In one of my trips to Helsinki in 2017, I visited Design Museo and in it there was an exhibition of the work of Margrethe Odgaard which investigated colours and patterns. It included a colour diary of various locations where colour combinations found in many places were captured.

The exhibition terminated in a room where the visitor could create their own colour diary in a piece of paper and colour it by hand. Recently I stumbled upon the drafts I created and I decided to transform the drafts I painted that day into a digital memory for myself but of the year 2018. The fact that it is digital and doesn't use tools like pencils, removes the possibility of having a natural pattern creation but netherless I find it visually interesting.

I strongly recommend seeing the original piece of work by Margrethe Odgaard. And thank you for inspiring me to look at the colours of my life.

But this got me thinking about what was the criteria to decide three top colours of each month so I decided to do two things: the top three most used colours of the photo decided by "a computer" and my hand picked choices. This method ended up revealing a couple of things about me.

I don’t like re-inventing the wheel so I looked up if there was any package that was already automatically choose the dominant colours of a photo. I found a package called colour thief.

For simplicity purposes (and because I had no idea what to call it), I will first show the three most dominant colours given by the "color-thief" package which I will call "computer" and my hand picked colours, via a color picker, I will call "my selection". Also the colour names are approximate colour names and not completely accurate. I wanted this to be as accessible as possible but I am not sure if using strange colour names that I don't even know would be helpful at all.

January

I couldn’t do this from memory so I turned to my phone and opened my phone gallery. I was pretty disappointed at myself. I wanted this to be an exciting task but instead I only found repeated photos of my cat. For example, the whole month of January, on my phone, is 95% photos of my cat. Is that really representative of what my January was like? I decided to pick a photo that I took when I bought a canvas for my living room and a plant. It is a nice photo because it represents the joy I feel when I make my house feel more like a home.

Colours selected by the Computer: beige, brown, blue.

Colours from My selection: dark mustard yellow, light beige and dark green.

February

I love snow. It never snowed where I grew up so I've always been fascinated by it. I know every Londoner hates when it snows but I really don't understand why. I built a little snowmen, drew on the snow, did a snow angel and it was so lovely to see my cat's reaction to the snow!

I picked my colours and compared them to "the computer". I couldn't help but notice that I aimed at the snow and bright colours. It becomes more noticable in the rest of the months that green is also a top pick for me.

Colours selected by the Computer: light brown, light beige, dark brown.

Colours from My selection: white, green and dark red.

March

In March I did my first visit of the year to Berlin to visit a good friend of mine. I always appreciate that even though I am a nervous flyer, it doesn't stop me from going where I want.

I suppose that on this photo it was hard not to have similar colours to "the computer".

Colours selected by the Computer: light blue, dark pink, dark red.

Colours from My selection: light blue, dark pink and dark red.

April

April was a long month but it was also one of the month I took the least amount of photos. I have a silly thing: whenever I feel good about my looks I take a photo with my cat. Don't ask me why but I just do it! Also I love that in this photo we are "matchy matchy".

Now looking at the whole page, it is clear that I'm very biased to find the colour green where I can.

Colours selected by the Computer: brown, beige, dark beige.

Colours from My selection: dark grey, beige and light green.

May

I was torn between this trip or my second visit to Berlin to CSSConfEU. I chose this particular photo because I love the colours of it and how the sky was so blue throughout the whole trip. I love visiting scandinavian countries.

How was yellow not the winner of this photo?

Colours selected by the Computer: light grey, dark brown, medium brown.

Colours from My selection: caramel yellow, light blue and medium green.

June

Took this photo when I went to Portugal in June. It was an odd month and I needed some time out of London too. I did this walkway with my dad at the time and went to the beach.

I love the many shades of green it has and how me and "the computer" picked different ones.

Colours selected by the Computer: dark green, light yellow, medium green.

Colours from My selection: light green, medium green and dark green.

July

I'm a bit of an idiot sometimes and I usually can't resist to take photos of things that make me laugh (even if I'm the only one laughing!). In July I spent a weekend in Brandscoombe by the beach where I saw many crabs, swam in the English sea for the first time and got a small tan line!

I am not gonna lie. At this point of the challenge I started to be more mindful of my colour selections so I decided not to pick green! I wanted to find other bright colours in it so I chose my flip flops, the road sign and the house.

Colours selected by the Computer: dark green, light red, light blue.

Colours from My selection: dark blue, yellow and pink.

