Needless to say, I am my cat's biggest fan. Literally her number one fan. She is a star in my eyes. Everything she does is cute so obviously she is the star of our Christmas cards ever since we adopted her.

This will be her 3rd Christmas with us although we nearly had a disaster earlier this year.

Earlier this year, in February, on a Saturday, I let Jessie out via the catflap as I would do every single day. She usually stays in our garden - at most she would jump next door but she would rarely stray more than one house away.

That day she didn't come home. I thought that maybe she went into someone's house and they took a liking and fed her and let her stay and she would come back in the morning. But I was really worried so I slept in the living room. All I wanted was to hear the catflap noise. But she didn't come home.

Sunday morning we decided to knock on neighbours' houses as we began to be afraid that she may have entered a high fenced garden and not be able to jump back. We also printed flyers with my phone number and put them up on trees.

She didn't come home that day. In fact, she didn't come home for 8 days and those were the most horrible 8 days I've lived this year (and in recent years). I wish I could say that in those 8 days the only thing that happened was missing her but it isn't true. The search for a loved pet makes you vulnerable. During that week, here is a list of things that happened:

• A woman was walking her dog in our street and I asked her if she happened to see my cat. Her response was to abuse me. Besides the name calling she said that I deserved to have my pet missing because if I loved my pet I wouldn't have lost it.
• A man got so angry we put a flyer through his letter box that he left his house to not only be abusive but also to make physical threats. He said we had no business in putting our flyer in his letterbox because, to him, it was rubbish.
• I received threatening phone calls from a man claiming to have looked for my cat and demanding money for it.

I don't handle threats well, especially if made by men. And in that week I realised that I was vulnerable. Those men knew more or less where we lived, my phone number and that we were desperate to have our cat back. One of the tips to look for a cat is to look for it in the middle of the night. If a cat is scared, they are most likely to come when there are less car noises. So I was doing midnight, 3am and 6am walks around my block calling for her. So I began to be afraid of doing that.

We both became physically unwell and our mental health took a big hit. I got very paranoid and I began to be afraid to answer the phone. I needed to answer the phone if it was someone telling me they found Jessie, but all I could think about was the man on the phone being threatening because I wasn't giving him money.

But good things also happened. I received so many text messages from strangers saying that they were hoping that I would find her and that they were looking out for her too. My NextDoor post got very popular and I got to meet lovely neighbours who really cared. And from NextDoor I had two people who volunteered to come with us one night to call for her. I have tears in my eyes every time I think about how selfless those people were.

We also had so many people sending us photos of cats that did look like her and asking us if it was her. There was one poor cat in one particular street that was caught three times on the same day by different people. I'm sure that cat is still very confused about that weird day they had!

Eight days later, on a Sunday, I had officially given up hope. All I was hoping was that she didn't suffer, in whatever happened. At that point we did everything we could and we needed to get back to work. On that Sunday evening we received a phone call. Up until that point, most phone calls were about similar cats (all very well intentioned obviously) so I thought it was another one like that. I was afraid to answer the phone so I gave it to my partner and he answers it and just gets up and runs through the door.

Jessie was stuck a couple of numbers down in a neighbours cellar. Those neighbours have been away all week and had only just come back and saw our flyers and since something similar had happened to them, they decided to call for her in their cellar. And there was she was. Stuck underneath their floorboards and meowing through a hole in their cellar from which she couldn't get out.

I couldn't believe my own eyes and I couldn't stop crying. Jessie was a bit thinner but she was in good health.

There were other details from this bad experience. I remember when I went to a shop to print her missing flyers, my pen drive stopped working. And because I did those flyers in google docs I thought I could just forward them to the shop's email. Turns out, I couldn't open them without having an app installed. This whole situation happened while I was in tears and my 4G wasn't being fast enough.

I also learned that without social media, it is really hard to reach your local community. I had to join local Facebook groups and create a NextDoor account. I managed to buy a temporary number redirect but I couldn't help but still feeling exposed. I still needed my real phone number in flyers because most people use iMessage and WhatsApp.

Sometimes my husband had work commitments that didn't allow him to stay at home. I questioned my safety a few times when following tips from people.

