Hi 👋🏼 I'm Rach. I'm a developer building software for CodePen, wife, mother of two, productivity nerd and recovering screen addict. This is my blog.
What happens when you listen to yourself? When there isn't any external input happening to my brain via reading, watching or listening to other external inputs. I have a permanently running internal monologue. Earlier in the year I shared the 5 minute timer hack for getting started on a task when activation energy is holding me back. Sometimes, the thought of spending even 5 minutes on something is too overwhelming. When I’m in this place, I find Kourosh Dini’s advice to “touch the keys” really helpful.George makes seriously high quality, very easy to follow tutorial style posts. My favourites: Crafting Organic Patterns With Voronoi Tessellations and Build a Smooth, Animated Blob Using SVG + JavaScript. He also has a whole bunch cool Pens with a modern visual style.Whenever I come across a form field that asks for my occupation or profession, I hesitate before answering.There are very few things I missed when I quit spending time on Twitter, but one of them was keeping up with the latest news and links from the JavaScript/Front-End world. I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid. I was an early riser, and would wake up before anyone else in my family, head in to the living room and switch on the TV.I figured in 2021 there would be some cool, nice looking software that would make it quick and easy for me to put an ERD together. I was wrong. Perhaps there is a bit of a remote hiring boom at the moment, but I have noticed a massive uptick in the amount of solicitations from people wanting to "have a conversation" about hiring me in 2021. Almost always, people find their way to my inbox because they remember me from Twitter.I turned 35 on Wednesday. For whatever reason, half-decade birthdays have always felt like a significant milestone to me.I believe that the best thing you can do for your career as a Developer is teach yourself how to learn effectively. Learning is a skill you need to develop, and it was one I actually didn't reach competence in until long after I'd completed my formal education.The first year I started coding professionally, most of the work I did was in Adobe Flash. Then Steve Jobs decided to kill Flash and it forced me to learn how to animate with JavaScript, CSS3 and HTML Canvas if I wanted to keep landing contract jobs.Sometimes I can feel like I am just going from one demand to the next all day long. Then at night when I really should go to bed I stay up an extra 30 minutes to an hour messing around on my phone simply because it is quiet and nobody is bothering me and I can. 