Cascading Style Sheets, my dear old friend

I like CSS way more than JavaScript. I like it more than English, too.

I learned CSS when I was a wee gal, during the glorious days of Web 1.0, when you could craft a second home on the internet without social media panopticons breathing over your shoulder.

Sure, there were some drawbacks during those days. You had to use HTML tables to create columns of text. You had to use Photoshop or PaintShopPro 7 to make gradients and rounded corners. Marquees and flashing text were all the rage. But that was the internet when it was beautiful.

CSS reminds me of that internet, and because of that, it fills me with joy.

My first website was an MSN Communities page. I quickly tired of it because I couldn't edit the look and feel of the site, so I went to Geocities, which at the time was the best way to create a free website. (I believe that Yahoo's downfall started the day they ended Geocities; no one can convince me otherwise.) Geocities had a “PageBuilder” feature that allowed users to move and style HTML elements within a drag-and-drop editor, which led to some pretty funky-looking sites, mine included. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get the elements to align properly.

I knew there had to be a better tool out there.

It sounds dramatic to say that CSS changed my life, but it kinda did. If it weren't for CSS, I would have given up on websites a long time ago. I wouldn't have started making websites again right after college, as an unemployed architecture grad, and then dreamed that hey, maybe someday I could even get paid to build a website. Imagine that!

Honestly, I probably wouldn't use the internet without CSS, because it would look like this:

Over the years, CSS has become even more amazing. Yet I can't tell you how many times I've heard people -- mostly backend engineers, but some frontend engineers too -- dismiss this wonderful language as an afterthought, as a nice-to-have rather than a must-have.

Even at Hack Reactor, whose business was predicated on churning out new frontend engineers, we had a grand total of one lecture on CSS. Most of the content was outdated. Some of it was flat-out wrong. The focus was always JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript. Sure, JavaScript is great. It's important. It's the golden child. Meanwhile, CSS remains forever in the background, the overlooked, misunderstood, unsung hero of the web.

With this in mind, I had fuel for my conference talk. My goal wasn't to give an introduction to CSS (there are far too many tutorials for that), but to share my passion, and to demonstrate how fun CSS can be.

Creating my conference talk

Last year, I gave a talk at Women of Silicon Valley about my path from architecture ➡️ biz dev ➡️ software. While I at first had lofty goals for that presentation involving custom graphics, I eventually settled on a basic Keynote template. So, out of habit, I started creating this presentation in Keynote as well.

After about five slides, I started feeling like something was wrong.

Honest Me: What are you doing?

Defensive Me: What does it look like I'm doing? I'm making my CSS presentation.

HM: Uhh...nah, that's just a Keynote template.

DM: HEY! I spent hours working on these slides!

HM: I'm just saying. You can do better. Like, wayyyy better.

DM: No I can't.

HM: I'll tell you what you can't do. You can't just tell people that CSS is important and expect them to believe you. You need to prove it! With solid, incontrovertible evidence!

DM: O...kay.

HM: Imagine this. You're giving the talk. You're showing an example of a cool CSS thingamajig you built. But instead of switching back and forth between this Keynote template and the webpage with your example, you're just showing one seamless presentation. The example is part of the presentation. Wouldn't that be awesome?

DM: But I can't embed CSS examples into Keynote.

HM: Nope. Hahaha.

And that's why I scrapped my Keynote presentation and rebuilt it as a webpage.

You can find the presentation here. Check out the GitHub repo for navigation instructions and direct links to some of the most interesting slides (imo, I'm biased of course).

I practiced my talk with my family and one of my best friends, who's also a frontend engineer. They gave excellent feedback, which helped me to create a more cohesive and relatable presentation.

Connecting with a virtual audience

As I mentioned earlier, I spoke at Women of Silicon Valley in 2019. I was fully prepared, but when I walked to the front of that room that had seemed so small from the back (there were ~100 people), I felt sheer terror.

I've read that the fear of public speaking traces back to our instinctual fear of predators. Humans, like all predators, have their eyes in the front of their heads, so when speak publicly, we're standing before a crowd of predators. (Can't find a source for this exact idea, though. I may just be misinterpreting this Psychology Today article, which says that the ostracism we feel while speaking publicly makes us fear for our own survival.)

My biggest issue is that the adrenaline runs into my hands, no matter how much I prepare. Even if my voice sounds confident, my hands shake, and I end up doing silly things, like typing “boo.com” instead of “box.com” (this may or may not have happened while I was giving a live demo in front of my entire company).

At Women of Silicon Valley, I held a clicker in one hand and a microphone in the other. Both hands were shaking. I struggled with clicking the right arrow button to navigate to the next slide. My voice was a little too quiet, even with the microphone. The audience was supportive, and I didn't make any significant errors, but I left feeling like I could have expressed myself better.

