Hello y’all,

It’s been a month since my last update here!

It’s been quite a month.

Gardening

I’ve published five posts in my /journal since we last spoke. My favorites:

• Trust browsers—not apps: a reflection on why I trust browsers, with some new cool ones that have come up recently. Also, there’s openness, accessibility of contribution, the forgiveness of HTML/CSS, and the interoperability that native web brings.

• Embracing the garden metaphor: a realization of how I share, propagate, and cultivate my digital garden. I connect the how with the why from my Strengthsfinder tests, and how I need to implement /search onto my website.

• Calculators: a list of fun, small calculators that I’d enjoy building, while also learning how to do more functional web development in the process.

• Into the Puttyverse: published at the kick-off of a week long virtual conference I attended last week. It was called Seen & Supported, put on by Puttylike, a community by/for/of multipotentialites. I briefly summarize other communities that have resonated with me, but this being the first event I attended from any of them.

New Beds

I’ve created a few new sections to my garden that I’ll tend through time:

• /strengths: right now, it’s where I list the results from various tests like Strengthsfinder, Plum.io, 16 Personalities, and Culture Index.

• /work: I’ve started building out this page, where I can explain the sort of work I do, what I’ve done, and what work I’m seeking next. Very much a work in progress.

• /work/experience: In the similar vein, finally got my resume resume up on the site, using the h-resume microformat! Needs a lot of styling, but it’s the first holistic timeline I have at the moment of my career thus far. Work in progress.

• /for-hire: Similar to /work, this one’s specifically a “reverse job posting” sort of post. It’s inspired by Maurice Cherry‘s and Julie Pagano’s own reverse job postings. Again, a work in progress.

I didn’t “build” as much on the development front. Some good refactors to make the code more maintainable. Taking a step back to look at the design itself, as I’ve gotten enough content to understand what my design needs are.

Soil Cultivation

I curated ~165 links of things I’ve read and discovered in my internet wanderings since our last comms. I won’t link to all of them here…hadn’t realized it was so many 😅.

My favorite five:

• The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer: a story someone posted "...to USENET by its author, Ed Nather (utastro!nather), on May 21, 1983." It talks about what what programming used to be like.

• Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List: shared as part of the resource pack after attending a webinar hosted by Equal Access Public Media, introducing their Style & Accessibility Guide. They’re doing great work.

• Meetings *are* the work: couldn’t agree more with Elizabeth Ayer’s post about the tech industry’s anathema of meetings. For me, they’re some of my favorite moments while working with others. Great read.

• Who Goes Nazi?: another older article, written by Dorothy Thompson in 1941. A story about a game to play at gatherings: people-watch and ask yourself (or with others), who’d go Nazi here?

• Stop Building AI Tools Backwards: This was one super interesting, where Hazel Weakly writes about how humans learn, and how toiling through the process of learning is…how you learn! The crux being AI’s are cutting out the process, so…nothing’s learned through production of an artifact: effortless results with nonexistent gain.

Conclusion

It’s been a long one. Hopefully, it won’t be another month since last writing.

I’m proud of how much I’ve been reading and writing—much more. The proof of it all, being on my own website, in my own digital garden.

Now, to go write a conference talk proposal to talk on stage about digital gardens.

Until next time, with love and thanks for taking the time to subscribe and read,

Jonathan