Welcome to Inspect. My name is Ajakarwal and my guest today is Helen V. Homes. Helen is a recent turned freelance designer developer from Charlottesville, Virginia.
She's previously worked at GitHub, Heroku and Mozilla. She regularly speaks at tech conferences around the world and is currently getting her business off the ground and working on a new product in the hardware and art space. So welcome to the show Helen. Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, glad you're here. You're actually my first international guest on the podcast. Oh my goodness, this is very exciting. Yeah, my first guest now, I haven't met in person.
The previous guest now I've heard of people I've worked with in the past, so this should be interesting. Well, now we know each other. Now we've met to be fair through a video conference, but that is good enough. We live at digital age.
Yeah, so this is the way everyone's doing that, right? Yeah, all of my friends are from the internet. Good stuff, good stuff. So yeah, we're doing this over a video call in the UK.
You're in Virginia. It's around about 8.30pm here. What time is it? Where you are?
It is 3.30pm here. So it's a beautiful day outside and I'm sitting inside doing work on a computer, such as the life. Yeah, I mean, it's completely opposite here. This is obviously the single, so of course it's raining.
It's evening here, so everyone's winding down. But yeah, this is obviously time differences. This is what you have to do. So in preparation 40, I would chat, I was having a look at your website and just doing a bit of research on your background and think of some questions to ask you.
And I noticed that everywhere on the net you are Helen V-homes, but I couldn't find any way what the V stands for. So is that something that you'd like to share or is it secret? So it's not a secret. The V stands for Victoria, which is my little name, which is really boring.
But as a fun story, I did once work at a previous job where for five months my boss also asked me the same question. He was like, what does a V stand for? And I told him, like, oh, it's just my little name. It stands for Victoria.
And he goes, oh, I thought it stood for versus like you were at like internal strife with yourself at all times. And I'm like, no, so what it's for? That would have been my first story. I know, right?
So let's just pretend nothing I said happened. It stands for versus. Helen versus Holland at all times, constant internal strife. I just cut it out.
Thank you. So you're from Virginia, Charlottesville. I know I've never been there myself. I mean, is that where you grew up?
Have you always lived there? So I'm actually not from Charlottesville originally. I'm from the Berbs in right outside of Washington, DC. So I am from Virginia originally, but I've moved within Virginia.
But when I think about where I grew up, I spent all my summers actually in this really small county called Sullivan County, Pennsylvania, which is surrounded by nothing and farmland. So I think of that as like home. But yeah, now I'm from Charlottesville, I guess. And how different is that from where you actually grew up in?
It's, I would say it is a lot cuter, if that makes sense. When I was growing up in the Berbs, like you had to drive everywhere and in comparison Charlottesville is really walkable. So I really like that. It's also a lot more southern.
Like I'm currently, so Charlottesville is a university town. And so because of that, it is fairly liberal and progressive, but you only need to drive like 30 minutes out of it. And it becomes farm country again, which is sort of like a culture shock. Like you really don't have to go very far before you meet people from very different walks of life.
So it sounds like it's a fairly sort of smallish town, you know, maybe a little bit more rural. Is there a big Texan in Charlottesville? Where are you from? Not really.
So the Texan here is pretty sparse. It's a beautiful town, but all of the tech that is happening, if it's happening at all, is either coming from the university, and I'm not a student, so I'm not from the university, or there are like two agencies in town. And I obviously don't work for either of those either. So my personal Texan is even smaller than the one here.
So I mostly get in my hanging out with other developers and other designers by meeting other remote workers and going to conferences. So you said that you didn't work at any of those agencies. So when you were working, not for yourself, for other companies, where those in Virginia or where those in other cities around the US. So my last job was actually with Mozilla.
So my last full-time job was with Mozilla, and they are based in San Francisco. So I was remote. I was on the developer tools team, and everyone was remote almost. Or the very least, everyone was spread out, even if they weren't remote.
So I didn't... I always felt like I was very much part of a team. I never felt left out, because everyone was all over the world. It was pretty crazy.
So I got really good at measuring time zones, actually. Was that quite difficult to work, don't we? It was not too difficult to work that way once you got your head around, like, oh, so-and-so is in this city. That means I can ping him around this time.
