Stephanie Stimac talks about the web platform, design, product management and life in tech.
Chloe woke up at 2:30 AM and 4:30 AM again after a weekend of not waking up until 5 or 6 AM. Woe is me. I'm starting this morning groggy and making my cup of coffee right away instead of waiting the usual hour or so to make it. There was a small miscommunication and Jhey was just on vacation last week, not his paternity leave so I'm planning to work two half days and (hopefully) one full day this…
I'm feeling like superwoman this morning because Chloe was once again UP early and I was up at 2:00 AM and from 3:00-4:00 AM trying to soothe her back to sleep. I get back up at 6:00 AM to start the day. I am planning to go to barre class and take Chloe with. Normally Jhey watches her if I have a workout class but I decided to take her with me today. It is just me and another woman in class so I…
The plan for today was to work a full day and I did that. I'm only back at work part-time so this week's schedule is a bit all over the place as I figure out the flow of things. I met with one of my colleagues, and he recapped all the projects for the Web Platform team. There is a lot going on, and it was a lot of information to process even at a high level. Half of the year is nearly gone so many…
Today was a bit shorter of a work day since I worked more than I was planning to yesterday. This morning's routine was off by about an hour with a groggy wake up after 7. Despite successfully going to bed early and not falling asleep on the couch, Chloe decided to wake up at 1:00 AM last night. It's like she knows when I go to bed early. I did manage to get to a barre class in the morning which…
I started work back up again yesterday, June 1, as a remote tech worker for an open source consultancy. My husband started his paternity leave today. I'm only going back part-time for the moment so my rough plan is to work 3 days a week with the exception of this week, as I wanted to open my laptop, clear out my inbox, setup my Notion pages for 2026, change my away message and just try to get a…
Today is my last day of maternity leave. Chloe is down for her morning nap and I'm trying to process the last 5 months and where it has all gone and all these complicated feelings. I want to go back to work and I don't. I am only going back part-time for a few months but it still feels like a massive shift is about to happen. Chloe is on a pretty good routine at the moment and just learned to roll…
And suddenly it happens one day in March. The sun beams down in a rare cloudless sky. It might be cold as the wind gently blows but The Sun. The Sun beams down and it promises Long nights on the horizon. It promises miserable humid days And lovely warm days. Harsh mid-day light. Dreamy golden evenings. It comes out to announce Winter's end before It once again disappears behind England's cloudy…
Note: I started this blog post at six weeks postpartum. It is now eight weeks postpartum as I am finally able to finish and hit publish. Six weeks ago I gave birth to my daughter. In some ways it didn't go according to plan. I had hoped to have a water birth. I imagined arriving to the birth unit and getting in the tub, but if that didn't feel okay then I would get an epidural because my pain…
When I reflect on 2025 it's hard to not focus on one thing: that I was pregnant (and still am as of this moment. Due in 2 weeks.) It is easy to just say that's what the year was full of and that's that. 4 months before I found out I was pregnant, I had written down my 2024 recap and what my hopes and dreams for 2025 were. They were as follows: Exploring more of the UK Get my UK license Establish a…
tl;dr summary # I'm heading out on maternity leave a little earlier than planned. I'm not sure where the last eight and a half months have gone but here we are! It's a very weird feeling to be prepping and handing off projects. All of my co-workers have been so lovely and supportive, and were especially supportive when I said I needed to start my leave earlier. These final weeks have been so…
Social media feels like it's in the throes of decay. Not just one platform, but multiple platforms. We've lost the social aspect and are only getting the media, and the general vibe I'm getting from people is that they're tired. The frustration with Instagram is palpable with folks on Threads. Creators are tired of their content not being shown to their followers and followers are tired of not…
Perhaps you're not aware of data privacy laws and didn't think you needed to be, and maybe that's okay...until it's not. If you're a brand, a content creator, or just someone on the internet, and you come across someone sharing their email on a platform for the purpose of being contacted for an opportunity, collaboration, maybe you have a question...those are all fine reasons to use someone's…
“Tabs were great, but we haven’t seen a lot of browser innovation since then.” These are brave words spoken by the CEO of a company that's using Chromium to power their new browser, which, at the time of writing this, they even failed to attribute correctly . I wish I could say I'm shocked, but this is a company led by someone who thinks artists, creators, writers, etc should not be paid for their…
Over the last two months I've felt a noticeable decline in my mental health. I attribute this to multiple unrelated things intersecting. Since becoming pregnant, I've felt more isolated than ever. The activities that I normally engage in have become a struggle. While I've got more energy now, a day out with a lot of walking takes it out of me. My village of people is in Seattle. Even in trying to…
I've been trying to make an effort to more intentionally pick something to watch when the weekend rolls around. While I've enjoyed the Grey's Anatomy binge I started during this pregnancy, it feels like a work week ritual -- something to put on in the background or pay half attention to. On the weekend, I've had the desire to create a different kind of ritual, one that feels more deliberate. After…
April was precisely what I was expecting it to be: exhausting. I'm still recovering from our trip to Seattle at the end of April. It turns out I never posted my draft covering the month of March and April, so I will attempt to cover the highlights. The excerpt above is from my draft. It turns out I wasn't recovering from our trip. It turns out, I was pregnant (am pregnant). It has completely…
