Commit temporary timeline stuff

.eleventy.js

@@ -65,6 +65,7 @@ module.exports = function (eleventyConfig) {
   eleventyConfig.setLibrary("md", mdLib);
 
   return {
+    markdownTemplateEngine: "njk",
     dir: {
       input: "src",
       output: "dist",

src/_layouts/_partials/work-timeline.njk

@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
+{% for timelineItem in collections.timeline | reverse %}
+		<h2 class="p-name">{{timelineItem.data.title}}</h2>
+		<div>{{ timelineItem.templateContent | safe }}</div>
+{% endfor %}

src/_layouts/blog-listing.njk

@@ -21,4 +21,4 @@ description: Occasional musings about tech, web development, and other miscellan
       </article>
     {% endfor %}
   </div>
-</div>
+</div>

src/_shortcodes/active-section.js

@@ -1,4 +1,6 @@
 module.exports = function activeSection(itemUrl, pageUrl, output) {
+  if(!itemUrl || !pageUrl) return "";
+
   // The homepage will not have an active state in either case
   if (itemUrl === "/") return "";
 

src/timeline/2005-forum-signatures-and-photoshop.md

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+---
+title: RuneScape, Forum Signatures & Photoshop
+date: 2005-01-01
+---
+
+Tweenage Alex hears about this cool new _online_ computer game, RuneScape, and starts visiting his friends with a dial-up internet connection a lot more frequently (for no reason except my love for them, of course).
+
+After years of nagging my mum buys a computer. I find Sal's Realm of Runescape, an online fansite with a forum which I spent increasing amounts of time on. They had a graphics forum where people make cool forum signatures. I want in on this, so I splash three years' worth of my weekly allowance to buy an entirely legal copy of Adobe® Photoshop® and start [creating graphics using Adobe® Photoshop® software](https://www.adobe.com/uk/legal/permissions/trademarks.html). I spend a lot of time on it and it quickly becomes a hobby.
+
+https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FyPfYKdXZ2nFSOyRS1gdR6ze8ELImqGGf2FwlugC1QAk.png%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D44e6bdd6172b985c4741ca77446c39f8323cdae3

src/timeline/2006-high-school.md

@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
+---
+title: High school
+date: 2006-01-01
+
+---
+
+In the Norwegian school system, at the secondary level you can either choose general studies or a more specialised field; I chose _Media and Communications_, which covered all sorts of creative production at a base level, including photography, cinematography, graphic design, print design, video editing, journalism, Flash, (which was the style at the time), and web design. I initially decided on this course on account of my passion for photography and graphic design [insert meme here] at the time.

src/timeline/2009-moving-to-scotland.md

@@ -0,0 +1,9 @@
+---
+title: Moving to the UK
+date: 2009-06-01
+
+---
+
+I move to the UK precisely two days after my high school graduation, callously breaking my poor mum's heart in the process (it's okay, she's forgiven my youthful follies since), taking a year off education to decide what I want to do with my life. I work part-time in a remote Scottish youth hostel and learn just how savage British school groups can be.
+
+https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipM_Vam7_K2glleZEeRtypNom9h99KKAWsF6Q5Lu

src/timeline/2010-09-university.md

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+---
+title: Starting university
+date: 2009-09-01
+
+---
+
+I decided to study some sort of web design or web development, because that seemed like an exciting field that had decent employment prospects compared to my other love, photography. My open day in Bristol was on a perfect, gorgeous spring day and I instantly fell in love with Bristol, and move there to start a BSc in Web Design at UWE Bristol.
+
+The photo is related, as my first project in one of my modules, Interaction Design, is to redesign a board game, so we had to play extensive amounts of Cluedo for research.
+https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipPOu2s1cOvPNoc1MeWuJkoW1BXXIsMBvqbQ6ZGh

src/timeline/2010-10-wdc.md

@@ -0,0 +1,9 @@
+---
+title: Attending my first web development conference
+date: 2009-10-01
+
+---
+
+Bristol's iconic web development conference, [WebDevConf](https://webdevconf.com/), is hosted at my university, and our course lead arranged for us all to get free tickets. Figuring it'd probably be more fun than a day of lectures, I go, and unexpectedly have a really great time (turns out most conference speakers are more interesting than many of our lecturers) and decide to return next year.
+
+I have since attended every WDC that's been put on except one, and even spoke at it in 2022 (insert link here).

src/timeline/2011-01-fsx.md

@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
+---
+title: FreestyleXtreme
+date: 2011-01-01
+---
+
+I take a part-time job for beer money as an English to Norwegian translator at [FreestyleXtreme](https://web.archive.org/web/20120502114651/http://www.freestylextreme.com/), who were an extreme sports apparel e-commerce store. (They were genuinely a lovely bunch and I'm sad to see [they were a Brexit casualty](https://cyclingindustry.news/freestyle-extreme-ceases-trading-seemingly-blaming-brexit/).) During their busiest times of the year I took care of various other duties when required, such as warehouse fulfilment, returns processing, and customer service.
+
+Once my line manager realises that I know how to make websites I was quickly re-assigned to making a few quick WordPress and Magento sites to support some of the biggest brands they were stocking and direct more traffic to their main site, and I developed a plugin to automatically convert a Google Products XML feed to a widget. This was the first time somebody paid me money to make websites and I was chuffed. I stay with FreestyleXtreme for a year and a half until I start my uni placement.