What was difficult was, is that because I'm on the east coast of the United States, obviously, Europe would always wake up before me. And so I'd always wake up in the morning and I'd have emails and bugs. And that sometimes was kind of like the daily grind, you know? It's like, oh, man.
All right. Cool. Did you try and adjust your working hours to suit the majority of the company, or did you just stick to your local time zone? So actually, 9 to 5, for me, was perfect, because I could talk with Europe in the morning.
Like, when I would sometimes wake up kind of earlier, if I knew that I was working with people mostly in Europe for a particular sprint, and then my afternoon is morning for San Francisco. So it actually worked out pretty beautifully. Okay, good stuff. And that was that Mozilla.
And so you also worked out a couple of other big companies, GitHub and Horoku, were they before or? So I actually have never worked at either of those companies, but I worked with them. So at the beginning of the year, I went freelance, and both of those places have been clients of mine, which has been pretty fun. All right.
You were on the dev tools team at Mozilla, right? Because I remember the first time I actually started hearing about just the work you do is on the tools day, by God, so when you were a guest on there. Oh, yeah, with you know, quite a while ago. And I remember you know, I was hearing that and how you were working on dev tools.
And I'm not Mozilla using myself, but that episode did make me spend a few days working in Firefox and just trying out the dev tools. Obviously, you know, like most people, I use Chrome as well. Oh, my goodness. Wow.
I'm so flattered. Yeah. So what was it like working on that sort of project? You know, obviously designing the tools that people use to build their sites basically and work on their sites.
It was really informative. I got to say, the people who work on dev tools just have to be at the forefront of everything that's coming down the pipeline. And so that was really fun for me, because previously when I was working as a web developer, you always kind of knew that something exciting was happening in CSS. But there was always like this, I can't use it yet.
Like right now, the big thing is CSS grad. It's like, I can't use it yet. But as you're working on dev tools, you have to build out the tooling for them. And so you actually not only do you get to work with the newest technologies you kind of have to because you have to be thinking about how am I going to build out tooling for people using these things.
And so that was super exciting. The parts of the job that were really hard and sort of scary were that like, if you kind of took a wrong misstep, there were a lot of people watching and a lot of people who would make sure you knew that they didn't what you were doing. And that's just sort of like an open source, like building products for building software, building anything. But there are a lot of people who use Firefox and a lot of people in the dev tools.
So I used to do a Mozilla user, Firefox user, and then you left. Oh, of course. I mean, obviously I use all of the browsers because you've got to do cross browser testing. And I actually now have like a weird habit of I use one browser for like personal browsing and another for work browsing and then certain websites, so I'll spend a different browser for it.
I always have all the browsers open. It's either it's great or it's awful. I don't know. Yeah, well, the Firefox DevTools are brilliant, especially seeing as they've got some of the tools to work with the CSS Grid.
They've got some features like the Grid overlay that so not Firefox Chrome haven't implemented yet and obviously Intlax or a little bit behind it. But yeah, it's really cool. I've been playing around with Grid recently as well, since it has been launched in all the browsers last month. And yeah, it's nice to work on that in Firefox DevTools.
It's really visually what's going on. So now you're working for yourself now, you've set up your own console receivers, I guess, or freelance? Yeah, so I'm technically an LLC. I don't know what that means in Great Britain, but I set up my own business at the beginning of the year.
I'd wanted sort of the change of pace. One of my very good friends went freelance around the same time. And so we both were setting up our companies in parallel, and that was really encouraging because we both were able to give each other advice about like trying to write contracts for the first time and how we did our taxes because it's different when you're a business and all of that sort of stuff that is kind of boring. But I have really enjoyed it because now I get to solve all sorts of different design problems.
And I really like variety. So did you make that decision once you already had some clients in the pipeline, or was it a deep first, you know, jump into the deep end and just see how it goes? It was very much feet first. And I got to say, so I was setting it up in, so I was doing all of this, like at the very beginning of the new year, and I'm sure that you know this, like right after the holidays, everyone's kind of quiet, everyone trickles back into work.
