I've been thinking, especially since the recent Spotify layoffs, that I'm due to delete my Spotify account. I haven't paid for it in years, and I have also significantly reduced my usage.

The other thing is that I've had this draft for ages and procrastinated on this topic. Luckily, today, I stumbled across this post from Raed explaining their reasonings for deleting their account. I thought, "Yeah, see, I had the same idea but procrastinated on it!". Not anymore!!

I have reasons similar to Raed's, but here are some of the thoughts that have been lurking in my head.

Their apps take up too much disk space.

It first annoyed me some years ago when I had a very old laptop with limited disk space. At one point, their app and its data took over 4 GB of disk space. That was when I deleted their app from my computer.

I don't want to pay for music I don't own.

The appeal for me to use Spotify Premium was that I had already bought the CDs from my favourite artists, so I didn't want to re-buy their digital versions. Now, this was, of course, pure laziness too.

Technically, you can plug a CD into your computer and copy and play the files. But this process was more straightforward in the early 2000s. I don't remember having a CD player on my laptop many years ago.

But since there was a way to avoid this whole effort, I paid for Spotify when commuting using the tube in London. Since there was no signal, I had to use Spotify Premium to be able to listen offline. One morning, one of my favourite artists removed their catalogue from Spotify. I couldn't listen to them anymore. Fair enough. It is in the terms and conditions, but I had the CD at home.

I ended up buying an external CD player to plug into my laptop to copy the songs. But doing that is a whole process because I also have to copy them to my phone.

Spotify took too long to allow blocking users.

I've been stalked via my Spotify account. Their harassment was by getting themselves and their friends to hit follow on my profile as a tactic to let me know that they are there and they see me. It was only in late 2021 that Spotify took measures to address this. At that point, they had already lost me.

Spotify gives a lot of money and a platform to awful people.

I don't need to say more about this.

Spotify gives too little money to the artists.

Another self-explanatory.

Spotify is bad for the environment.

I took these photos at FFConf 2022. That was the first moment I felt ashamed, and I should have pulled the plug then. And I shouldn't have shared some of my Spotify playlists since then, but I wanted to share something that would connect me to people.

Please watch Natalia's talk on this topic as it is really important.

Goodbye Spotify wrapped

I always felt so smug and happy when I shared that I was either in The Rasmus's 0.001% or 0.005% top fans every year. I buy their merch and art and travel to see them live, so I am contributing to their livelihood as much as possible. But I can't contribute to this company anymore either.

Thank you, Raed, for sharing your post and prompting me to take action, too.

I'm excited to share that I am one of the speakers for this year's All Day Hey! I first attended All Day Hey in 2018, and it has since been one of my favourite conferences. Well, technically, this is a comeback to the stage since I did give a lightning talk at All Day Hey back in 2019.

So, five years later (I can't believe it has been five years), I will be back, but this time to talk in a longer format about my new experiments with the Web Speech API and thinking a bit more about voice interfaces.

I've been working on new experiments and will be sharing new things I've learnt since I gave this talk at the State of the Browser and FFConf.

Tickets are still available but I bet not for long!

See you there?

I am excited to attend IndieWebCamp Brighton in less than a month! I already booked my non-refundable hotel, which felt very nerve-wracking!

The last time I tried to attend an IndieWebCamp, I ended up cancelling my trip last minute because childcare plans fell through.

But Brighton is near where I live, so hopefully, all will go well this time. I'm super looking forward to meeting people from the community and having some dedicated time to work on my little blog! I know that technically, this could have been an RSVP type of post, so it's one more thing for my backlog of things to improve around here.

I'm really thankful to Paul Robert Lloyd for taking the initiative to organise this. If you need any more convincing, Paul has written a more compelling introduction to the event on his blog.

Learn more about the event and RSVP on the event page.

See you there?

Let's get these out of the way!

