Angélique Weger is a coder, designer, teacher, learner and overall enthusiast. This is her blog.
Generally, I do a lot of reading – books, yes, but also blog posts, articles, newsletters, the like. And, lately, I’ve been doing some thinking about what I intake, what I do with it, and how to develop some reinforcing habits so my relationship to what I read isn’t fleeting. For books, I already do a fair amount of highlighting and notetaking. I capture and review those using Readwise , but…
Back in 2022, I switched from using Goodreads to Storygraph . At the time, Storygraph didn’t have an API, so I wrote a small bit of JavaScript to load my currently reading page in Storygraph and gather some data from the page: Book title Author Cover photo Link to the book’s page in Storygraph I then used that data to display my current reads on my /now page. Now, many years later, Storgraph still…
One year ago, I started a new job with the Maryland Department of Labor. I had worked for startups, for a university, for museums and other nonprofits, for myself – but never before for a government. I didn’t fully understand what it means to be a government employee (nor do I profess to know it all today, a mere 365 days later), but I was encouraged and even enthused by the examples before me in…
On the last day of 2021, I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts. Two days later, I also deleted my Goodreads account. Not exactly a new year’s resolution, but more like a decision to not bring those things with me into my new year. This decision was something I saw as an eventuality. Even as I continued to use the services — running a Facebook group, liking photos on Instagram — I knew I was…
Exactly three years ago, I made my own private copy of Coraline ’s lftm and pushed my first commit. Unbelievably, I have kept it up, almost every workday, since then. LFTM stands for low-friction task management system, and I’ve mentioned it before here . LFTM introduction # The README in Coraline’s repo really spells out the simplicity of this system: The system consists of a number of folders,…
There’s a fair amount of angst about how much there is to learn in web development (and often front-end dev specifically ). 1 As someone who wrote her first HTML 25 years ago, I get it. It’s a lot , and it keeps growing. Which is why, especially when hiring devs, I care way more about how you learn than what you currently know. If you don’t have a flexible and strategic learning system, I…
Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), an opportunity to share and spread knowledge about digital accessibility and inclusion. Building awareness remains an important goal for web accessibility 1 , as many folx who are building for the web are unfamiliar with web accessibility, both what it means to users and how to implement it in their digital products. Accessibility is not reliably…
In this series, I’ve shared how and why I started working remotely , what has made me a successful remote employee for over a decade , and why I think 2020 was more about working through a pandemic than a great experiment in remote work . Hopefully this was good, relevant or even validating information and now we’re left with: What, therefore, should I do? 1 Working — and, more specifically,…
To wrap up this series on remote work , I’m going to focus on the things that improve a remote worker’s life. In this article, I’ll share what has worked for me on an individual level and, in a later post, tackle what can be done and offered at the company/team level. First, a reality check about what working remotely has looked like for me. Photo by AdrienBe from Pixabay Pre-COVID, your social…
Since the middle of 2020, folx have been fretting and opining about worker productivity in articles, in blogs, on Twitter. Newly remote workers had barely plugged in and opened their laptops, and yet there was a sudden gnashing of teeth about whether anything would get done in this new environment. Framing this conversation around the viability of remote work is, to me, pretty deceptive. In…
I have been working remotely since 2007. When I accepted that first work-from-home role, I didn’t expect it to be a lifestyle and was simply making a convenient choice: My husband was already commuting over 40 miles one way for his job We had a single car We were raising my brother, who was about to start middle school Working from home gave me the opportunity to be there when my brother got out…
For the last five years, the community at Dev.to has used International Women’s Day as an impetus to share the stories of women who code. Since I’ve been active there as a reader and commenter (in addition to cross-posting my blog there), I decided to participate. Read my post for some sweet '80s and '90s tech nostalgia and enjoy the posts by other members of the Dev.to community .