And I at this time was like setting up my business and trying to pursue contracts. And you know, everyone's kind of like slowed answer emails during this time. And I was very nervous for a little bit. I was like, what if no one hires me?
But once everyone was sort of back in office, it was not a problem, had clients and was working by February. So it all went okay. But I was very nervous for a little bit. Yeah, that's one of the fears I've always had as well because it like in between jobs, I although I would be working for another company now in between jobs, I have worked for myself, and I do do some freelance work on the site as well.
And I've always thought about whether I should put more effort into every business and try to make that my sole income. But because of things like mortgage and family commitments and you know, just life in general, it's just one of those fears that what happens if I don't have a client for a certain amount of time and you know, all of these bills start coming in, but the income's not coming in. Yeah, I got to say like one of the best things I ever did was put like a ton of money away. I sort of knew that I wanted to do this eventually.
And so I've been slowly accumulating like a really, really large saving funds just so that I could deal with problems like that one. Like, oh my goodness, what if I have a dry spell? So that's part of the way that I approached that problem. And then the other thing that my family was really nervous about was like Helen, what happens with your health insurance?
Because this is a very American problem. We all, but like lots of Americans get their insurance through their employers. But luckily, my husband also works. So that really helped.
I get my insurance for him. But yeah, that was like one of the big fears that like my immediate family all had. They were like, how will you go to the doctor? Yeah, well, it's quite important.
One is it is an important problem. Yeah, there's a lot happening around that in America at the moment, but we won't make this a poll picture. Yeah, I know pretend I said nothing. So are you working with any projects or the moment?
Is anything that you talk about? Like, sure. Oh, yeah. All right.
Okay. So like broadly, something I'm working on, obviously my business, like I kind of talked about that, which has been fun because now I kind of pursue, like, where do I want my portfolio to go? Like what sort of problems do I want to solve? And that's pretty exciting.
But when it comes to like a cool project I'm working on, at the very beginning of a brand new project, which is always a fun place to be, it's all sunshine and rainbows right now. So for a few months, I've been working on like this brand new portfolio. And that's finally launched. But now I have space for this new project, which is something I've been mulling over for a few years.
It's like this remixer for famous art pieces that I'm hooking up to a hardware display board. And so that's part hardware. It's part iPhone app. And then it's also a server that processes the images and like spits them out onto the board.
And I'm super right over my head. I don't know what I'm doing. It feels great. Every little problem is really hard to solve.
But I'm working on it with actually my husband. And he, his name is Brian and it's really fun to work with someone who has really different strengths. And he does like all this like low level algorithms, like crunching big numbers. And I like really like fonts.
So we're very different when it comes to like strengths and weaknesses. Yeah. And then I'm always kind of working on like various certain pieces. I don't like to write about tech necessarily directly, but more the way tech and computers interact with like my own human experience.
That sounds really wishy-washy. But that's always something I'm working on. I have like 10 drafts, like pretty much at any one time. And I just kind of see what sticks and turns into something.
So those are kind of the things I'm working on right now. Yeah. So this hardware, this art project, what sort of hardware are you using? So I am designing my own PCV board for it.
It uses Neopixels, which if you look them up on native fruit, they just kind of look like these tiny little squares. They're like these tiny programmable LEDs. And so my idea is kind of to like set up, I don't know if you remember like light pin boards. Those are like a big thing in the 90s.
Yeah. So it's kind of like the nerd programmer version of that. We're like customizing all the lights and being able to like play with it on your phone and I'm working on something like that right now. Okay.
So are you kind of recreating art using lights? Basically. Yeah. That is a good way of putting it.
Yeah. So have you got any particular art pieces that you're using as your test pieces? Yeah. I do actually have a few.
I have been using Star Knight by Van Gogh. I did one, I did like a pixel representation of Mona Lisa. And I feel like I did one other, but I can share the links with you later because they're fun like, they're currently, they were those are literally just things that like I've done on my computer, but they were really fun to work on anyway. Yeah.
That'll be good if you could share links to obviously what you've done and even some of the hardware that you're using. Then I can put some of that in the show notes as well. All right. I mean, we're actually doing something, well not similar, but the job that I work at, we're experimenting with a lot of IoT hardware at the moment.