But we had a happy ending, many people don't. This changed me so much. Before, I would take a photo of a missing pet and keep my eyes open, but now I am actually active in replying to people and hoping to give them the comfort and empathy that I once received. I volunteered to help search when my neighbour's cat went missing (another happy ending story!) and I keep an eye/am active on the groups I once joined when I needed help.

It is free to have empathy.

We would both like to thank everyone at Hactar who gave me all the time I needed to look for her and to look after her after she was found.

But now back to happy Jessie. She has put the weight back on! And more important than John Lewis Christmas ad: here is Jessie's 2019 Christmas card.

P.S.: You might wanna read my Developurrs interview with Jessie!

It's been a while since I've written a blog post. Life got a bit too busy and chaotic after July/August and I didn't think this would happen to me but I think I accidentally burned out. Although I was away most of October I still think I didn't fully recover. So, at the beginning of November, I started to really look forward to FFConf because every year I always leave feeling inspired and energised.

I've been to FFConf since I moved to the UK and I've mentioned it in passing in previous blog posts. It has been a place where I made "friends forever", where I got a lead to my current job and where conversations are natural, human and don't feel like a job interview.

This post will be a reflection post where I will share lots of personal thoughts and notes that I took with me so they may not reflect the content of talks. Sophie has written a fantastic day recap that may be align more with that if that's what you're looking for.

Empathy

In order to #EngageEmpathy we have to do a serious mental effort. Empathy is a very important topic to me because I've felt the consequences of the lack of it from people around me in the past. It was the second time I've seen a talk by Sharon Steed and I was, once again, very moved by it.

We all have our unique perspective and background and how we interpret and feel things presented to us. Sharon told us her story about living a stutter and how often empathy wasn't there was she needed but also when it was. I have a completely different life experience from her and still, everything she said could be applied to me and my own experiences.

My instant reaction was to laugh when Sharon said that "empathy is the thing you should be doing not to not be the asshole". But I am sure we have all been in situations where we saw an exchange (or even participated in one) where something was said that was unnecessary and that wasn't as funny. Maybe a co-worker who once made a "joking" comment about you leaving work on time or a bit earlier didn't bother to think that you may have a personal reason why.

That was a mild example but unpleasant exchanges are likely to happen in a workplace where patience, perspective and connection are lacking. When I was working with people who lacked these and I made a mistake or fell short of their expectations, the "finger pointing" culture was very present and it impacted everyone's morale.

I'm still thinking about the definition of empathy. Sharon presented questions that I never considered: you choose empathy with how you define it so: how do I define empathy?

The penny dropped for me here: I've been moving what I define as empathy as I grew too. In fact, I'm pretty sure I wasn't as empathetic as I am now compared to 10 years ago. I began to think about how sometimes, some friends of mine, disappoint me because they said or acted in a way towards me that I would never do right now, but maybe I would have done/said the same 10 years ago?

But the good news is, and like The Good Place has been telling us, we can change and engage in empathy every single day. But at what cost? In the past I've felt exhausted and exposed from educating people about empathy, especially when explaining to them how their actions (or inactions) have impacted me.

I've done my personal reflections alone in the past couple of years. My personal experience with empathy had to come from within, from a lot of self forgiveness and from a lot of "letting go". I've become more empathetic towards others once I learned more about myself.

I admire the work of Sharon. She has made herself vulnerable so that others can learn and bring a new attitude to their workplace which will benefit so many people. Sharon shared key empathy behaviours that we can all individually practise in our daily lives, in and out of your workplace, that can have a wonderful ripple effect.

Imagine being able to feel safe to ask your colleagues what you need and being in an environment that puts people first? Open communicators, safe and included humans deliver wonderful things.

Vulnerability is the gateway for all kinds of things.

– Sharon Steed

Being vulnerable allowed me to take and receive. And I don't mean opportunities (although that too). It allowed me to grow emotionally.

At last, Sharon said something that moved me and completely changed how I interact with my friends:

We don't listen to what people say, we listen to our opinion.

– Sharon Steed

Becoming a web developer in this day and age

I was really looking forward to see this talk by Amina Adewusi and slightly terrified too. It has crossed my mind multiple times recently how I genuinely don't envy junior developers right now. This talk was a quick reminder how privileged I am and how I was lucky that I joined the industry quite some years ago.

