"Building a personal website in 2022 is a radical act"
Hello there! You subscribed to this newsletter at some point in the last 4 years but it's been dusty for a while. Here's a little intro to get us back in the mix:
I'm Charlotte, based in Brighton in the UK, I love CSS and I love making generative art, especially if I can make it into something physical like jewellery or puzzles. I technically work on the Design Infrastructure team at GitHub but shortly after joining I contracted Covid-19 and have been on medical leave all year (mostly fatigue and visual processing issues). I've been able to do some sporadic computer work in the last couple of months though and that's put the pep back in my step.
Huxley and I share the sofa desk
The other day I attended my fifth ffconf (I may be biased but it is the best web conference out there). Sophie Koonin gave a wonderful talk about the magic of personal websites: having a little corner of the internet to put anything you want, be silly, be a reflection of you, and, crucially, not be owned by a billionaire.
I was in the midst of building a new personal website for myself already, but this was the extra push I needed to treat it as a priority. Ownership of your own online content is more important than ever – like I'm genuinely worried Twitter won't exist by the time I'm ready to shill my new RSS feed to "my" followers.
All this to say, basically, I've made a blog. After ~14 years of having my own website and being too afraid to actually put content on it, I'm biting the bullet and carving out my corner. I love to share as I learn which usually takes the form of videos or presentations so writing is a scary prospect, but I know I can't get better by not doing it.
Here's my first post:
Fancy frames with CSS
This is a technical exploration of how to achieve the decorative effect of non-square corners, featuring some under-appreciated CSS properties, SVG magic, and a sprinkling of Houdini.
I hope you enjoy it!
This newsletter is going to become the place I share new articles, perhaps with a dash of extra context like this one here. Expect more CSS and generative art deep-dives, probably about once a month. If you're not into that please feel free to unsubscribe, or if you'd rather keep up to date with RSS you can do that here.
All the best,
Charlotte
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