So there's one of the guys is getting to talk on Friday about a device called Puck.js, which is a, it's like a Bluetooth button which you can program using JavaScript. And he's been working on something with that. Oh, very interesting. So that should be interesting.
But yeah, the plan is for everyone in the company to try and build something together and maybe integrate with Alexa because you can use some Alexa skills now on Amazon hardware. So yeah, that's kind of what's happening in the next couple of weeks where I work. Oh, that's super exciting. I've never actually worked with any hardware before like that.
So it's something that we completely knew to a lot of those actually. Yeah, that'll be super exciting. I love it. I think that sort of like the same joy that I had when I very first like got a website working and was like able to change things and make it look the way I wanted that same sort of joy.
I had it all over again for hardware like and I made even with really simple stuff work, like make that little button on like the Arduino starter project light up. I was like, wow, this is cool. I need to do more of this. Yeah, I went to this local meetup in their home and there was a guy there called Ben Foxl, he's a JavaScript developer from Oxford in the UK.
And he was using one of these pug buttons and he had connected it via a web server to some like internet connected fairy lights. So when he hits the button, the lights change color. And then he also wired them up to a WordPress blog. So he presses the button, it created a post on his WordPress blog.
And then the lights were watching his RSS feed from that post and then they changed color as well. So you know, it wasn't like a groundbreaking end result because the lights just changed color. But the fact that he was doing all over a web server and through a web press blog just shows you just like with a few lines of JavaScript was actually possible. It's pretty amazing.
Yeah, I did something like that similar. So like this project, like I said, I've been like thinking about it for a while and I had none of the prerequisite skills in order to build it. So I've been doing like smaller projects to ramp up to it. And last year in October, one of the things I did was like I made an iPhone app that connected with very similar to what he had done with pug.
Like I had connected it to a neo-pixel ring. So that when someone tweeted at me, the neo-pixel ring would like light up, you can set like a custom link color that you see on your profile on the web on Twitter. So like mine is like a deep blue. So the neo-pixel ring, when anyone tweeted at me, it would like light up their like pre-defined color.
And no one understood it when I tried to tweet about it because it was really confusing. But it was a lot of fun to work on. And then everyone starts tweeting at you and you got the strobe light going on. Yeah, that's actually what happened.
Like I was at a conference like playing with it like it was sitting in my lap and like I was trying to explain what was happening. And then everyone starts tweeting at me and then I'm like, Oh my God, like I was trying to like put it under my shirt and like crumple it over myself. Like, I'm sorry. Other people giving talks at this conference.
I'm like lighting up and listening to crowds going on over there. Excellent. So that's a really nice segue actually on to conferences which was my next question. So you've spoken to quite a few places.
You've got a few videos on your website that you've shared. What was the most recent one talk that you've given them? I think my most recent talk was at View Source. That was in Berlin in September.
Yeah, that sounds right. What was the topic of that one? I gave a talk on Web Typography. It was called Type is your Right.
And it was all about how you can use progressive loading enhancements to have really nice Web Typography on your websites, but also not like create terrible loading experiences on mobile where like you can't even see like any of the content yet, which is like something you see on like a lot of sites on mobile on the web where it's like you're just waiting for a couple seconds, like waiting to be able to read anything. Like that's lame. The talk is about getting rid of that. Okay.
And are you speaking anywhere else this year? Yeah. So I am speaking at Revolution Conf in June. So that's coming up really soon.
I'm giving a talk on ways to get designers into your code base. I actually have a discount code, which I could link to later. But yeah, that is like currently my only speaking engagement for this year. I had to kind of like put like a pause actually on the public speaking while I was like getting myself situated at the beginning of the year and getting clients and everything.
So now I'm like ramping back up again. So is this talk going to be because you've done a similar one before about getting designers into the next code, codebase? Didn't you do something with iOS? Yeah.
So the first time I ever gave this talk, this was over a year ago at this point, I gave it in March of last year. And at the time it was called 10 Ways to Get Designers Into Your Swift Code Base. And I gave it at a Swift Conference. And since then, my philosophies have, I would say, matured.