"You look tired." Well, I'm pregnant and in the first trimester. I'm currently trying to prevent myself from throwing up, while needing to force myself eat every 2 hours despite not really exercising and needing to sleep for what seems like 12 hours a day all totaled up, and then there's the anxiety when something doesn't quite feel or look right. Then there's the intense aversion to foods and…
We arrived back from Seattle on a Tuesday, and I was thankful to be UK side after the most horrific airport experience at SeaTac the previous day, in which nothing went to plan and America's incompetence really shined bright. I actually broke down in the TSA line. Something I have never done before. I barely made it to the Arsenal match on the following Saturday, feeling wildly fatigued, my…
I really haven't done a review of my months since November. I've been deep in hibernation mode, conserving energy for what will be a busy few months. I started to write a log about what happened in March, the first March that did not drag on this year, at least for me, but now it's May and April was precisely what I was expecting it to be: exhausting. I'm still recovering from our trip to Seattle…
Early yesterday morning, on the second day of Blink On, I received the news that I had officially moved from Staff level to Pre-Partner at Igalia. This largely means that I now participate in decision-making with the rest of those Igalians who are pre-partners and partners. I received what feels like a waterfall of new information and new responsibilities. This is good and exciting! You should…
My manicurist is showing me the Easter nail art she's been practicing. A cute little bunny stares up at me from her plastic practice nail. She's telling me about another piece of nail art that took her a year to master for Valentine's Day. She's joking about putting the bunny art on her CV. "You should be proud of it, people can see what's possible," I say. In the back of my mind I'm teetering on…
March 11th marked my one year anniversary at Igalia. It simultaneously feels like the blink of an eye and also decade. I suspect that's just the way life goes. It has been a busy year of rebuilding my self-confidence in my career. Despite it being 2 years since relocating to Berlin and being laid off, I am still mending the trauma of 2023, and working at Igalia has been instrumental in that.…
In a recent experience while building a website, I tried to use ChatGPT to help me out with JavaScript. Something I've never needed to fully learn because my work has always been divided by JavaScript devs and HTML/CSS devs. A long time ago I used to be able to write bits in JQuery but that knowledge is long faded. The point is, I've never had to sit down and learn anything beyond the basics of…
If your response to a lineup dominated by men is, "There are almost no women in this field," I'm afraid that reveals a lack of effort to curate an event with diverse, interesting perspectives. It suggests you haven’t prioritized thoughtful research or meaningful outreach—and if you’re not putting care into the core experience of your event, that likely extends to every other aspect of it. If only…
I don't know what I wanted out of 2024, and I think that's okay. I started the year focused on trying to figure out the next thing for me career-wise. I did some freelance design work, even designed a whole app for someone, and continued with the interviews but every time a company asked for a presentation and 6 rounds, I bowed out. Hiring in tech needs to be revamped from the ground up in my…
My goal for 2024 was to read 30 books. I had set a stretch goal despite not meeting my 2023 goal. I finished 31 books in 2024 and I am damn proud of that. I found myself prioritizing reading and having more time to do so. Perhaps it was finally abandoning Twitter, after realizing it's descent into a toxic cesspool was no longer reversible, and finding that when you're not scrolling mindlessly or…
As I have spent the last 6 months starting to explore the rather precarious position we've placed web ecosystem in, with regard to how browsers are maintained and funded, I thought I'd dive into another angle: The ways that web platform features get prioritized and built. I worked on Microsoft Edge, so I have direct experience working on a browser team. My current work is at Igalia , which is an…
I was re-designing the footer for my blog when I added a list of social icon links. I needed to add some padding between them, as one does, and was preparing to apply padding to the left of each icon so the final icon on the right remained aligned right. On smaller screens, when my footer wraps, this means I would need to write some more CSS to switch the padding to the right so the icon on the…
I am writing this from the desert where we've had a lovely few days of food and football (both American and English). I've found this trip a bit harder to adjust to the timezone and environment and have been struggling with energy levels so we haven't gone biking. It could just be my body's way of forcing me to rest as the year winds down. November's energy definitely brought a lot of slowing down…
Six years ago the thought of standing on a stage to give a talk made me physically ill. Six years later and 30 times on stage giving a talk, it still actually does make me physically ill but not to such a severe degree that it did then. One of my friends is back in school and had to give a presentation to her professors, so she asked me for some tips. Also, in case anyone needs proof that you can…
October was once again a blur in which I tried to soak up all the autumn vibes in between trips. I headed back to Seattle & Bellingham for another wedding party in the bestie group. I managed to snap a very faint photo of the aurora from Alki beach while back home in the UK, Jhey got a full light show, no camera needed. Figures! I attended AWE EU, which is my first event in a long time that puts…
Form controls are notoriously difficult to style, something the web community has been talking about for years. In 2019, when I was still at Microsoft, I had been working with Greg Whitworth to start evangelizing the work that was being planned for <select> , as well as the Open UI community group that would help bring this plan to life. There's a lot that has happened in that five years, and more…
