a month ago i left a job i held for several years, a job that took me through a winding road of launching a product, going through an acquisition, lots of high points and lows...but ultimately i got to end the journey on my own terms, on my own time. i couldn't have asked for anything more, especially given the state of the world. i'm so very proud of my work at glitch and fastly, and it's special how i got to be one of just a handful of people who can say they have grown and lead millions of developers in creating the web and community! it was a lot of fucking work, though, and i need a break.
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releasing an editable document on the web for anyone to edit in any way is terrifying but exciting. that's in part why i worked on glitch for so long - letting millions of developers run arbitrary code, more often than not for free, allows incredible viral moments to happen that shine brighter than any of the bad stuff (spam, phishing). this facilitation of web building always comes with its moments of noticing someone is doing something you didn't intend and you immediately thinking 'oh, that's it, we're fucked' but more often than not the next moment you're tearing up because the web can be so beautiful.
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in my last blog post i talked about the kissy lips mac osx icon and how reactions of my use of it shaped the direction i took a lot of my art going forward - essentially, if i choose to express myself in a way and people tell me it's not professional simply because of misogyny, i'm going to double down. it was in september of 2014 when ben sisto, artist and expert on the song who let the dogs out, reached out to me about an art residency program he was running at the ace hotel, 24 x 36 - where 36 artists spent a night at the ace hotel in nyc over the course of 24 days.
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since the dawn of time, mainstream operating systems would offer a set of default avatars to choose from when creating your user profile. these avatars often had no context related to the software they came with – last night i learned that andy's old xbox 360 avatar was a pair of lemons. naturally, i had to introduce him to the iconoclast, my own founding mother of default avatars: the macosx kissy lips.
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ten years ago a true taste-maker ahead of her time, named jenn schiffer started a newsletter and it got to just over 1700 people which was pretty wild because in 2014 there were only like 5000 people on the internet. hi, i'm jenn schiffer, and i have since deleted my mailchimp account so i could only find the first issue in a reply to the email someone sent.
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last month i said i'd be experimenting with more sculptural candles and that's exactly what i did this weekend. and because i had also recently finished my three.js journey certificate, i figured that starting this weekend's session by rendering the candle on the web first would be a good practice and a cool way to show off the candle i had floating in my mind for weeks.
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10 years ago i was working as a senior front-end engineer at the nba making way too little money for what they had me doing and writing extremely niche web development satire as a hobby with my coworker – normal 20-something lady in tech things. this was last time i ever remember being truly bored, which was the big driver behind me writing things on an invite-only blogging platform (medium the dot com in its infancy) that i knew were very funny and therefore would piss off a certain demographic.
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i know how to code and i'm pretty good at it, but it's not something i do for my full-time job anymore - this is great for me, honestly. so, obviously, i do not write as much code as i *used* to, *but* i still made a lot of interesting things this year. here is **my 2023 in code**.
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during covid quarantine, i decided to try to organize the decade of stickers from my career in the tech industry. i figured that i could fashion a sticker book out of a binder and plastic dividers from the dollar store. this proved to be a major fucking pain in the ass.
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one of my favorite things in the entire world is receiving email or coming upon social media posts of people using [make8bitart.com](https://make8bitart.com), which is a free in-browser pixel art editor i've built and been maintaining since my own learning-to-javascript journey back in 2011 - 12 years ago!
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