A couple weeks ago I finally attended Florida DrupalCamp, a camp I had wanted to attend for years! Not only was it the first time I attended, but it was my first time speaking at this conference and my first time speaking at any conference since New England Drupal Camp in 2019! It was such a fun camp and I got to see some of my favorite people in the Drupal community.
Thursday: Arrival
I flew in on Thursday afternoon and immediately got drinks to kick off the camp—it was great to catch up with some people and enjoy a tasty Florida beer in a low key environment! After a couple other coworkers arrived, we all made our way to a Korean BBQ place and we enjoyed so much delicious food and sushi. I ended the evening by going to the same ‘low-key’ bar I had gone to when I first arrived, but it turned into a college student drink haven at night! We shouted at each other over music too loud for this old lady and got back to the hotel at a reasonable hour.
Friday: Training and contribution day
I didn’t attend any trainings on Friday, but I did want to attend the camp to work on my session, learn how to contribute code to Drupal using merge requests, and of course, talk to people! I ran errands with my old pal and former coworker Mike Herchel, and he showed me and my current coworker / session co-presenter Adam Varn the ways of the merge request! I finally got the hang of it after Mike showed me, and it came in handy on Sunday during the contribution day. We ended the day with a couple drinks and great conversation.
Saturday: Session day!
After a fun couple days hanging with coworkers and Drupal friends, it was time for the camp to officially start! After picking up my badge and attending the opening announcements, I attended a lot of fantastic sessions.
Working with Layout Paragraphs: an Easy-to-Use, Drag-and-Drop Content Editing Tool for Drupal by Justin Toupin
I’ve used Layout Paragraphs in a project before and I’ve liked it, so I was interested to hear how others used the module and any best practices to follow. To be honest, I don’t remember much about this session because this was right before our session, but from what I can recall, I thought this session was pretty informative.
New things we love and more things we want in CSS by Adam Varn and… me!
Picture courtesy of @symfonystation@phpc.social.
I had so much fun giving this talk and nerding out about CSS with Adam and the people attending the session! We talked about awesome new CSS goodness such as container queries (supported in all modern browsers as of February 14th, 2023!) and :is and :where, and things we want such as subgrid and color-contrast. We ran into a technical difficulty with our slides, but we recovered (fairly) gracefully and continued on with the session. I’m so glad to be back in action speaking at conferences!
I met Andy a few years ago at Design 4 Drupal Boston and he started working on my client team the week of the camp, so of course I wanted to check out his session on accessible Javascript! He talked about accessible navigation and modals and I really want to use his navigation techniques on our project.
Next Drupal admin UI improvements by Cristina Chumillas
Picture courtesy of @symfonystation@phpc.social.
Cristina spoke to a full house about new improvements in Drupal’s UI and ways to contribute! She discussed an initiative to create a new dashboard for the Drupal admin pages and urged people to help out with the CSS modernization initiative. It was a great session and I came away from it excited for the future of Drupal.
The 10 Most Useful Libraries in Drupal 10 Core by Andy Blum
Andy’s a great speaker and I always enjoy attending his talks! In this talk, he listed some useful libraries in Drupal core such as once() and debounce(). I absolutely loved his slides, too, and it was a great session to attend at the end of the day.
We ended the day with lightning talks! People who wanted to participate wrote their name on a whiteboard and each person spoke for about 10 minutes about pretty much anything. One person talked about ChatGPT, another showed off a cool robot, and Mike Anello discussed his grievances with Drupal. It was funny and fast paced and I really enjoyed it!
Afterparty!
After the lightning talks, we all headed over to the afterparty, a venue with bowling, axe throwing, corn hole, beer pong, and many other games! After a few hours of fun, we ended the night by checking out a dive karaoke bar in what felt like the other side of town. It was a great way to close a pretty fun day.
The Lullabot crew after games and karaoke. We clearly enjoyed ourselves.