August

A very special memory for me. Walked all the way via the "hard path" mostly because I didn't know there was an easier one! In August I went to the Fringe for the first time and I loved it! It was a very long and hungover week.

Similar to March, "the computer" and I were on the same page.

Colours selected by the Computer: light green, light blue, light yellow.

Colours from My selection: light yellow, light blue and light green.

September

I love cats and this photo was taken at a wine cellar in Portugal.

I don't remember that month very well (which is weird) but my phone is again 95% photos of my cat.

Colours selected by the Computer: medium green, light grey, light yellow.

Colours from My selection: light yellow, medium green and light red.

October

This month was so hard to pick a favourite photo! It was my birthday and I spent it in Salzburg. Besides doing amazing walks I also saw one of my favourite bands live!

On that night I discovered that I really like hazelnut schnapps! I had an amazing time singing out loud all of my favourite songs.

Colours selected by the Computer: dark brown, light brown, medium brown.

Colours from My selection: blue, medium brown and dark brown.

November

I chose this photo because I was mind blown by how beautiful the O2 looked when everyone turned on their phone's flashlights. The photo isn't amazing and it was one of those things that you had to be there but visually it felt so cosmic and magical.

Colours selected by the Computer: dark brown, beige, light brown.

Colours from My selection: dark grey, beige and light green.

December

For the second time in my life I didn't spend Christmas with my parents but that didn't stop me from hosting it. We had my sister and her husband come over and I cooked a vegan nut roast from scatch. I was really pleased with myself, especially with how I bought everything in advance and decorated the house! (basically I'm happy that I did normal adulting)

Red is one of my least favourite colours but it was Christmas so I felt like I had to pick it.

Colours selected by the Computer: brown, beige, medium brown.

Colours from My selection: red, beige and light green.

I enjoyed doing this even though now it looks a bit boring. I'm clearly very biased in the colours I like and the photos I choose but also it made me realise that maybe I don't take as many photos as I should. Maybe I should capture more things that got my attention because the years go by really quickly and we don't even notice and then I will forget tiny things that were nice. I need more colour variety in my life too I see.

I had completely forgotten about the photo I took in November but once I re-opened it I remembered the feeling I had when I was there live. So for that, this was worth it. However, this made me realise that I need to do some learning regarding naming colours. My vocabulary on that is pretty weak and I need to learn more especially in how it plays out in accessibility.

P.S.: I am not reducing the amount of photos I take of my cat.

In 2018 I began to participate a lot in the IndieWeb community and that gave me a lot of confidence to work on my blog. I told myself sometime last December: "I'm going to make sure that over this Christmas break I do x, y and z so that my blog has more IndieWeb stuff.".

Well, that didn't go to plan. I did write a bit and made some small changes but I didn't make major developments like I would like. I was catching up on Netflix instead. In the past few days I began to feel this bizarre sense of disappointment in myself and a weird feeling of not feeling that I acomplished much. I was falling back into old habits of expecting too much of myself.

The other day I was reviewing my bookmarks so that I could clean them and I thought: "Oh! I should use this as an oppportunity to finally have bookmarks on my blog... like everyone does.". I embarked in this task and decided to experiment using a micropub client to automatically publish into my blog so that I could save time by not adding the markup manually. I decided to experiment with Quill and out of the box, it worked fine. I styled it and it lives on my new "bookmarks" page. But I was not satisfied. I began to check what other people were doing and I got dragged into this feeling that I've made it all wrong.

The micropub endpoint that I am using works great but it publishes straight to my "posts" folder in my Jekyll project. This meant that I couldn't have fancy urls. I thought: "hummm I think it would be prettier if when opening an individual bookmark entry it would have /link/ before the bookmark slug.". This meant that my current implementation wasn't doing the job.

I realised that if I wanted that, apparently, I should have used the collections feature from Jekyll. But my micropub endpoint isn't specifically creating bookmarks and publishing them into a specific directory. This lead me to come to terms with the fact that I would have to create my own micropub endpoint if I want to have fancy things built for my specific needs.

TIL: that is called selfdogfood.

"Fair enough" I thought. I looked up "how to build micropub endpoint" and after all the articles about how to create a mini bar, the technical ones weren't matching the level of my knowledge so I felt hopeless. I was sad cooking my dinner and thinking how I am so disappointed at myself that I want fancy things for my blog and feeling technically inadquate and way behind my IndieWeb peers.

I carried on my search (still looking for anything micropub related) and I stumbled upon this journal entry from Jeremy Keith.