And I actually think that sort of the main things I want to communicate with that talk really transcend necessarily technical architecture. And when I gave the talk before, it was like really embedded in how do you get designers into a Swift codebase. And like I said, I think that a lot of my talking points like really don't necessarily have very much to do with the code. That's good.
It's good that you've made an evolution of a other talk that you've given before as well. So it'd be interesting to see how your opinion has changed from this topic within a year or so. Yeah. Hopefully everyone likes the evolution.
Hopefully it's good. Yeah. So how do you get into speaking at these events? Is this something that you pitched for or are conference organizers approaching you now?
So it's a little combo both. In the beginning, it was all pitches. Now it's still mostly pitches. And occasionally, like once in a blue moon, a conference organizer will reach out to me.
So before my company could send me to speak now, I'm all about my lonesome conferences, be to find the budget to have me come out. So that kind of changes the dynamic a little bit. Some conferences, I'll get accepted and they'll love the talk. But when we come down to brass packs, how do I get there?
Sometimes it's not always possible for me to attend. Okay. Yeah. So how does it work with a conference?
I've never spoken to a conference. So just a bit of history about why I started this podcast is I've never personally, I've never really been a conference speaker in talking about big crowds, I've been talking about my conference. So I thought that before I try and talk in front of a crowd, let me just build up some experience in talking about topics that I'm interested in. So that's why it's not this podcast, actually.
And because the goal ultimately is to try and talk publicly as well. But at the moment, I'm never spoken to a conference. Do they generally cover your travel costs? Do they get you to the conference?
Or are you left to your own devices to get there? So it totally runs the gamut. Unfortunately, it really depends on the conference. But I, as a rule for myself, only attend conferences where they can cover my travel and cover my hotel.
But some conferences, especially the ones that are not for profit, sometimes they can't cover anything. And so they'll look for mostly local speakers, people who can just drive there, any meetup, basically kind of runs on that model. Because meetups are typically, you know, they're run by people like us who have full-time jobs. They're just looking for someone to come and talk for 15 minutes to 30 minutes on something cool they're doing.
And that's a great way to initially get started is by going to meetups. Whereas some of your larger conferences are able to cover your travel. It just depends. There are just questions you need to ask.
Yeah, sure. Do you remember what your first big conference was? What the talk was about? And how you actually got on to that conference?
Oh my goodness. Like it was yesterday. My first talk was at Cascadia. This was Cascadia JS.
That's a conference that happens. It kind of moves between Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland. So it actually goes up into Canada some years. And then it comes down into the States on the west coast.
What had happened was they had like a, they had a GitHub where they were accepting proposals. So you opened up an issue and you put in your talk abstract in there. And my talk was actually originally rejected. And then later they emailed me and said, hey, we had a few dropouts, we always loved to have brand new speakers.
Because we like to get new people talking. And I was like, yes. And I had decided that the proposal that had been accepted was what on JavaScript, prototypal inheritance. And looking back on it, I have no idea why I chose that.
I really was just trying to get accepted to a conference. And this was the abstract I had written. I had never written one before. It wasn't a very good abstract.
I very immediately felt like, oh my goodness. I don't know anything about JavaScript. How am I supposed to write a talk about JavaScript? I explained it to other people, which is not true.
Now I can say I know stuff about JavaScript. But at the time I really felt like I didn't. Basically what I did was I wrote out this long thing on JavaScript in a gist file, like a private gist. I morphed it into a story about learning styles and also still about JavaScript.
And I sent it out to people. And it's really funny because this was such an important part of writing a conference talk even for me now. Because I sent it out to some people who I really admire and large swaths of it were just wrong, which I'm so glad I had it looked over. Because it's always important to have your code reviewed.
And that's what I needed. So I cleaned it up. Getting to the conference at the time was actually pretty challenging because that year it was being held in Blaine, Washington, which is when you look at a map of the United States and you look on the West Coast, it's like the very, very tip right along the line before you get into Canada. And getting there is actually logistically kind of difficult.
I was living in Charlottesville. I took a bus up to the next big city, which was DC. And then I had two flights. And then once I got into Atlanta, Seattle, which is like the next big city out of way from Blaine, Washington.