While now more than ever there are more options to learn to code, these still don't cater to caregivers and/or people who don't have an exorbitant amount of money to pay for courses. Not to mention career changing folks who can't study full time.

And after all those challenges, the job search is another challenge. I share some similar stories with Amina - most recruiters don't have empathy or understanding of how your personal time works when doing technical challenges for job interviews. The first and only time I've ever used a recruiter, my phone number was shared with four other recruiters who rang me non-stop from 7am onwards emotionally pressuring me to complete coding challenges.

I genuinely loved how Amina gave a talk to junior developers while also giving tips to those already established in the industry about how they can help. I also recommend Jo's talk from the previous year at FFConf where the focus is how an established developer can be of help to junior developers.

Before becoming a web developer I considered other careers while I was in university. Sadly, these all shared a similar trait to web development: they are "new" and very gatekeeping. When I studied web and graphic design, photography and video, I started to get the impression that "new-comers" aren't necessarily welcome. Professional photographers started to get really upset when young people started to able to afford digital DSLR cameras and photo editing software.

People have a hard time accepting that this an industry that is changing daily and that it is very possible to be "junior" at it and be very good at it. I see this gatekeeping especially from senior folks who believe that junior developers skip "essential skills" with bootcamps and therefore shouldn't be immediately hired. People who believe this are projecting personal frustrations with their own wasted time in now obsolete technologies along with their own insecurities and fears of not being able to catch up. We are all "junior" developers the moment a new javascript framework comes out anyway.

I thought I'd also share some useful links that I captured from Amina's slides:

• How white engineers built racist code – and why it's dangerous for black people
• Keziyah's twitter account

You have the power to make the web a better place.

Work tools

During the day we had three "a bit more technical" talks. One about Git by Alice Bartlett, a guide to use browser tools to improve performance by Anna Migas and another performance talk by Harry Roberts leaning more towards a business/freelance view.

It is with some shame that I do admit that I make some things that Alice mentioned in her talk. Alice mentioned that, when doing commits, describing all the work made by linking into a ticket isn't a guaranteed method since, at any moment, those tickets or ticketing system may be deleted. This made me realise that I haven't stayed in a job long enough to have seen this happen, so I've been making that mistake for quite some time. Not only that, but until this talk I relied on pull requests to write a lot about the changes being made and I shouldn't do that.

This would have been incredibly useful to have on a welcome book for anyone joining a company that contribute to a project using Git. In fact, it reminded me how in previous jobs I wasn't properly informed of how the team "did their commit messages" and how a documentation guide wasn't available anywhere and yet I was still expected to have known. Empathy, am I right?

I love how performance talks can all be so different and you always learn something new. In Anna's talk, I was reminded of some CSS tricks that I didn't remember (like font swap!) so I really recommend catching up on her work or recorded versions of her talks.

Harry's talk focused on goals when working to improve performance in an angle I hadn't considered before. Until this talk, I was one of the those developers who saw performance as a final number to improve (when tackling the issue from a "done" perspective) without asking other questions. Some of the questions he asks actually make perfect sense:

• How do you know your website is slow?
• What key areas of the website should I look at?
• What will it mean for the business if your website is faster?
• How will you measure?

Harry also shared a great point that I do by default and completely forget when talking to others: capturing data is really important. Before, during and after. He also shared a good point: we need to normalise talking about performance before building something (and to me, this includes even before the design phase) as it seems like a lot of performance work is actually fixing things that were preventable (similar to accessibility).

Surveillance and more horror stories

It was hard to name this section since surveillance and poorly designed tech is a topic that really upsets me. As a woman, I've experienced the fallout of poorly designed features that do not take into consideration people who need to be safe while also being able to have a social life like everyone else.

Laura Kalbag's talk (along with all her work) is really important now more than ever. Laura shared very scary facts on how some corporations have access to an infinite amount of data that although "anonymised" it can easily be "de-anonymised". It scares me that this important information is only being shared with people who are already in a very niche community and how this isn't part of broader education. As Laura pointed out, lots of people have no way to understand what they are consenting to when signing up for services. The same way I didn't give consent for Google to own my FitBit data and yet here I am.

