My blog turned 10 and I owe much of my career to it.

When this site turned 1, I wrote about it. There’s one important quote from that post:

Spending hours on potentially useless web projects, but loving every minute of it.

I wrote that sentence a few months before I would join Mapbox and it’s almost sweet how untrue the statement about useless projects turned out to be.

My story with Mapbox actually started earlier that year. A Mapboxer was scouting on Dribbble and found my (one and only) post, leading them to this site. They emailed me to see if I was interested in working at Mapbox and referenced my posts. The next month, I flew down to DC and worked out of the garage for a week. I had to turn down the offer because I wasn’t ready to relocate.

I continued to work on my blog, sharing and writing about my CodePen projects. And then I wrote another blog post, tweeted it, and a few hours later I had an email asking me to join the Mapbox team remotely; the email referenced that blog post.

I stayed at Mapbox for over 7 years where I met and learned from the best of the best. I worked with people who saw me, pushed me, and challenged me.

Around the same time I started at Mapbox, I befriended Joni Trythall on CodePen. After she tweeted about an interesting conference, I emailed the organizer (who turned out to be Joni) about how I could help. A few weeks later, I was a co-organizer of Ela Conf. In our last year running in 2017, Shanise Barona joined the organizing team and we stayed in touch.

Fast-forward to the end of 2021, I had three job offers. In all three, I had a connection from Ela Conf, with one being Shanise. Shanise was working on Accessibility Insights at Microsoft, which was the job I wanted but didn’t think I would get. And then I did.

Through all those potentially useless web projects, I built a career, made friends, and, most of all, grew up right here, in plain HTML and CSS.

So, that thing you weren’t sure about sharing? Share it.

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