Thank you for highlighting the issue & referring alternatives.

I was doing blogging on the medium and it became paid. I was too lazy to set up something for me :( . So, I decided to continue my old Blogspot. As I wanted to write for myself only to refer my learnings later. Hence, I removed the comment sections.

Also, I started a11ytips.dev for sharing my accessibility learnings. I hope soon I ll set up something for my own website.

I used to do WFH - 2-3 days/week before the pandemic. I am used to WFH but TBH I am not enjoying. I prefer to go to the office for at least 1-2 times.

No, I am not much productive now. It is more of just end up adding folks on the calls. As we are in lockdown so even after office hours I end up sitting in front of Laptop only.

I did 6 months job at a company that was moving to an online website service. I got it after applying through a job portal and I still remember they didn't called me. So, I called them and they asked me to come for interview. There were 2 senior folks who asked me about HTML, CSS, designing, DIV, etc.

The job clause was they will pay very-very less for 3 months and then based on the performance they ll give a hike.

My first impression was the whole tech team refused to help interns (LOL). As per them, "no one helped them when they started their career. So, why should they help us?". Then management forced them to help us. It was not a great environment as there was clearly a lot of junior-senior kind of behavior but yes I learned a lot there. At least I got a break in the industry because of them.

Yes, every time. My nightmare is - I will forget the most basic code or my personal message will pop-up on the screen, the worst - my slides will be deleted.

So interestingly, if I prepare my slides and footnotes with content then definately during the session I start getting nervous. So, I always give my sessions from my experience. In this way, I don't have to memorize anything.

One of my friends once told me - "It is always good to be scared before going to stage. This shows that you still care to give presentation and you are not over-confident."

There were many challenges. As when I started meetup and community was not an acceptable thing in India. For me, it was like I am explaining the folks first what meetup is and then doing tech-session. Also, there were no resources to host a meetup at any place. We did our starting meetups for a year at a cafe where I used to pay for venue and food. Apart from logistics challenges, even attendees were not keen to spread the word about the community.

Now, everything is sorted. Every company now supports Meetups and communities and so is co-working. So, there are not many challenges.

My advice :

1) Do not look at how many people came? Look for how many interested people came. At JSLovers, I never focused on having 50-100 folks. My focus was on quality over quantity.

2) Getting speakers is hard. Try to push from your attendees to be a speaker (but do not compromise on the quality). Do a dry run with them, ask questions to them, and also be prepare might be you need to chip-in while speaker is giving session.

3) Have a code of conduct always

4) Do not be afraid of taking negative feedback.For me, feedbacks are my next steps :)

5) Always remember the community is about 'sharing' not about 'marketing'.

Aah!! this is a very common problem. My approach is

1) To understand WHY? what is stopping the management to move to a new tech stack? As in my current company, we have enterprise products with large users. Moving to new tech is risky with respect to the money, resources (devs), and product shipping & stability. Now, according to that I ll plan my strategy. So, now we are picking all new features in the latest tech stack as well as moving modules wise to new tech stack.

2) I will prepare a POC to show my management and team - WHY? Sometimes, people assume that because something is on social media it is influencing our tech decisions. So, make a POC of the existing module and highlight - less coding, time to deliver, scalability, performance, maintenance, learning curve, community support and if there are any cons too (so, that you can show them you are not biased to it and have done good research on this).

Hello Diana,

I am an accidental speaker. I started my community JSLovers (meetup.com/jslovers) 5 years back to share my learnings with the developers. For 1 year we were not able to find any speaker. Only my co-founder used to give sessions and I used to manage rest. Then 1 day, he was not able to give a session and I have to give the session. TBH, my 1st session was worst and I was not able to give session I think for the next 3-6 months but then after that, I was back and still doing the speaking.

How did it help in my career?

• It gave me a lot of confidence to present in meetings, internal sessions, etc.
• Public speaking helped to handle the questions and the crowd. This again helped me in my career when I am in a meeting or interview I am always confident.
• Recently I got my yearly performance review and my manager mentioned this - "I can stand you in front of a room full of 100 folks to present and you won't be afraid or nervous and this all because of your experience in public speaking".
• Public speaking helped me casting my network in the tech world and it helped me to reach the people easily for any tech help or job.

I will not push myself to 'know everything'. I would like to just focus on fundamentals and basics. Luckily when I started programming there were no social media. So, less distraction and I was having limited resources to learn from.

Second, I will not learn-for-job approach, I will learn to program for myself. Back then my focus was to learn to just get a job. So, I was just not getting deeper into the concepts.