And then I took a train and then I took a bus. My nerves were wrecked. I was so terrified. I was like really, really nervous.
Like I wasn't like eating food. I was like, I have to give a talk in front of people about a thing I don't know about. But I will say this. It was all fine.
Like everything went well. I prepped. I managed to do everything. Yeah.
My first talk was at Cascadia JS. Thank you, Cascadia JS organizers on JavaScript for the type of inheritance. Is that a conference that still happens now? It doesn't happen anymore.
And I believe the conference organizers actually did write up a blurb about why they decided to discontinue it. And I don't remember the specifics. But another conference called Seattle JS has popped up in its place because there was a lot of love in that area for Cascadia. Okay, that's good.
That's good. And how do you come up with the talks for your conferences that you're speaking about? Are they determined by the conference? Are they looking for talks that are answered topics?
Or is it almost a free throw? So what I do actually is I try to, so at the beginning, what I would do is I would look at conference websites and I look at the things that they wanted. And I'd see if I could craft a proposal that like fit for what they were looking for. And more of what I do now is I come up with things, I ask myself two questions.
I ask myself, what do I want to learn and what do I have to teach? And when I'm thinking through those questions, I come up with things that I think I could give a 25 minute talk on and enjoy the process of creating and giving a 25 minute talk. And I create an abstract in essence. And then I go around and I try to look at conferences and I say, do I think this conference, like, do I think this talk would even fit in with this conference?
And if it does, then I submit. And then from there, it's all systems go to actually try and write something and come up with the talk. Yes, exactly. And from there, I look at my abstract, I say to myself, it was like thinking, and then yeah, you go and you make it work and make it happen.
Excellent. Are there particular places where you can find out about conferences that are looking for speakers? Or do you just need to check on the conference's own websites? So there are two resources that I use a lot.
There's a site called PaperCall.io. And they, all they do is it's just conferences and they're called CFPs. They release their calls for papers on there. And I actually keep all my talk abstracts in there, even for conferences that don't use that service because they just have a nice little setup for organizing your talks.
And then there is a really great email subscription service that is called Technically Speaking. And I can't remember the names of the two women who run it. And I say that because I can only think of their Twitter handles. But I'll find that information later.
They run sort of, I'm not sure if it's weekly or if it's biweekly, but they run like a tiny letter where they have like just sort of like rolling like these are currently conferences that have like Open CFPs. And that's pretty great. And there are a few other services too. I'm actually writing like a really long blog post on how I write talks.
And so I actually like have all of this information written down already. So I'll send that info along. Yeah, do you think that'll be ready to publish in terms soon? Because I could put the link to that in the show notes as well.
If you could try that in with this episode. Hopefully I'm hoping to have it done and released on like Friday. I say that those are like famous last words. Like I think I can get that done by the end of the week.
We'll see. But you will be the first to know. That's perfect. Because I try to release an episode on a Monday or Tuesday usually.
So if you get it done by the Friday, then that's perfect. All right. So race against the clock. Yeah, pressure.
No pressure. All right. No, brilliant. That's some good advice.
I'm probably speaking definitely some, you know, I'll check out some of those resources. It's something I'd love to get into. I just haven't really had a chance yet. And I suppose meet ups, you know, there are a few meetups we're on from.
So I'm based in a place called Wokingum, which is in in Berkshire. So it's about, it's about 30 minute drive west of London. But it's quite a growing Texan. There's a lot of big companies around here.
And because it is just outside London as well, a lot of companies I'm moving here to get out of the, you know, the rush zone of London. And a lot of people are actually living here as aren't commuting in because it's a commuter town, I guess. But yeah, it's growing. So there's quite a lot of smaller meetups and smaller tech events that happen within the Reading and Berkshire area.
So I do try and go to as many of those as I can, but I haven't spoken at any of them yet. But yeah, I just haven't thought of a topic. You can do it by day. You're about to learn all of this stuff about like hardware at work.
Obviously you need to like write down your experiences because other people would learn from you. You have something to say. We'll just do what you did and just pick a topic and learn about it later. Yeah, I will say it's a stressful way to, it is a stressful way to go and give talks.
