A few weeks ago, Ava started a tagging game for Bearbloggers, challenging them to answer some questions about how and why they blog. Then Kev adapted Ava’s questions for non-Bearblog users. Since then, these questions have been making the rounds from blog to blog. Recently, Eric tagged me in his answers.
I’m tagging in Evan, Aleksandr, and Ashlee. If y’all are comfortable with it, I’d love to learn how you got your start with blogging.
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
Broadly, I enjoy writing. Essays, for instance, were a schooltime forte of mine. I cut my teeth on technical writing during my internship at USAA, where I wrote wikis that were among the company’s earliest internal documentation for React and Redux, the web stack the company had recently pivoted to.
My time at USAA also led to my public-facing writing here on the blog in a few ways. The first was an assignment my manager gave my team to try our hands at writing whitepapers, topics of our choice. I decided to read up on U.S. case law surrounding digital accessibility. I later adapted parts of that whitepaper into my first post, as well as my first meetup talk.
One of my favorite parts of my USAA tenure was getting to be one of the instructors for USAA’s season-long new-hire web development training. There, I (re-)encountered the questions, challenges, and misconceptions that new web developers face… and occasionally, I found established resources unhelpful or unsatisfactory. I ended up writing the resources I wish I had been able to find.
That training program followed a React video course that today boasts hundreds of thousands of participants. I’d taken that course myself during my internship, and it was interesting to revisit with more experience while the students took the course fresh. To my surprise, the course was riddled with a pattern I’d since unlearned: using <div> with click handlers instead of <button>s. I took that and wrote my second blogpost: How (Not) to Build a Button. More and more blogposts came out of resources I needed for the training, such as my ARIA explainer or an introduction to lexical and dynamic scope.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
This site is built with the Eleventy static site generator. I switched to Eleventy in after taking Andy Bell’s Learn Eleventy From Scratch course.
Eleventy is refreshingly focused on static pages, which has helped keep my blog lightweight and performant like I would like a blog to be. Any perf hurdles have been my mistake, rather than set by some minimum viable bundle size. I’ve found Eleventy to be neatly extensible where I’ve needed it to be. The focus on Markdown over more involved templating like MDX or Astro makes me feel more comfortable with the idea of being able to move away from Eleventy at some point in the future if I ever need without needing to totally rewrite old posts, but also, after almost five years (!!!) of this Eleventy-ified setup, I feel like my blog setup is only getting better and better, and I’m in no rush to move away from that for the time being.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
I built the first version of this blog with Gatsby, and specifically, the gatsby-starter-blog template which I very poorly attempted to restyle. I moved away from Gatsby in large part because I felt like I was wrangling needless complexity any time I wanted to write a new post, especially any posts that required extending the site in some way. The tooling felt like overkill, and it was overkill that felt like it was getting in the way of writing.
How do you write your posts?
For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/
All in Markdown, all in my site’s repo, all in VS Code, all with Git.
I’ve never been particularly great at expressly writing and rewriting drafts for the sake of being drafts. Instead, I self-edit heavily as I go. As a result, I end up writing in what will be the end format and location for the posts anyways: Markdown files in my site’s codebase.
Writing within my codebase and running it locally gives me a better sense of what the post will look like in the end. Are my paragraphs running long? Am I mixing too many kinds of elements or styles too closely together? Additionally, I can go ahead and start embedding code demos (courtesy of Aleksandr Hovhannisyan’s eleventy-plugin-code-demo plugin) from the get-go, and edit it as I edit the post.
This said, I very rarely write linearly from the start of the post to the end. Instead, I often stub out the headings I think I’ll need, and then skip around from section to section to flesh them out as the mood hits. For instance, this is the first answer I actually completed.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
Blogging inspiration tends to come more freely to me when I’m already teaching people, as a result of the questions or misconceptions that come up. Teaching new web developers at USAA was great for this, as was answering questions when I was streaming. My (now a little outdated) post about skip links came out of a question I was asked on stream! These days, I’m not really doing anything like that, so I don’t quite have my finger on the pulse of which questions need answering anymore.
In other cases, I’ve seen something get shared, and feel a need to correct the record. My most recent post, Don’t Use aria-label on Static Text Elements, was an example of this. In these cases, I try not to call out the original source, especially since by the time I’ve written something about it, the particular catalyst is usually just one example of many.
I know in the past, I’ve used this blog as a worry stone in times where I’ve felt more anxious about work. As I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve felt much less like I “need” to spend extracurricular time thinking and writing about web development, and I’ve replaced that time with more reading and spending time with friends (as an aside: I highly recommend seeking out your local theaters). Feeling less compelled to write as often is probably a good thing, then.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
For some of my bigger accessibility posts, I will hold off on publishing for a day or two while some friends look it over and provide feedback. By the time people are reading it over, however, the bones of the post feel pretty set in stone for me, and I’m not likely to make substantial changes. I’m also just anxious to get the thing out — so drafts likely won’t simmer any longer than two days.
What are you generally interested in writing about?
As will likely come as a surprise to no one, I mostly write about web accessibility. In particular, my hope is that I can provide accessibility guidance that feels tangible and applicable, and that readers can see their projects and scenarios represented in the guidance.
Who are you writing for?
The most straightforward answer is that I’m writing for any web developer who wants to learn more about accessibility and inclusive design.
I also often feel like I’m writing for fellow accessibility advocates. This is in part because one outcome of writing about any technical niche is that the folks who find said writing are most likely to already be involved in that same niche. That’s okay because time and time again, I’ve experienced just how useful it is to be able to link to just the right post from another writer in my team review comments, chats with coworkers, documentation, new-hire training, and my own blogposts. Not only is it a huge time-saver, citing others from the within the industry can also lend an accessibility advocate some extra credence. Part of why I write is because I hope someone will be able to share something I’ve written as they make their case for more inclusive design.
What’s your favorite post on your blog?
At the moment, On the <dl> tops the list for me. It was a very fun exercise to showcase the versatility of a fairly simple, straightforward markup pattern. I don’t think any of my other posts have really given me the same kind of chance to just let loose with my examples, and I think demonstrating UI patterns that people have definitely seen in the wild goes a really long way towards making the post’s point.
I’m a Spotless Giraffe. is also up there for me, in that I put myself out there personally in a way that I don’t usually on this blog.
Any future plans for your blog?
Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
I’d love to add some good search functionality; navigation feels like the site’s weakest spot right now. I know others in the Eleventy space have been toying with Pagefind as of late, and I should sit down sometime and figure it out.
I’ve quietly been adding some pages here and there that reflect more and more of my non-work, non-webdev interests (can I interest you in a catalog of my tabletop roleplaying game campaigns, perhaps?), and I’d like to keep making this site reflect more of me like that.