Third, I will ask for help!! This is my biggest mistake even when I was a jr developer I did this mistake. I used to assume that if I 'll ask for help my lead or manager ll fire me (LOL). Which is obviously not true.

Most important, I would prefer to keep my all notes with me always. Trust me when you are starting with programming the notes you make for yourself are your assets throughout your life.

My dev environment is very simple. I use VSCode with fewer plugins - GitLens, Markdown preview, Beautify, ESLint, and Prettier. The theme is Quiet-light.

But I use a lot of browser extensions to ease my dev process.

But here is my Desk Setup twitter.com/hellonehha/status/1240591707114065922

Hello,

#1 As a dev the top-most thing to do to have an accessible site - write semantic & structure code, provide alt tags, add lang, title attribute, do not remove the outline from the CSS, make sure color contrast is passing, should have label tags and use Lighthouse and wave tool to assist your inaccessibility.

#2 For now my favorite is VueJS Gridsome (it has GraphQL support too) if I am looking for something UI Framework based otherwise I just go vanilla - it is superfast.

#3 I am pretty active on Twitter and Linkedin. I keep sharing my daily learning there and I keep interacting with devs there. Apart from these, attending Meetups help a lot and appreciating developers on their blogs, work, etc on DMs

Thanks for the question Bolaji Ayodeji

My advice would be not to stop yourself from writing by thinking these:

1) I am not a good writer 2) I only know basics 3) Who ll read my blogs 4) There are already many blogs on the same topics

The reason is no one is expert as a blogger with regular writing we improve, there are many folks who are looking for basics blogs only and you never know who ll read it. Most important is to write for yourself.

Last year in December I took 25DaysofDesignSystem challenge and I told everyone I am writing for myself only and I removed the comment sections too.

I am not aware of any resources for writing. I generally just follow few people's blogs and try to see how I can improve my writing.

Thank you, this is very helpful! Neha Sharma

What do you mean by Isolation - is it like a Design system or a library of components which you can use in a project?

Yes a design system but building it's components and seeing all their states in isolation from your app.Neha Sharma

At Rubrik, we've had great success using Storybook(storybook.js.org) as a tool for developing components in isolation.

Developing components in isolation helps you test all the edge cases that are hard to reach in the main project environment.

1) I am an accidental speaker :). When I started JSLovers it was impossible to get a speaker. My co-founder used to give a session and I used to manage everything. Then one day he was not able to give a session and I delivered my first session. It was the worst session. I didn't give any session for 3-6 months and then 1 day I just decided to give a session and since then no looking back.

2) I feel for me it was the zeal to just face the fear and also when you know something very well and not memorizing for faking you already know there is nothing to fear. Just to go and face the crowd.

3) My advice would be - "Do not go to public speaking because everyone is doing it. If you are passionate about knowledge sharing then only go. Also, there is nothing like a basic or advance topic there is always an audience for everything. All the best!!"

Hello Chinmay,

Thank you for having me :)

#1 There are many resources available. Yes, W3org is good place to learn accessibility. Also, I wrote an article on the my fav resources: a11ytips.dev/docs/accessibility-learning-resources do check

#2 To support the web application for the blind and color-blind users:- for blind make sure your application is accessible via keyboard & it is giving the same experience at screen readers as it is visually. There are many different types of vision issues. Do make sure color contrast is meeting (lighthouse - chrome extension is a good tool to test this) as well as make sure nothing is 'color' based eg: fix the fields marked in red.

Neha Sharma Thank you for your answer and time.

It is great to hear Ali about your interest in Design. I learned all these when I was doing the designing course (unfortunately at that time the internet was not so reachable to us).

How to get started in design? I would definitely advise joining a in-person course. The reason is you will learn a lot when you learn offline (in-person). As every designer has their own style and that can be explored when you are working with fellow designers and have a mentor. The first step you have already taken to learn the fundamentals of designs.

or you can join an interaction design forum - it is a very good website focusing on the UX and UI courses.

As for a front-end developer, I am assuming you ll always have a designer who ll take care of color theory and font-selection. All you need to take care of is to review the designs and make sure color-contrast is as per WCAG, there are not too many fonts, and spacing is consistent.

Thanks.

Thanks for your reply Neha Sharma

Google gives a very good insight into this.

To start, minify the CSS, Javascript, assets such as images, etc. Cache the static assets.

There are different approaches for breaking long CSS and JS files such as you can have critical CSS, load JS on a modular basis to improve the performance.

My goto guiding tools are Google Lighthouse and Network panel. Lighthouse gives you the issues and solutions too.

web.dev is a great place to learn web performance tuning.