WomenTech Global was a very different experience. The conference was completely virtual, hosted on Hopin.to. I commuted from my office into my dining nook, which has consistent lighting and a plain background, opened my presentation in a browser, and waited for my slot to begin.

I was nervous, of course, but significantly less nervous than I'd been at WoSV, even though my presentation consisted of multiple interactive slides.

Nervous Me: This is scary! I wanna go home.

Relaxed Me: You are home.

NM: Oh yeah.

RM: No one's going to attend anyway.

NM: But...THEY MIGHT! Some people found out about it on LinkedIn!

RM: So? It's the internet. People like posts without thinking twice. They've already liked a million other things by now.

NM: But...I'm on the agenda!

RM: You and a hundred other talks. Everyone's going to go to the talks about ML/data science/Python/React/social justice. CSS is just not flashy. Recruiters never reach out looking for CSS developers. They're always looking for React developers, aren't they?

NM: But...!

RM: Look. If anyone does show up, that means they're interested in what you have to say. They're not going to hurl tomatoes at you through the screen for being a less than perfect speaker. Besides, you know this presentation inside and out.

I took a deep breath, turned on my mic, and started speaking. Contrary to my expectations, about 30-40 people attended. When I reached the slide where I had to edit a CSS rule, I resorted to hunt-and-peck typing (which, thanks to the virtual format, no one could see).

Ultimately, the talk went really well -- better my practice sessions. I finished at the half hour mark, but the audience was lovely and filled the remaining 15 minutes with questions. Some of them even reached out to me afterward with more questions! I feel honored to have had this opportunity, and such a wonderful audience to boot 🙂

Other thoughts on public speaking

Would I speak at another conference, virtual or otherwise? Yes to both!

I'm a shy person. Not as shy as I was as a kid, or even a few years ago, but yeah, I'm shy. I don't like being in the spotlight. When I speak off the cuff, without sorting out my thoughts first, I space out and get tongue-tied.

It's precisely because of all these weaknesses that I try to do as much public speaking as I can. Public speaking has the potential to be deeply humiliating, but it can also be the exact opposite: exhilarating. There's nothing else quite like it.

Now, all I need to do is figure out my next conference topic.

Optimistic Me: 📊📈✨DATA VISUALIZATION ✨📈📊

Realistic Me: Why don't you try making some data visualizations first?

Blog notes: I haven't updated this blog since 2016. I would like to update more often than once every four years (ha), but I can't promise anything. I'm a very slow writer and my posts always end up being super long. This one is almost 2000 words!

Was Hack Reactor worth it?

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: For me, yes, it turned out to be worth it. What Hack Reactor promises, it delivers. When I speak of promises, I'm referring to the fine print of the student agreement, in which you pay $17,780 in exchange for a crash course in JavaScript plus job search training.

On both points, Hack Reactor absolutely excels. The software development curriculum is top-notch. I learned so much and so quickly that it felt like I was downloading information into my brain, which was pretty awesome.

How does Hack Reactor help people to learn so quickly? Different people will give different answers to this question. Some might say the lectures. Others might say the projects. For me, the crucial part of the learning experience was, unquestionably, the opportunity to interact with my remarkable classmates. My cohort was full of kind, brilliant people who encouraged and inspired me to be a better programmer. I learned a ton from working through problems with them, both in my pair programming assignments and in my group projects.

Because of my classmates, the 700-plus hours I spent in that concrete tower with the broken elevators at the southeast corner of the Tenderloin were not just tolerable. They were fun.

People often question the hiring statistics on the Hack Reactor website. I don't blame them; it seems ludicrous to suggest that fledgling programmers with no CS background or prior work experience could land six-figure salaries after three months at a for-profit bootcamp.

Now that I'm on the other side, it all makes sense. Most Hack Reactor grads end up in the Bay Area, which is flush with tech jobs and where the average going rate for software engineers is on the lower end of six figures. Hack Reactor also expends great effort on crafting and culling their student body. The program selects for students who have already demonstrated a certain level of proficiency in coding and trains those students in strictly practical matters: full-stack JavaScript, MVC frameworks, databases, version control, and those pesky algorithms questions that come up in technical interviews. We did toy problems, whiteboarding sessions, and mock interviews, all of which proved useful during my job search.

Hack Reactor also trained us to treat job searching as a job in itself, and to take it seriously, but not personally. We were encouraged to apply to five jobs every day and keep up with our toy problems.

I confess I did neither of those. But I did apply to 50+ companies total, and there was a memorable two-week period during which I had onsite interviews nearly every day. After a while, I finally understood what people mean when they say job searching is a numbers game.

Thoughts on the job search

It was more difficult than Hack Reactor.