I have to admit, I really don’t care that much about the specific technologies being discussed at indie web camps: formats, protocols, bits of code …they are less important than the ideas. And the ideas are less important than the actions. As long as I’m publishing to my website, I’m pretty happy. That said, I’m very grateful that the other IndieWeb folks are there to help me out.

And there it was. I had lost track of my purpose and I was too focused on building it correctly and catching up with everyone. I need to listen to myself too: it doesn't matter if I only dump HTML in here. It is my blog and I should build it as I can and as I want.

But what is the source of this unsatisfaction? Is it because I made my github repository public? Maybe.

I am being harsh on myself. I am learning lots here already. When a job ago I was only doing javascript this blog was one of the very few places where I was doing HTML and CSS for example and I've learned loads from it. I'm still behind on all the IndieWeb principles but I will get there. Could 2019 be the year I finally have webmentions? Let's hope so but I will probably need help.

This may be the first time that I am writing a year review before the year actually ends so it is a good sign. Also, It’s really hard to create blog post titles so I decided to go dramatic. I had a couple of goals for this year. I wanted to work on my wellbeing, do a talk at a meet up, go to the gym and declutter. I’m happy to share that I did more than that.

This was a long year and lots happened during it. I started 2018 by joining Hactar.is and I am so happy to say that this was the first Christmas that I wasn’t thinking about searching for a new job. I finally had a Christmas break where I was relaxing and not thinking about work.

It’s been a year of unexpected learnings. For example, I learned that when I’m happy in my job, my mind starts looking for other things to be worried about. Surprisingly, this led me to do therapy for my anxiety and my confidence.

I’m very lucky and privileged to have been able to do weekly sessions and it was, without any doubt, the most well-invested money I spent this year. I was able to talk about and rationalise emotions and traumas I’ve had that I never dealt with and I feel like I got to know a side of me that has always been quiet. Doing these sessions led to different consequences especially around relationships and confidence. Had it not been for those sessions, the majority of the things I’ve done this year wouldn’t have happened.

Global Diversity CFP Day

In February I signed up for the Global Diversity CFP day workshop in London. I had set my mind to do a talk at a meet up and I wanted to learn how to propose myself for it. To my embarrassment I ended up crying in it. I felt overwhelmed and ashamed of myself. My mind was telling myself that my bio wasn’t great and that I don’t have anything interesting to tell people. I was bottling up these feelings and when it came to the last exercises I couldn’t stop the tears falling from my face. I didn’t have anything technical. I wasn’t coming up with anything revolutionary or brand-new. I felt as if I was wasting everyone’s time. Inside my head I can’t thank Sareh enough for being incredibly supportive on that moment that I broke down. Despite everything, when I arrived home I had a bio and a shy idea.

Codebar

Sometime in June I saw a tweet saying that Codebar Monthlies were asking for volunteers and I decided to apply. It felt adequate because I was grieving with emotions related to things that happened to me in the beginning of my career and, to me, I see the Codebar project as a community that I wish I had found when I was a junior developer and I wanted to contribute to it. Little did I know I would actually gain so much from it.

Long story short, in the last 2 years, without me realising, I lost my confidence in communication tasks such as emails. I used to be full hands on but in the last two years I began to question and doubt everything I would write and it became an extremely anxious task. I couldn’t even reply to emails from my neighbours. I would re-read many times and then give up and ask my boyfriend to do it instead of me.

I only realised how bad it got when I had tasks at Codebar that involved approaching venues to host and I was in panic and feeling anxious. Although the team had prepared a couple of email templates that did help out to start, I still would have to follow up on conversations and make decisions! After a couple of months, when I was approaching venues to the career panel that I was co-organising, I realised that I was replying without hesitation and booking venues for the following year. This is something that I wouldn’t have done just a few months before. The side of me “that gets things done” was coming out so quickly and had it not been for me volunteering it may have not come out!

In December I signed up as a coach in a Codebar Workshop for the very first time. I was so nervous… for nothing! It was as relaxing and as welcoming as people say it is. I learned a lot from it especially around my choice of words when explaining something to a code newbie. I’m looking forward to doing it again next year!

Conferences

This was the year I attended the most conferences: All Day Hey!, CSSConfEU, State of the Browser, IndieWebCamp (I think it counts as a conference) and FFConf! When I was in the State of the Browser I looked around me and noticed that I was seeing many familiar faces but also became fully aware of the fact that I have been carefully picking conferences that I perceive as friendly, inspiring and welcoming and not necessarily attached to particular languages in the front end domain. There were particular types of talks that I really connected to. I started to grow confidence to admit that I know that I can look up technical stuff anytime via any search engine or a book. Technical talks are amazing, yes…but they were going straight to my brain… whilst some talks were going straight to my heart.