Before sharing some of the details and process I used to migrate this site from Middleman to Eleventy, I think it’s helpful to provide some context behind my choice. First and foremost, there’s not a damn thing wrong with Middleman. 🤷🏻♀️ Honestly, working on Middleman had only gotten easier for me since I had been developing on Windows back when I started the site in 2015 and had since moved to…
Since my team is currently hiring, how we go about hiring for tech roles is very much on my mind right now. I’ve participated in hiring on three different teams now (on both sides of the hiring equation), and my own thinking and process has evolved. Designing an interview gauntlet # On my first team, I transitioned from being a freelance contractor to a full-time hire and never experienced their…
On January 6, like so many other Americans, I watched a scary and violent thing unfold in our nation’s Capitol. Because I watched things happening in real time on my screen — on the PBS News Hour livestream, but also in people’s responses in Twitter and various community Slacks — I was aware that, in addition to the immediate stressful events, there was also an undercurrent of 'How am I supposed…
Last year, in what must have been a pique of new year energy, I started working on both redesigning this blog and investigating what it might take to migrate it from Middleman to Eleventy . While all my previous experience with static site generators had been with ones that were Ruby based (specifically Middleman and Jekyll), I learned of Eleventy when I was looking for a static site generator I…
I’ve been thinking a lot about teams and, based on my own lucky experiences, what makes them work well. I’ve been at Fractured Atlas for almost three months now and am legitimately delighted at how quickly and easily I gelled with my new team. The one thing I keep coming back to when trying to describe why I’ve been able to connect so quickly and accomplish so much is this: Safety. I'm so into my…
With the exception of an original iMac I worked on for a couple years after graduation, my personal computers have always been, well, PCs. I’ve also had a progression of Android smartphones and tablets, plus a mostly abandoned Ubuntu laptop, but 99% of the time I’m sitting down to a machine with a keyboard, it’s had a Windows OS. Until last week — when I unpacked the refurbished MacBook Pro I’m…
I finally conquered a technical challenge that had been stumping me for awhile. This blog runs on Middleman, which requires Ruby and a slew of other things that aren’t necessary in my work dev environment (i.e., the laptop I usually take with me when I travel). This is clearly something I didn’t think through when starting up this blog—clearly evidenced by the “location” metadata I set up and have…
While this could easily be a commitment to a new year, a reboot for my blog (I know it’s been awhile), first I have to look back, to write something that’s been in my head since September and shares things beyond even 2015. (Spoiler alert: This post is going to be just a word dump and sans technical/code examples.) Professionally, 2015 was the best year I’ve ever had, better than any I would have…
I wrote previously about how to set up your Windows command prompt to work better and wanted to add to that ways I’ve customized my interface of choice ( Cmder FTW) to make my command line more efficient and enjoyable for me to use. Changing the appearance # First, as with all things — including this blog! — I get things displaying using Solarized Dark . Solarized is color theme for text editors…
When I started using Git and later learning Ruby, the command line became a place I hung out regularly. Being a Windows user, there were some early frustrations because many of the commands referred to in tutorials and walkthroughs weren’t available to me, e.g. pwd , touch , sudo . Since OSX, the Apple OS has been built on top of Unix, Mac users are able to open up Terminal and use the same…
There’s been enough coverage in the last year, that most folx accept tech has a diversity problem. The documentary Code: Debugging the Gender Gap looks at this issue 1 , it’s history, causes and impact. While, honestly, I went into this documentary with the sense that it would be akin to preaching to the choir, I was pleasantly surprised at how many new things I learned. As a result, I feel the…
If you’ve decided Sass is snazzy and want to learn more, I’ve gathered up some links I’ve found useful and hope you do, too. Reading & learning about Sass # While you might not start out reading the Sass documentation , sooner or later you’ll end up there in order to learn more about a feature of Sass or its limitations. For example, after just saying earlier this month that I don’t do much…
Using variables for colors is awesome; naming those variables can be…complicated. I’ve worked through a few different methodologies and wanted to share a bit about what I’ve learned along the way. Need an into to WHY colors and Sass are awesome? I wrote about this and gave some examples in a previous post . Why name colors # Regardless of what system you use, the goal is usually the same: To make…
Back in the days when I was still intimidated by the command line, the lure of variables convinced me to figure out how to start using Sass in my projects. Just like I no longer memorize phone numbers because they’re all pre-programmed into my cell phone, I also don’t have to memorize the hex values of brand colors or entire web project color palettes due to the awesomeness of Sass. Intro to Sass…
True story: I wrote my first lines of Ruby in February and used that wee bit of knowledge that to motivate myself to start this blog using a Ruby-on-Rails-based static site generator ( Middleman FTW!) and used that experience to give a talk to the Bmore on Rails meetup…46 days after I wrote those first few lines of Ruby. Which is a long-winded way of saying, getting things running on Middleman —…
I don’t follow all the advice I receive via social media and blogs (because, oh, what a surreal life I would lead then!), but a blog by Garann Means found its way to my Twitterstream via Andy Mangold , and it is pretty much why this blog exists. Because I have been out here adapting, writing and honing code since my first Geocities (yup!) site in 1996. And I have written many, many, many things…