alone to be assaulted! Quick website? AI it.

I’ve cried a lot over AI. I’ve also cried a lot between 2015 and 2017. I couldn’t find a single job spec that cared about CSS. I thought I was useless and didn’t know where to turn or I should just give up.

I’ve recently been turning more and more to DIY, sewing and crafts to lift my spirits up. But doing so in a capitalist society is still daunting. The slop is everywhere. Even to wind-down I have to navigate the other craft’s shit show: the fast-fashion, polyester, fabric waste, drop-shipping, stolen designs, pollution, etc.

But even in those communities there's always the crafters: the people who care and will have you and teach you and support you.

That’s how I’ve been surviving since 2015. By trying to mingle and be where the crafters are. If given the choice wouldn’t you rather watch an Oscar nominated film instead of a fast-produced straight to streaming film? Wouldn’t you take a carefully ethically crafted wool jumper instead of a She-in polyester one?

And there isn’t really a conclusion to post. Just getting it out of the system and hope I can still pay bills until I die.