This year I saw one talk that makes me smile every time I think about it: Tim Holman’s at FFConf. It was exactly what I needed to see and it happened at the same time I was doing my talks at meet-ups. It really inspired me to embrace this dormant side of mine of things that I love that can be side projects. I’ve been telling myself “your side project doesn’t have to be an npm package or a future mini start up” but seeing Tim’s talk and laughing along side everyone really solidified this thought. We should be embracing our experiments and not do “CV driven development” (stole this one from Charlie’s awesome talk at State of the Browser and FFConf).

(PS.: All the conferences mentioned were 10/10. Do look up their videos).

Meet-ups

In July I decided to try and apply to do a talk based on my shy idea from February, and with the help of Heather (for my usual proof reading and grammar suggestions), I crafted a talk proposal and submitted it to a local friendly meet-up called //TODO London and submitted to MirrorConf too. I was obviously rejected from MirrorConf. I knew I was going to be rejected but since the “no” was guaranteed anyway I wasn’t really going to loose anything.

After a couple of months, a date for November was arranged so that I could give my talk in //TODO London. But around the same time I was told that ViewSource was looking for lightening talk submissions so I decided to apply for it at the very last minute with the same topic. I was in bed about to sleep when, a week before, I received an email that my lightening talk had been accepted. I was shocked especially because I had written the talk title and description by myself. But I was very happy! It happened before my originally arranged talk so that was my first trial of it.

In both events the talk was well received. I talk about this in a couple of posts already but I was so afraid of making a fool of myself while putting my heart out. While I was at FFConf, I received a message from ReactJSGirls asking if I wanted to do a talk. I did, again with the same topic, and it has since all been written down on this blog in a previous blog post.

My goal was to do one talk this year but I ended doing two and a lightening talk all in the space of a month. It retrospective, I’m glad that I left this towards the end of the year when I accumulated a lot of inspiration from the conferences I attended, and when I had more coping mechanisms for my anxiety and more trust in myself from volunteering in Codebar Monthlies.

Around summer I attended a lot of meet ups and I began to feel the same I feel about conferences. I realise that I prefer to attend friendly and inclusive meet ups who focus on inspiration and personal side stories rather than just tech.

Gym and declutter

I sucked at both. I failed once again to get back into a gym routine. But don’t worry, between Christmas and new year I have already been to the gym two times! I also bought some clothes this year. My home office and cellar needs a proper declutter and organisation and I have been procrastinating. So hopefully next year.

Bonus cool things:

• I got a paddling pool.
• Got plants for the flat.
• Played in the snow in London.
• Got two haircuts and one hair dye.
• Visited Berlin x 3.
• Visited Sweden.
• Visited Edinburgh.
• Visited Salzburg.
• Flew my parents to see my flat for the first time.
• Only broke my phone once.
• Found a cheap wine that I like in the supermarket.
• Received my UK Resident card (not cool and booo to it but at least I didn’t get rejected).
• Saw The Rasmus live twice.
• Only cried a little bit when I flew on a propeller plane for the first time.
• A year of good memes.
• In February I discovered that my forehead breakouts were due to my shampoo and changing shampoos has done miracles for my skin.
• Met dogs that I follow in instagram in real life.
• Hosted Christmas Eve vegan dinner and made a nut roast from scratch.
• My nails are grown and I only relapsed into bitting once.

Next year: WEDDINGS! But also:

• Get in the gym routine.
• Work a lot on my blog and “side projects”.
• Reduce alcohol consumption by a lot.
• Read 10 books.
• Continue to work on my mental wellbeing. There is still a lot to do.

I admit that I would like to talk in a conference but… I’ve done a tour of my shy idea already and I don’t have anything else… which sucks. So maybe it is best I don’t put pressure on myself on this one.

Nice links

• Tim Holman's talk at FFConf
• Charlie Owen's talk at FFConf
• FFConf 2018 playlist
• My blog post about my shy talk

I very rarely share online if something isn’t going well in my life. I’ve always treated my social media the same way most of us do: we only share the good bits. I thought I was doing that but nowadays, I look back at some photos of what looks like an excellent time of my life but now I know very well that it wasn’t like that at all. I suppose that at the time of posting them I was too numb to see what other bad stuff were surrounding that moment. I particularly hate seeing photos that remind me of previous jobs. Now that I’ve processed and understand many things that happened to me that were wrong, my heart sinks scrolling through my instagram timeline for example. I can’t even handle opening photos to delete them because it ruins my day.