September was incredibly busy across work and personal life. I am out of a routine and trying to find my way back to writing regularly (among creating in general) while also making sure I spend time doing things I enjoy. As soon as I publish this I'm off to decide what to bake and then go hang out and read and maybe make some soup. It's soup season. Life in England # We celebrated our anniversary…
I spoke at State of the Browser a few weeks ago in London, and I want to reflect on what an absolutely lovely community of people organize and attend that event. It is my second time speaking and third time attending. Thank you for once again making me feel welcome & allowing me to tell you how dismantling global capitalism relates to funding of open source software and the web platform. I…
I'm not so sure I like calling these "Life checks"...perhaps going forward I will call them something else. Maybe time to bring back The Web Witch's Grimoire but make it monthly. Much to my dismay, it's already September, and I'm sat here looking back on the last three months thinking, "did that go the way you expected it to?" And the answer is yes it did. I feared the amount of travel would make…
Everything is the same and yet everything is different. That's how I feel sitting on the edge of the water in West Seattle. I've not been living here since January 2023. I've been back 5 or 6 times in the last year and a half and suddenly the buildings that were steel bones and scaffolding are complete. New shops and hotels abound across the lake in Bellevue. When was the last time I was in…
The speed at which the pace of life changes around here is a little bit like whiplash. I had been mapping out summer a few months ago, and suddenly it's July. I've been to Spain for a week, and then to London and Bristol, I went with Jhey for a week, where he spoke at Config in San Francisco. I've just had my last conference talk of the summer and am enjoying the Croatian coastline for the…
I've just realized I never posted here about my book, Design for Developers , going to print and being published last August (2023). It's almost been a year! I have links throughout this site pointing to it, but I never took a moment to celebrate the three years of work it took from start to being delivered to my door. I want to take a moment to mark that now, because I just received a few copies…
Microsoft announced it is deprecating support for the CSS properties -ms-high-contrast and -ms-high-contrast-adjust in favor of the forced colors standard. There will be a deprecation period and there's an origin trial and a feature flag so you can ensure your updated CSS is working correctly. All the details are over on the Microsoft Developer Blog: Deprecating support for -ms-high-contrast and…
When I was interviewing for a role with Microsoft Edge in early 2016, I got to my final interview in the loop and I can still remember sitting across from my soon-to-be manager when he asked about the future of the web. HoloLens had been announced, so I must have had that in my mind because I answered with a question. "What if you could crawl into a web page?" And began to describe what it would…
I make a habit of browsing web platform features to see what's new and interesting and moving along in the browser space. It also leads to discovering things that have been around a while that I haven't heard of before. In one such instance, this is how I discovered @media(monochrome) . I found this media query particularly relevant with what seems to be an onslaught of e-ink devices making their…
After my first two weeks at Igalia, while everything is new, it also feels as if I've come back home after 2 years away from the web platform space. There is so much new information about web platform projects to digest and I've been slowly figuring out how things work around here. Igalia is a flat structure cooperative, which is really cool, but also really new to me and also feels incredibly…
My desk setup in the UK is slowly coming together & Jhey picked out a microphone for me. I had a Blue Yeti microphone in the US...and I still do it's just in storage. It had issues with staying connected through a dongle after my work MacBook was upgraded and I didn't have the normal, big USB plug anymore. It was a fine starter microphone but it was big and bulky. I knew I didn't want the Yeti…
One of the more painful experiences I've encountered on the web is filling out a form input that is fixed width. Whatever I've typed becomes cutoff and I can't actually see what I've typed or am typing. On desktop, I usually click and drag to highlight the text to see the cutoff text. Mobile can be even more annoying, resulting in trying to copy and paste my text somewhere to ensure I've not…
We've started the new year and the layoff news just keeps hitting. In April 2023, I was laid off from my product management role that I had just relocated to Berlin for, barely 4 months earlier. I'm still in the process of interviewing for a role. I did have some life things to sort through during this time that made applying to roles really difficult so I had some very limited criteria when the…
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Jhey and I have been going back and forth on naming our CSS project and I am once again reminded how terribly hard it is to name things. You want something that stands out, but when you go to research what's available from a branding perspective, the prospects are grim. We initially landed on The Cascade and created a newsletter sign up page, but about 10 others have had the same name idea so we…
My goal for 2023 was to read 24 books. I read 21, just shy of 22. I don't get particularly hung up on whether or not I met my goal unless it's really abysmally off target. I ended up reading many 700+ page fantasy books this year so when I average that out, that's nearly 3 "normal" books. I didn't read as many educational or historical books this year. I was largely in an escapist mood. Most…
2 international moves 21 books read / 14000 pages read 612 copies of Design for Developers sold (the eBook is 50% off as of 12/30, grab a copy!) 9 countries visited 2 bucket list places crossed off 63,431 miles flown 1 lay off 6 months unemployed but... 8 freelance projects completed 15 interviews 40+ job applications 93 products on Amazon sold based on my designs since August 6 Etsy sales 243…