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What I'm Doing Now

An on & off log of what I’m currently doing/interested in. Slower paced than a twitter feed but less permanent then an about page.
Now pages are becoming more common, you should make one for yourself!

April, 2024

Updated my now page for the first time in a year… That’s why the last year of updates are so sparse. I honestly couldn’t remember much.

Still jobless.

March, 2024

Brodie’s birthday! 🎉

Diagnosed with POTS.

Wrote some banger posts, How do I survive? and Front-end development’s identity crisis.

Still jobless.

February, 2024

Still jobless.

January, 2024

Officially jobless.

Helped Brodie out tabling at Dark Moon Expo.

Brodie got covid for the second time, I miraculously managed to avoid it.

December, 2023

I’m being made redundant.

Made some amazing new friends.

November, 2023

I might be made redundant.

Helped Brodie out tabling at Raven Witch’s Market.

October, 2023

September, 2023

Had an extremely belated birthday party.

August, 2023

It’s my birthday!

July, 2023

Flew to Sydney for my grand pa’s funeral.

Took a week off because I’m burnt out. Wasn’t enough.

June, 2023

May, 2023

April, 2023

Helped Brodie out tabling in the artist alley at their first convention, Supanova Melbourne. nervousghost.com

Started working my way through Sara Soueidan’s Practical Accessibility course, and I’m absolutely loving it so far.

Trying to help improve our design systems practice at Portable. Governance and direction are my top priorities.

After some discussions, we’ve realised that it’s not so much the “Portable Design System” as the “Portable Design System Design System”. Design System2. As it’s a Design System for making Design Systems.

Tagged, versioned and released PDS Styles as a package.

March, 2023

I’m no longer a junior! I’m now officially a mid-level developer, or just a developer, but really as y’all know, I’m actually a Design Engineer.

Had the great pleasure of taking part in a Crafting Type workshop, where I got to start crafting my very own typeface! Many thanks to Thomas Phinney and Wayne Thompson.

Helped build a website for Victorian Law Week (yay!) but it was on WebFlow (oh nooo).

Wrote about the accessibility of the different input types.

Still working on building out the Portable Design System, things are slow moving working as a one woman show.

February, 2023

Working on building out the Portable Design System, starting with Styles and Docs.

Revamped the Portable website’s IA/navigation, fixed many many accessibility issues.

Went to DDD by Night as listened to these talks:

Went to Laneway Festival and saw:

January, 2023

I want to learn about generative art, specifically with SVG.

December, 2022

Oop, I’ve moved onto a new Mastodon instance @[email protected]

I’ve also set up a tweetback Twitter archive at twitter.ellyloel.com

November, 2022

So Twitter is a shit show lmao, I’m on Mastodon now @[email protected]

I did a presentation on Solid JS, going from zero knowledge to trying to give a presentation in 2 days is harrrdddddd. Note to self for next time, make slides, you will forget what you want to talk about otherwise 😂.

I also did a presentation on the future of CSS, covering what new things are usable now and what will be usable soon™.

I’m looking into building a component library with WebC, though one of the key usage situation will be in WordPress so I need to figure out how/when to run the compile step.

October, 2022

I got to take part in Portable’s Ethical Human-Centred Design Foundations training session.

Working on matching our figma2theme tool to the Design Tokens Format so that we can use more tools with our tokens, like Style Dictionary.

September, 2022

Been learning a lot about accessibility lately and how sadly a lot of the more complex accessibility focused native HTML elements aren’t yet very accessible (details & dialog).

August, 2022

I’m officially an AWS certified cloud practitioner, what ever that means 😂

Looks like it’s that time again, the clock has struck, and now I am 21 🤯

The fourth version of my website is complete! No more Gatsby or Next, 11ty all the way!!

July 2022

I decided that I actually wanted to work on rebuilding my website using 11ty not Next.JS

Completed Design for developers course by Sarah Drasner on Frontend Masters

Completed Web components course by Dave Rupert on Frontend Masters

Reading Every layout by Andy Bell and Hayden Pickering

Building a Web Component to make stylized text accessible

Hosted a webinar about neurodiversity (Neurodiversity in projects and at Portable)

June 2022

Still working on rebuilding my website using Next.JS

Finished CSS-for-JS Devs by Josh W Comeau

Want to share my love of CSS

Want to get involved with W3C community groups

Want to start using Web Components more

May 2022

Lots of people movements makes me think about moving

Helped Rachel Nabors out with AWS Amplify user research and because of that got access to their Web animation essentials course

Made some Web Components × frameworks showcases:

Working on rebuilding my website using Next.JS

Wondering how people get to be in amazing roles where they get to do things like create video and articles about the web and be members of the CSS working group and many more amazing things.

April 2022

Blogging platform, struggling to choose whether going with a ready to go third party platform or going fully custom is better. I tried weighing up the options in order of least to most “custom” (self hosted/self designed/self coded):

  1. Medium/Dev.to/Hashnode (Third party platform)
    • Completely owned by a third party
    • Ready to go right now, zero setup
  2. Obsidian Publish (Personal third party platform)
    • Owned by a third party but customisable to an extent
  3. Framer Sites (No/low code)
    • Hosted by a third party but fully customisable (as much as a wysiwyg drag and drop can be)
  4. Ghost (OSS CMS)
    • Self hosted option
    • Can be setup with pre-made themes or headless with a custom frontend
  5. Markdown (Custom everything)
    • Fully custom, what my “old” (current) setup is (Gatsby w/ MDX)
    • The sky is the limit, though that can be dangerous when it comes to spending more time coding the platform than actually writing
    • Allows me to keep other aspects of my site integrated all on the same platform (AMA, Tools, Resume, etc.)
    • If I choose this option should I stick with Gatsby or continue switching to Next or use something like Astro?

Web Components are awesome!!!

every-layout.dev looks really interesting

March 2022

Polypane seems awesome

February 2022

Built Portable Justice hub

Budding interest in Web Components

Thinking about the unfortunate truth of stateful design often being ignored or forgotten
Twitter thread

January 2022

Scrimba Podcast episode came out!
https://scrimba.com/podcast/ep-44-elly-loel/

I also made a personal link shortener using Netlify redirects, so all I have to do is run: shorten https://twitter.com/ellyloel twitter which automatically updates the redirects file and pushes up the changes so then we get https://elly.to/twitter

Started CSS-for-JS Devs by Josh W Comeau

December 2021

I remixed a cool Glitch In Bio on Glitch for my partner nervous ghost (https://nervousgh0st.glitch.me/). The combination of simplicity and customisability makes it approachable for anyone. I was able to go in and make more advanced tweaks to set it up, but if my partner ever wants to add or change things they will easily be able to without having to worry about the more complex side.

I finally got all of the bug fixes and small tweaks for my website shipped. Most of the changes were to do with parts of the digital garden (graph, markdown processing, link capturing, etc.) as well as some redirects ‘n’ stuff.

November 2021

I’ve been working on a presentation about neurodiversity with a few colleagues, which we’ll be presenting internally on the 6th of December.

I’ve also been working on fixing up this website as there’s been plenty of big & small bugs plaguing the site.