Something similar happened in 2017. I had my first and only Facebook account since 2009. That account had lived through a lot. I actively avoided opening my Facebook account because at that point I had accumulated a lot of people who just reminded me of pain.

I used to struggle a lot with boundaries and defending myself. I hated (and still do) confrontation. I would allow lots of people to win arguments because I couldn’t handle the stress of standing up for myself. I was petrified of upsetting people and always been too apologetic. The fact that I couldn’t stand up for myself damaged me so much. Opening a website and see lots of people who caused that damage was a constant reminder of sad times. For those reasons as well, it takes a lot from me to block or remove someone from social media. It is really bizarre but I am always afraid that, if I do remove someone from my social media, that person could ask me why and that would lead to confrontation especially if it is someone from your work place. Unfortunately, as a woman, after some years I’ve accumulated some people who I had to block and because of this, I became very obsessed with privacy settings.

Everything hit the fan when in 2017 I used the marketplace option in Facebook when I was moving houses. I needed to sell some furniture so I thought it was ideal. The user experience was amazing - I quickly added photos, location, price and soon after I received my very first message.

 The thing about marketplace is that strangers could send you a message to talk about the item you are selling. A person who was not friends with me on Facebook (an innocent stranger) messaged me and since I was using my laptop at the time, I quickly clicked on the notification and opened Messenger. I saw, in front of my eyes, my previous clean Messenger inbox with only around 5 different conversations going on, be flooded with previously deleted messages… including from people I had previously blocked. I saw them all loading in front my eyes and be reminded of names I really did not want to see. I also saw my Messenger settings be reset. It unblocked people I had blocked and anyone could send me a message.

I started to shake, cry and in panic. I was physically frozen. I couldn’t delete my messages manually because that meant that I had to see them. I couldn’t manually block those people anymore because it was too much. I decided to delete my account all together.

I already knew that “deleted” messages don’t mean “deleted” in Facebook’s servers. I figured that it was a bug and I think that in the moment I allowed someone who wasn’t friends with me to message me via a brand new feature it must have reset the status of previous messages and profiles in relation to me. I didn’t report the bug as I was too shaken up. I only deleted the account and moved on. Probably this is fixed by now but I don’t want to try or test it myself.

Today I am feeling the same with Instagram in regards to bad memories. Especially because I don’t recognise the person I was that posted 6 or 5 years ago and even before that. I changed so much. I want to give younger self a big hug but I also want to erase that person.

Some people I follow, although they never did any harm to me whatsoever, they accidentally remind me of someone or an event that I don’t want not be reminded of. But because they never did any harm to me, I can’t bring myself to unfollow them because I don’t want to be harsh so the cycle continues.

I never open my own profile in Instagram but I want a blank start. I do like Instagram. I like following friends and inspiring people. I love seeing colours and even memes so I still want to have an account. Unfortunately, I read that I can’t delete an account and use the same username. So I am at loss of what to do.

I will be more mindful of what I share online too. I will make sure to only post photos of something if it is a 100% positive memory. It isn’t to show off to other people - it is for my own sake. I want to be able to use it like a photo album. Open it and smile - instead of anxiety, panic, remorse and tears. Maybe during this Christmas break I will find the guts to do a purge but I know that it will be a "fake purge".

I should also bring up something important to me that is the catalyst of these personal notes (including my talks about blogging). This year was a very important year to me because I did therapy. As my previous post mentioned I went though some rough patches in my life that I never properly processed before. Perhaps it is because the year is about to end but I have been thinking a lot about what I’ve learned about myself and how I worked on my mental health. It has been a process of forgiving myself and rebuilding my confidence but in order to do that I had to face many repressed feelings I had and it wasn’t easy. I may or may not do one or two more posts with some tangents on this topic but I am happy to finally let it all out and be honest to myself.

I’m not going to waste bytes talking how social media, the way it is today, is a shit hole. I’m not going to waste time either explaining why deleting social media is a privilege. So this is just a rant from someone who is somewhat upset that someone else' server will never forgive and forget your past.

Note: I mentioned these social media platforms but it applies to any other platforms. I really like a lot of people who work at the companies mentioned and I know that these companies have created a lot of amazing things too.

Visiting my “niece” 😻🎄🤶🏻