But I will say you were very proud of yourself at the end. Like you're on cloud nine after you've given the talk. Yeah, cool. That's that's all of my questions I had.
Do you have any questions for me? Do I have any questions for you? I know we can't have any questions for you. Oh my goodness.
I like want to ask you if if you were to give a talk, like what do you think you would give it on? I almost like want to workshop this with you like right now. I'm like we can come up with a talk that you can give. Well, I spend most of my day working with CSS.
So I suppose that's you know, the topic that I've got the most experience with that I would feel most comfortable talking about. So yeah, maybe I could you know follow in the footsteps of people at Rachel, Andrew and Jensen Simmons, I'm not talking about CSS grid. It's obviously a hot topic at the moment and not everyone explored it. So yeah, maybe that could be I think I would love to see like CSS grid like remixed with like other really cool like there are so many people who talk about like the magic of CSS in essence.
Yeah, I feel like even that term there is definitely have you seen the stuff that Jensen Simmons has done where she's recreated like Mondrian art and she's done a load of experiments. Oh yeah, no, I so Jensen Simmons and I actually she works at Mozilla. She and I work together on the tooling for the Firefox developer tools. So I'm very familiar with her work.
She does really cool stuff. Yeah, so she's done some really cool experiments with grid. Obviously if you just have a little browser on and code pen, some of the things that people are creating with it are are amazing, you know, game, there's games and all sorts. Yeah, so maybe something like that.
But I don't know, I've thought about this for a while and I still don't really have an answer. But I will, I'll think about it. That's all right. I do.
I do want to be the first to know because I'm excited about it. I don't know. I really do believe like giving talks is really, really great for one's career and there is just a lot to be said about technology. You should do it.
Yeah, definitely. Have you ever given any talks in the UK? Well, I've got any plans to. Have I ever given any talks in the UK?
I have not. I would love to. UK conferences. Getting up.
Yeah, yeah, there's quite a few big ones around here. There's especially in Oxford. There's a few in London. I wouldn't be able to name them right now.
Probably not as many as I would hope they are. You know, a lot of them tend to stay around Europe or so they're a bit more accessible to everybody. But you know, there's just not enough. It'd be nice if there were some bigger ones who were looking for people.
But yeah, it'd be great if you are over here. Definitely share the details and hopefully meet up with person one day, never know. That would be wonderful. Then we can meet IRL, not just like over Google Hangouts.
Yeah, this is IRL now, isn't it? This is real. It's like, it's true. It's real time.
Yeah, cool, cool. So, all right, well, it's been great having you on the show. Thanks for being my first international guest. Well, thank you for having me.
And thank you for having me be part of your evening. Like, it's a 30 there. I really appreciate it. It's like dinner time.
Yeah, yeah. So, if people want to find out a bit more about you, where can they find you? Anything you want to plug? All right, my plugs.
So on Twitter, I am at Helen V. Holmes. That is Helen spelled with an H and only one L, a V as in versus. Holmes is in Sherlock.
That's a UK shout out right there. My website is also Helen V. Holmes.com. My pin tweet right now is something I wrote recently, which is called Critique is Terrifying, which I started a part time job as a hobby.
And I wrote about it in terms of receiving critique through design critiques and through code reviews and just how you get better and how you learn what kinds of critique to take and what you don't. So, those are my plugs. Brilliant. And all those links and everything will be in the show notes as well.
But I'm sure you can just Google Helen V. Holmes and make sure you put the V in there because that's how she's known. And Helen Holmes apparently doesn't get you the right result. I've tried.
No, Helen Holmes is like a silent film actress from the early 1800s. Don't do it. She's not me. Definitely not the right result.
She's cool too, but not me. That's why the V is in there. Just a different change. That's why the V is there.
Yeah. That's literally the reason. All right, look at this. It's been really good talking to you.
And thank you again for being on the show. And hopefully speak to you again soon in the future. Yeah, thank you so much. All right.
Have a good rest of the week and get that blog post written. Bye Friday. I will. All right.
You have a great rest of the week too. Bye. Bye.