I am an anxious person who usually expects the worst. I am also someone who hasn't seen Black Mirror because I find reality quite... overwhelming as it is. But it bothers me not knowing how far off are we from fiction? It bothers me not knowing when "data" can be used against me. As a woman, I immediately imagine worst case scenarios like, for example, getting different prices when you're on your period. This was an exagerated scenario... I mean, right now the worst that is happening is that these companies are messing with our democracies.

Laura shared some tips of how you can try to protect yourself online along with tips of how you can help have an impact in the tech world that we all develop to:

• Be independent
• Be an advisor
• Be advocate
• Be the questioner
• Be the gatekeeper
• Be difficult
• Be unprofessional
• Be the supported

And also very important: Host and own your website!!

Here are some useful links shared by Laura:

• Technology Colonialism
• SiteJs.org
• The Great Hack
• The book: "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power"
• Adam Buxton's podcasts

Silence is complicity.

Creativity

It is hard to disguise this but: this is my favourite part of the day and the one that made me fall in love with FFConf. This year we were in for another treat! It isn't often that you see a conference promoting fun projects. It is really important to me because in the past I've put off working on silly personal projects out of fear of being mocked and not taken seriously. But FFConf always bring inspiring people over who are in fact, very successful!

Charlotte Dann did an amazing talk that explored her background in jewelry making and how she transferred her fantastic skills and creativity into web development. I pretty much had my mouth open the whole time seeing her process of building something from creative coding into pieces of jewelry. I wish I was as cool as Charlotte. It is hard to put into words how it re-sparkled my mind into making things.

And the day ended with Suz showing us how to use web apis to interact with slightly more unusual devices. In this case a game boy printer! It was amazing! I would like to give a go at something like this in the future - although I'm almost sure I've exhausted all my "cat based" ideas.

Suz Hinton closed the conference with an important message. She talked about big corporations are abusing and taking control of things that belonged to everyone with the example of the 900 MHz band that is designated for amateur radio. An emotional message that touched me as well. I was unaware of this particular example and it was heartbreaking.

I want less mass-produced surveillance bulls**t and more harry potter magic.

– Suz Hinton

I want the web to be a medium to create things and/or to communicate and express yourself. You know... like paper for example. To create paper planes, to draw on, to write, to send letters. I miss the wholesome web I once knew. I do not want the web to be a tool for oppression, control and manipulation. Some days it feels impossible to reach the people outside the web community.

I left wondering what else can I do but keen to do something.

Thank you FFConf. I want to see you again next year!

Two months after the first flower 🌸🌺

When this month started I was very optimistic. I was full of energy and keen to get shit done. Now, I am overwhelmed with this sense of productivity shame. I have two blog posts that are still on my drafts, one side project and a lot of other tasks to do. Hopefully next month it will be better.

Bookmarks from July

Web development/tech related content

• A Vacancy Has Been Detected - by Kelly Sutton.
• Rainbow coloured grid with Splitting.js and custom properties - by Michelle Barker.
• Eva Design System
• Common Voice- by Mozilla
• SVG shows today's date - by Terence Eden
• Year in photos - by Barbara Yang
• freezeframe.js
• Captions and Transcripts and Audio Descriptions, Oh My! - by Dennis Deacon
• Full stackers - by Chris Coyier
• You don't need MomentJs
• Form design: from zero to hero all in one blog post - Adam Silver
• Pokemon Card Holo Effect - by Simon Goellner
• Heatwave: An Animated CSS Sun Illustration - by Michelle Barker
• Creating my logo animation - by Cassie Evans
• Well-being on twitter - by Andy Bell
• Real dark web - by Charlie Owen

Let's appreciate what the 1% does. But let's not allow the 1% to dominate the conversations and our collective headspace.

– Charlie Owen

Miscellaneous

Fun, cute, happy, uplifting content etc.

• 10 flowers to grow in your garden.
• A relatable feeling.
• CCTV footage of me during July

Made me think

Content warning: This section might include tweets that aren't uplifting and happy but rather thoughts that stayed with me.

• "It's a hundred times easier to criticize than create." - Telling this to myself whenever someone mocks the silly things I create.