Then again, I have a terrible aversion to unemployment. I also have bad memories of my previous job search, back in 2010, when I graduated into the recession with a useless degree and no marketable skills. At that time, I did a total of one phone screen and three onsite interviews, all spaced at least a week apart, and immediately took the one and only offer I received.

This job search was much, much better. In summary: looking for a job as a front-end engineer in the Bay Area in 2015 was a lot easier than looking for a job as an entry-level sales/marketing/administrative assistant in Los Angeles in 2010, but it was still very difficult. Some of the things I learned:

Thomas Pynchon's circle of influence

To visualize the relationships between Pynchon and the writers connected to him, I created an arc diagram in D3. Initially, I planned on using D3's built-in chord layout generator, but I fell in love with arc diagrams after seeing so many beautiful examples online (e.g., Bible Cross-References, Command Usage Arc Diagrams, The Shape of Song, among others).

I went down a few rabbit holes, including creating a matrix dataset similar to those required by the chord layout and plotting the writers as nodes on a scale. Thankfully, there's this wonderful Les Misérables character co-ocurrences arc diagram, also in D3, which set me on the right track.

I formatted the influence data into an object with two arrays, nodes and links. Each node contains the name of a writer and a number indicating the writer's category (influencer or influencee), and each link contains a connection between Thomas Pynchon and another writer.

All the influencers appear to the left of Pynchon, with an arc above the horizontal; all the influencees appear to the right, with an arc below the horizontal. The colors were generated by D3's category20b scale.

Other circles of influence

I also wanted to visualize the influences of the other writers. Initially, I added all their connections to Pynchon's graph. This worked for Vladimir Nabokov but failed for Emily Dickinson, who was influenced by a writer who appeared to the right of her (Ralph Waldo Emerson) -- resulting in a backwards connection.

The solution was to create new graphs and layer them on top of Pynchon's. So, clicking on Nabokov's name (for instance) will fade out Pynchon's graph, increase the size of Nabokov's name, move his name and dot to the center of the page, draw a line from his name to the center dot, and display his influence graph around that new center. Mousing away from Nabokov's graph will delete his graph and bring back Pynchon's.

Figuring out how to rearrange the new graph around the new center dot was probably the most difficult part of the entire project. I passed the center position to the new graph and gave the influencer dots a negative x-axis position so that they appeared to the left of the center dot.

Hover selections

The last feature I added was a hover selection event. Mousing over a writer's name will fade out the entire diagram except for the name, dot, and arc belonging to that writer.

This was the second most difficult part of the project, because of the preexisting fade effects associated with the click event. The entire graph fades out upon clicking a name, and the entire graph fades back in when the mouse leaves the new graph.

I ended up initializing a boolean to keep everything in check: multipleGraphsOnPage starts off as false, becomes true when a new graph is created, and reverts to false when the new graph is deleted. The hover selection event is enabled only when multipleGraphsOnPage is false.

My project completion strategy

The purpose of the solo project was not to build a perfect product, but a minimum viable product. Hack Reactor instructed us to reduce the size of our scope in half, twice -- which I didn't even need to do, since I'd deliberately chosen a very small scope to begin with. The extra time afforded me the chance to polish the look and feel of my project, including the animations, and dive deeper into D3.

This project was really fun. D3 is by far my favorite JavaScript library ever, and I can't wait to make more visualizations with it.

More D3 & SVG resources

• D3 and JavaScript: Working with JSON

• How to rotate the text labels for the x-axis of a D3.js graph

• SVG Text Element

• SVG Path Element

The process

Nikola themes live within the appropriately named themes directory. My files are structured as follows:

/theme-name
  /assets
    /css
      theme.css
  /templates
    base.tmpl
    index.tmpl
    post.tmpl
  engine
  parent

Here's an overview of what these files do (taken from the Nikola theming reference):

That's it! I used the similarly bare monospace theme as a guide. You can spruce up your theme with additional templates (see the zen theme for an example), but I decided to keep mine simple.

Now for the fun stuff!

There's another reason why the default theme didn't work that well for my blog: I'm wordy as hell. I don't write posts; I write essays. So, rather than change my style of blogging, I thought I'd pull off an illusion. My main objective in redesigning this blog was to make it resemble a series of digestible sentences, as opposed to the giant wall of text that it actually is.

For inspiration, I looked at Medium, Longreads, Nautilus, Aeon, and all the other beautiful text-heavy sites that have cropped up in recent years.

Final thoughts

Designs are never finished, but I'm happy with how my blog looks right now. I plan to implement a hamburger menu for smaller screens within the upcoming weeks. If you have any suggestions, or find your viewing experience to be less than optimal, please let me know.

^* With much gratitude to my Hack Reactor classmates for giving me the necessary push to redesign my blog.