2023 in Review

One Post a Week

Back in September I set a challenge for myself to try and write one blog post a week through the end of the year.

I figured, 7 days to write one single post? Peace of cake. Turns out that writing is a lot harder than I thought. I managed do to it though, and it’s something I plan on continuing moving forward. I’ve learned a lot not just about writing, but about managing time, and actually prioritizing tasks.\

Projects

Accessibility Playbook

I started a new project this year!

In an effort to document and share my experience and knowledge around accessibility and creating accessible experiences I created my accessibility playbook.

I’ve found over the years that I consistently point team and community members to reference sites or checklists and wanted to be able to centralize the items that I have found important or useful in my own work. By creating my own playbook I can customize it to meet my specific needs or thoughts, and link out to those same resources from a publicly available and centralized location.

I hope to continue to grow this playbook with more patterns, methods, tips and tricks that I come across and share with the teams I work with.

Design Tokens Community Group

Lots happening behind the scenes. The second editors draft was released for review in just of 2022. Since then the Format team has been hard at work figuring out all of the finer details of the spec. Lots of discissions are taking place in the Design Tokens Community Group github repo.

The DTCG is taking a break for the holidays, I am excited for what we’ll see come out of the spec team in 2024. We’re also beginning to take a hard look at what sorts of resources we can and should provide to the community from an educational and reference standpoint.

I added both a /Uses and a /Now page to this site. I hope to be able to keep these up to date as things change. It’s been interesting to see these types of pages, along with other IndieWeb practices become somewhat more commonplace across the web; at least with the people I follow.

I have also added some basic IndieWeb features to this site, like rel=me links, and author/article h-cards. I’m sure I’ll share some thoughts on my overall experience trying to adopt some practices in the future.

Finally, between mostly moving from Twitter to Mastodon, and spending a lot more time curating and consuming RSS feeds, I feel like I’m getting much more value out of the content I am spending my time consuming. Both Miriam Suzanne and Chris Coyier have exelent posts on this topic.

Other Life Updates

2023 has been a crazy year for the family. Our kiddo turned one this year and I can’t believe how much he’s grown over these last 12 months. It’s hard to imagine he’s the same tiny baby that couldn’t go more than 10 minutes without crying.

Two weeks ago a crazy off-season tornado ripped through our town. Our house made it out without a scratch but large portions of the community were affected and have been dealing with either damage or complete devastation. The timing of the event definitely put a lot of things into a new perspective this season. I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about how lucky we are, and how important and fragile the normalcy of life is.

We’re also trying something new as a family this year. We’ve invested in a massive wall-sized calendar and are going to try to plan out our year in advance. We often hear that if you don’t make time for the things that are important to you work or other insignificant tasks will find a way to fill your time. I’m hopeful this will allow us the foresight and confidence to accept or reject invitations and plan our own family growth goals for the upcoming year.