Alt text without image

Note

Sara Joy wrote on

From years of being bored, unsatisfied, or struggling in various jobs and industries, I finally feel like I have come home.

I’m so happy to join an industry with such brilliant, interesting, and gloriously nerdy people—I mean this in the best possible way!

I have attended both Beyond Tellerrand Düsseldorf and CSS Day 2024 and, wow. Huge thank yous to the organisers, speakers, and to the many warm and funny fellow attendees I had the joy to socialise with.

This is my church.

Sara Joy wrote on

Continued from previous comment.

Just a note on my enthusiasm and apparent social butterfly-ness—I’m loving it, but also I feel like an imposter!

I made my own websites as a teen and then tried to do other things with my life, while here and there tinkering with web stuff at a low hobby level.

I came “back” into the industry in 2022 after a couple of years of training myself up, to pivot into it.

I’m still quite new, and there is so much I don’t know! I thank the twitter exodus & Mastodon for helping me find my people 💖

Sara Joy wrote on

Continued from previous comment.

It’s quite odd chatting with people who talk to me about stuff that has happened in the last 20 years of web development, which given my apparent age, I should probably know about—but nope, such a n00b.

From 1999 with bare html with all the styling integrated into it, into nascent CSS, to one later job where I made a sorely needed database plus the UI to manipulate it with MySQL, php, etc…

I then skipped at least a decade—maybe 2—of change and progress and popped back up in 2020/2021!

Sara Joy wrote on

Continued from previous comment.

I was lost, tbh. Why do I need the command line now? Where should I point FileZilla? Who are you calling a “git”? Wtf is npm? Where’s “web design” gone? UX? What do front end developers do? Is that what I want?

The twitter dev community helped me so much! Answering my questions and encouraging me to keep pushing. I found excellent articles and ideas to help me move forward.

If there’s anything I miss from twitter now, it’s all the other beginners. People who maybe I could help up after me. 🪜

Sara Joy wrote on

Continued from previous comment.

All these people I’d come to admire on twitter started heading over to Mastodon. I started using the account I’d set up there when Musk brought his kitchen sink in, and everyone was so follow-back-happy then!

It felt like cheating, totally short-circuiting the huge hustle and consistent engagement effort required in twitter to even get *seen* never mind *replied to* or *followed back*.

So people know me. I turn up to this flagship CSS event for the first time and mingle HARD. I’m so grateful 🧡

Max Böck wrote on

In reply to: @sarajw@front-end.social.

I heard something by Conan O’Brien once where he says how important it is to “find your people” in life. Find a community that is excited about the same things you are, and welcomes your participation. I think the web enables us to do that, and the front-end bubble (to me) absolutely feels like “my people”. So many friends here that I’ve never met IRL, but I know we would hit it off instantly.

Manuel Matuzović wrote on

In reply to: @mxbck@front-end.social, @sarajw@front-end.social.

after all these years spending time together online I feel so close to many of you that I feel save writing you and asking for a place to crash for a night if necessary.

Matthias Zöchling wrote on

In reply to: @mxbck@front-end.social.

Woah, there’s a lot to unpack here. @sarajw@front-end.social shared a personal story in an inspirational thread, that was then successfully derailed by Austria’s famous WebDev couple @matuzo@front-end.social and @mxbck@front-end.social (they can’t deny their Twitter upbringing 😬). At last, Max brought it to a halt with an accessibility pattern I hadn’t come across so far: Alt text for an image that never existed in the first place! How do we call this, … “text”?

Get involved

Have your say on Mastodon, or simply share this thread.