I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for community-led events in the front-end community, and I am forever grateful for that. However, I am heartbroken by the current state of the events.

Many community-led events have recently been cancelled due to low ticket sales, which feeds a gigantic gap of events left by the pandemic. I remember we had to cancel the in-person London CSS and IndieWebCamp London at the very last minute back in 2020, and it was incredibly stressful to disappoint attendees and speakers.

It is obvious that in-person events have either not returned or are maybe a little less frequent than before the pandemic. But that was a public health event—having to cancel events due to financial strain sounds incredibly painful, and I know it is the current stress of many event organisers.

When I moved to the UK in 2015, I struggled a lot. I was already struggling with feeling too much of a junior developer. I felt alone and missed my friends. I also thought that the front-end community was my co-workers who happened to be bullies and whatever the Twitter timeline showed me. I hated myself and this career, but I genuinely had absolutely no other skill that could match the salary I desperately needed.

My friend Paul joined the company I was working at and recommended events for me to attend. Nearly 10 years later, Paul and I still attend conferences together. At the time, he raved about FFConf. I got a ticket, and my life changed.

I couldn't believe it - there were actually conferences and meet-ups that encouraged you as you are and welcomed you even with all your lack of knowledge. At the time, I always thought I didn't belong at any meet-up or conference. The few I had attended so far always made me feel less than. But for the first time ever, I… had a great time. The following year, we attended All Day Hey! and then State of the Browser. By 2018, I was incredibly motivated and engaged in the front-end community, and I had organised my own events, such as Codebar Monthlies, Homebrew Website Clubs, and LondonCSS.

I have so many feel-good memories of events and talks I saw.

Jeremy's talk at ViewSource that made me work on this blog.

I remember Jo's talk about perfectionism, Impostor Syndrome and Anxiety. It was the quick therapy lesson I didn't know I needed then. All because of a community-led event called TODO London.

Charlie's talk at FFConf, which mentioned "CV-driven development", explained my frustration with modern front-end tools.

Tim's talk unlocked something in me: you can learn by building useless things.

I cried during Suz's talk. I, too, have that passion.

Beaming with a smile because all I want is to be as cool as Ruth.

Feeling avenged by Heydon's talks.

Dreaming to be as bright as Michelle.

Karaoke parties after events.

Conversations with people and realising that I was finally surrounded by people who cared about making a usable web.

Seeing my "buddies from the internet" at least once a year.

Meeting my "buddies from the internet" for the first time when we attend the same event.

And many more...

It is 2024, and I am so grateful to have given talks at the events that inspired me. But I am also grieving the loss of other events I deeply loved, like TODO London, and recently having conferences like Front be cancelled. Every little meet-up in London and conference contributed to who I am as a person and a professional.

I agree with Marc: the things I said above can happen at corporate events. But damn… small community-driven events are that little 3rd space for someone like me… who made their hobby their career and now doesn't know where to hang out.

I love you all and miss you.

This said, I have some news: I'm going to start a new small free meet-up in south west London. Hopefully, this will attract people who live in the area and work from home. I hope to share more news soon.

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