Sunday: Contribution day
On Sunday morning I got up, checked out of the hotel, and made my way to the venue. I spent the majority of the day participating in the CSS Modernization Initiative, updating Drupal’s 10’s CSS to be more modern after dropping IE11 support. Now we can use CSS custom properties, logical properties, and even nesting with the magic of PostCSS! I was super jazzed to be refactoring code and using some of the techniques I had discussed the previous day.
After a long, fun day of coding, chatting, and eating pizza, I flew home, returning to a harsh New England winter after a few days in sunny Florida. I’m so glad I finally attended Florida DrupalCamp and I hope to attend (and speak!) again next year!
Note: I posted about this on Mastodon a couple days ago, only because I couldn’t make myself sit down and write a blog post about this due to getting in my own head about my writing. Well, tonight I decided to just sit down and write, perfection be damned!
I haven’t ever picked a yearly word or phrase, but this year, one popped into my head: challenge accepted. I don’t know how I came up with this word and why it didn’t appear to me until late February, but it fits for where I am now in my life.
After a couple tumultuous years (The pandemic! A breakup! Impostor syndrome! Mental health stuff probably due to all of the above!), I spent 2022 spending a ton of time by myself, taking it easy and resting and writing and learning what I want out of life. Maybe this also came from turning 40 in 2020, but after taking this time in 2022, I feel more myself than I have in years and I feel more ready to take on the world, both easy and hard.
In the past, when faced with difficult things, my impulse was to hide or cry or criticize myself. Now, after a year of self reflection, I face difficulty with curiosity and wonder and take it as an opportunity to learn even more about myself and why I react to things the way I do. it’s hard but in a different way, the kind of challenge that feels good on the other side. Instead of hiding from difficulty, I face it head on. Challenge accepted, I say, because I know I’m strong enough to face almost anything.
This took me a million and a half years to write, but finally, here's my 2022 in review!
The good!
I started running again. Yes, I've started running in both 2020 and 2021, but in 2022, I stuck with it and completed Couch to 5k over the summer! I even ran two 5ks this year and I'm happy to be back at it.
I danced in a recital! Yes, my sister and I signed up for adult hip hop classes at my niece's dance studio, and we danced in our first show right before the holidays! I am not the greatest dancer in the world, but it's fun. I can't wait for our big show in June!
I'm finding things to do in western Massachusetts. I've joined a few Meetup groups, one for women in the area, a knitting group, a board game group, and a craft beer group. I've been staying busy with all these groups and I hope to continue attending these groups in 2023!
I traveled! In 2022, I traveled to Palm Springs for the Lullabot retreat, Portland OR for DrupalCon Portland, Charlotte to see my brother, Des Moines for work, Providence to visit friends, Portland ME for an extended weekend solo trip, Rhinebeck with my knitting friends, and New England Drupal Camp. I knocked a new state off the list--Iowa! I'm glad to have started traveling again.
I took care of myself. In 2022 I started getting manicures every two weeks with my family, and that relaxation time helped me a lot. I meditated, did yoga, wrote in my journal, practiced gratitude, and took walks. I spent a lot of time by myself this year, to learn more about who I am and what I want. I'm grateful to have that experience in 2022!
My career grew leaps and bounds. Related to the above item in regards to taking care of myself, I became much more confident at work. In 2022, I started working towards a lead developer role, which means more meetings and less code, but this move feels right to me. I'm still coding day to day, but I'm stepping more into a mentorship role and assisting other developers on the team with tasks. Things finally fell into place career-wise in 2022 and I'm excited to see how I grow professionally in 2023!
Bye, Twitter. Earlier in the year, I created a Mastodon account on my friend Tom's server but didn't use it much until Twitter was bought in late October. Since then, I've not posted or looked at Twitter and I don't see myself going there again. It's too bad because I met many fantastic friends on the site, but Mastodon looks to be a great place to continue meeting even more people. That's what matters to me.