Bookmarks related to tech and web development

• Shawna, a Set Maker by olia.
• Letting Eleventy Schedule Its Own Builds by Luke Morrigan.
• Using Trello as a Super Simple CMS by Phil Hawksworth.
• Sometimes the job is an assembly line by Dave Rupert.
• Hands‐on guides to assitive technology and accessibility testing by Adam Liptrot.
• Style your RSS feed by Darek Kay.
• WIP: Block links / Cards by Manuel Matuzović.
• Hacker News Blogroll.
• Re-creating a Japanese Fireworks Catalog from 1883 in CSS by Mads Stoumann.
• So, you don't like a web platform proposal by Yoav Weiss.
• Tucked corners by Ana Tudor.
• Take this aria-label quiz by A11y is Everything.
• The ideal viewport doesn’t exist by Andy Bell.
• Scrolljacking 101 by Sara Ramaswamy.
• Sunday Sites.
• Creating custom easing effects in CSS animations using the linear() function by Michelle Barker.
• I Used a Game Boy Camera for FaceTime Video Calls in iPadOS 17 and It Was Glorious By Federico Viticci.
• Fixing Search by Robin Berjon.
• Windows 95 by Gabrielle Wee.
• AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born by James Vincent.
• Why thousands of young Chinese people use a pink dinosaur as their alias by Caiwei Chen.
• Being an imperfect gardener of my digital garden by Elizabeth Tai.
• LearnWithJason: CSS-Only Scroll-Driven Animations by Bramus Van Damme.
• Eleventy Notes by Sandro Roth.
• Design Ethically by Katherine M. Zhou.
• Coworking With a Friend to Write More by Jacob Kaplan-Moss.
• Scribe.
• Scroll-Driven State Transfer by Roman Komarov.
• On Social Media, Lurkers, Introverts, and Blogging by Roy Tang.
• Blinded By the Light DOM by Eric A. Meyer.
• Plucky: a standing wave underline by Noah Liebman.
• Why side projects are essential for creatives—and employers should embrace them by Jonas Downey.
• First-Gen Social Media Users Have Nowhere to Go by Jason Parham.
• What happened to blogging for the hell of it? by Whiona.
• Never Use “Scroll” Value for Overflow by Roma Komarov.
• Lost in Translation: Tips for Multilingual Web Accessibility by Ben Myers.
• Don't Use Fixed CSS height or width on Buttons, Links, or Any Other Text Containers by Ashlee M Boyer.
• Pixel Art Studio by Michelle Barker.
• Using 11ty to bring back tag clouds by Ginger.
• Weekly Bookmarks 5: CSS and Web Components by Roma Komarov.
• share-button Web Component by David Darnes.
• Of Time And The Web by Jeremy Keith.
• DIMPACT – measuring emissions from media and digital entertainment by Ellen Davies.
• Engineering progression for humans by Sophie Koonin.
• Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It by Tim Neusesser.
• HTML with Superpowers by Dave Rupert.
• Adding a git based changelog in 11ty by James Doc.
• Tales from a solo dev by Tommy Palmer.
• Highlight Text When a User Scrolls Down to That Piece of Text by Chris Coyier.
• by .

Other bookmarks

• We are COVID’s collateral damage. And we are legion. by Amy Bailey, PhD.
• Energy makes time by Mandy Brown.
• Some tactics for writing in public by Julia Evans.
• The Nine Men Of Madeley.
• Humpty Dumpty Print.
• Purrli.
• British police testing women for abortion drugs by Phoebe Davis.
• I Bet I Can Speak Spanish

I had not realised it had been 805 days since my last bookmarks roundup. 805 days. This section is still one of the most visited parts of my little web corner.

It's been so long that I have accumulated an intimidating number of bookmarks. On the other hand, I did go on maternity leave and stayed away from the tech world for a while. I started the draft for this post in May 2023, and here I am, on January 2024, finally sharing it. It's a good thing that for the past few weeks, people have been talking a bit more about their bookmarks, and because I want to move to a system of individual link sharing rather than bulk, I needed to get this batch out of the way.

This post will mostly include links from 2022 - things I bookmarked while on maternity leave. It's great to revisit these because I have no memories of that time.

I hope to get another batch of bookmarks from May 2023 out soon, and then I will move on to add them individually. I mentioned before somewhere in these posts, but adding them as a batch isn't working for me right now. I used to do it monthly, but if it is a month that I bookmark a lot, it will be a long post to curate. Right now, this format takes me at least one hour to create. I could switch to a weekly post but must integrate it into my routine. Maybe forcing a time slot every Friday morning or something. I also like the idea of individual link posts so that I can add tags and get back to them quickly.

Bookmarks related to tech and web development

• Using Position Sticky With CSS Grid by Ahmad Shadeed.
• Doing the work by Monica Dinculescu.
• Stream on by Simon Collison.
• a11y.css by Gaël Poupard.
• 12 Days of Web by Stephanie Eckles.
• Pixel patterns by Chuan.
• Subterranean Blogging by Tom Critchlow.
• Fix Contrast.
• Esoteric.Codes by Daniel Temkin.
• Generate a Pull Request of Static Content With a Simple HTML Form by Hilman Ramadhan.
• How To Use Contentful With Eleventy by Henry Desroches.
• WHCM and System Colors by Adrian Roselli.
• Getting Started With Accessibility: Dynamic Type by Bas Thomas Broek.
• SVG Generators by Iris Lješnjanin.
• All the Eleventy things by David Darnes.
• Web accessibility simplified.
• How I Make CSS Art by Yosra Emad.
• How to keep up with web development without falling into despair by Baldur Bjarnason.
• “Evergreen” Does Not Mean Immediately Available by Eric Bailey.
• Reducing The Web’s Carbon Footprint: Optimizing Social Media Embeds by Michelle Barker.
• Aspect Ratio is Great by Michelle Barker.
• Websites as an Act of Creativity by Yesterweb Zine.
• Digital Cleanup Day.
• Estimate how many people using your website might be disabled.
• From Tumblr girl to engineer: How the platform inspired a generation of women to code by Elizabeth de Luna.
• Using the language attribute to make your website accessible by Craig Abbott.
• Don’t Alienate Your User: A Primer for Internationalisation & Localisation by Sophie Clifton-Tucker.
• What is the Web? by Jim Nielsen.
• Understanding Layout Algorithms by Josh W Comeau.
• Privacy and the :visited selector.
• Notes on a Blogging Accelerator by Tom Critchlow.
• Home Sweet Homepage by Amy Wibowo.
• Mourning loss as a remote team.

Other bookmarks

• 11 years, 10 arrests, at least 62 women: how did Britain’s worst cyberstalker evade justice for so long? by Sirin Kale.