The not good
The hardest thing to happen this year was the end of my long-term relationship. We had gotten back together at the end of 2021 but we both quickly realized that it was over, and we split at the start of 2022. Yeah, the beginning of 2022 wasn't fun at all!
Unfortunately, I got Covid in 2022 after my trip to DrupalCon Portland. Thankfully I didn't feel super horrible and I don't have any long-term effects from it--I'm grateful for that.
I'm gutted about the overturning of Roe v Wade and all the unnecessary mass shootings that happened in this country this year--those are more than 'not good' but they fall in this category.
This post has taken me an eternity to write. I hoped to get this out on the ol' blog before the new year, but here we are, January 12th and I'm finally posting it. I hope everyone's year's going well and I hope to have a post with my 2023 goals up soon.
For the last three years, I've compiled a list of good things that happened in the past year. Well, this year, it's been much harder for me to want to write about the good things because of, well, everything. Ending a long-term relationship during a global pandemic a month before turning 40? Yeah, 2020 was awful.
Still, a few good things did happen this year, so I'll note them here.
I started running again for the first time in 6 years. I stopped when it got too cold, but I'm confident I will pick it up again once it warms up and once I don't have to wear a mask to run outdoors.
I discovered the joy of fountain pens.
Before the pandemic, I spent a week in Palm Springs with my team for our company retreat. It was such a fantastic time and I'm glad I was able to take one trip this year.
I moved to a new apartment with an in-unit washer and dryer. Enough said!
I listened to a LOT of #ClubQuarantine on Gabriel & Dresden's Twitch stream. I wasn't a Twitch user before the pandemic, and now I watch so many DJ sets every week.
I don't have any wise words for the end of this post. 2020 was so rough and horrible and I don't even know what 2021 will bring.
Well, looks like I forgot to write a weeknotes post last week, and here it is, Monday morning, and I haven't written this week's post yet! This post will be quick and short, and I'm hoping to do better with writing a weeknotes post every week again.
Today I'm attending An Event Apart Online Together: Front-End Focus. I'm excited to spend the day watching excellent sessions by Jeremy Keith, Ire Aderinokun, Una Kravets, and more! I look forward to learning about improving CSS performance and modern CSS tips and tricks. Plus, I can watch the conference from the comfort of my own home, which means knitting and tea while I watch. Can't go wrong with that!
I've started studying for the CPACC exam I mentioned in my last weeknotes post. I've been interested in web accessibility since 2004 when I came across Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Accessibility series, and my interest grew further after my father became a quadriplegic in 2010 while watching him try to access the internet with limited mobility. It's taken me awhile to muster up the confidence to put my accessibility knowledge in action, and getting this certification will further my expertise. I'm nervous about taking the exam in a couple months, but if I study, I know I can pass.
Big surprise, I haven't done any work on my website in the past couple weeks! As always, it's hard for me to want to spend time on my computer after coding all day during the week. I'd rather be knitting, writing in my journal with my fountain pens, cooking, watching Star Trek, or listening to music. It's hard to find the time to code more after hours because I do so many other activities in my non-working hours. I do want to finish up the Netlify Large Media work I started a few weeks ago, plus I want to run most of my images through ImageOptim to ensure my images are as small as they can be without losing quality.
In non-tech news, I'm on Week 3 of Couch to 5k. I ran almost 2 miles in the rain this morning -- I've missed running in the rain! I can see my progress, little by little, but it's not getting any easier running while wearing a mask. I keep on thinking how much easier running will feel to me once I don't have to wear a mask outdoors, whenever that will be. I've also still been practicing yoga on the days I don't run, and I've sucked it up and went to the dentist to get a teeth cleaning for the first time in 4.5 years. I've been wanting to do better with health-related things, and I feel so much relief after finally going to the dentist. My life is oh-so exciting.
That's it for this week! This week I hope to get Large Media up and running on this site and to actually write my weeknotes post on Sunday. Wish me luck!