src/timeline/2011-09-pal.md

@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+---
+title: Learning by teaching
+date: 2011-09-01
+---
+
+Second year rolls around and I become a student rep for my course, as well as a [Peer Assisted Learning leader](https://www.uwe.ac.uk/study/study-support/peer-assisted-learning)—basically I put on an open-ended study session every week for a specific module I had in first year. This was a really great experience and reinforced my beliefs that one of the best ways to master something is to teach it to others. The module I was assisting with, Introduction to Web Design, was taken by quite a few other creative courses who had otherwise no background or experience with the web, and I had to go back to basics. It was really satisfying when you saw that a concept _clicked_ with students because of your help.

src/timeline/2012-06-simpleweb.md

@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+---
+title: Simpleweb
+date: 2012-06-01
+---
+
+I join [Simpleweb](https://simpleweb.com), a Bristol web development agency, as a uni placement web developer. This was a really fun experience, I worked with some very talented creative developers, and I get my first direct experience with agency work. I mostly worked with WordPress, PHP, and jQuery for client projects, but also got some experience with Ruby on Rails by building an internal HR tool.

src/timeline/2013-01-naconf.md

@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+---
+title: New Adventures conference
+date: 2013-01-01
+---
+
+I attend the [New Adventures conference in Nottingham](https://jegtnes.com/blog/a-love-letter-to-new-adventures/) and have a blast. I land my first ever piece of freelance work, doing some front-end theming for a Shopify store through a mutual conference attendee. 

src/timeline/2013-09-final-year-of-uni.md

@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+---
+title: Final year of uni
+date: 2013-09-01
+---
+
+Emboldened by a successful and enjoyable placement year at Simpleweb, I return to university for my final year of studies. Having lived long enough in the UK to be baffled at the state of the trains, I decide to make a train journey planning website for my final year project/dissertation, frustrated at how there are more than 20 different train operating companies in the UK, but their websites were all reskins of the same two booking engines, which were horrendous on both the UI and UX front.

src/timeline/2014-01-bristol-mediation.md

@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+---
+title: Bristol Mediation
+date: 2014-01-01
+---
+
+One of the more interesting modules was a group-based one that my course shared with IT Management for Business students, where our final project was working with local Bristol charities to help them identify and solve business problems. My group was partnered up with [Bristol Mediation (now known as Resolve West)](https://resolvewest.org/) and delivered a PHP-based internal web application for their volunteer mediators to share their availability and transport modality, to allow the organisers of the mediation sessions to pick the most sensible combination of mediators to people in need of their services.

src/timeline/2014-05-project-brunel.md

@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
+---
+title: Final year project completion
+date: 2014-05-01
+---
+
+For my final year project, I wanted to explore ranking complex train journeys by _quality_ instead of a simple list of departures sorted by departure time, and choose three user-weighted metrics instead: price, journey time, and amount of changes required. Depending on user needs, you may prefer, for example, a much slower train journey with one change instead of a quicker and more expensive journey with two changes, or vice-versa. It was very satisfying to work on, especially as it scratched a personal itch, and had it not continuously broken because it relied on screen scraping to fetch the data (look, the alternative at the time was a horrendous SOAP API with no free tier for educational use), it'd have been a very fun side project to maintain. I built it using Rails (and not because of the thematic appropriateness), and it won the Best Digital Media Project award at the faculty awards, so I, too, can call myself an award-winning developer, which was all the rage in the early-mid 2010s.
+
+I dip my second toe in the freelance waters by creating a WordPress plugin for a uni friend's client website. The water was fine!

src/timeline/2014-06-job-hunt.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: Job hunt
+date: 2014-05-01
+---
+
+[I start looking for a job](/blog/graduate-seeking-great-company-to-make-lovely-web-things-for/).
+
+I find out I get to graduate with a first-class degree, which was neat. My mum was very proud of me.
+
+[I find a job](https://jegtnes.com/blog/i-m-joining-cxpartners/). 
+
+Emboldened by my previous short forays into freelance life, before I started my position, I do a month's worth of Drupal freelance work with [a local agency, Southmedia](https://southmedia.agency).

src/timeline/2014-09-ons.md

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+---
+title: Office for National Statistics
+date: 2014-10-01
+---
+
+One of my first projects at cxpartners is working with the Office for National Statistics: they had an ambitious project going to entirely rebuild their site using the GDS model, and they hire cxpartners to do help with user research and help build out a [pattern library](https://onsdigital.github.io/pattern-library/) for the [alpha version of their new website](https://digitalblog.ons.gov.uk/2014/12/08/ons-website-prototype-launches/). 
+
+Working on such a big and impactful project so early on in my career was fantastic: not only did I enjoy helping to deliver the alpha ONS pattern library as a junior developer; but getting to work together with some very talented experience designers and user researchers was a privilege and helped me grow as a developer in many ways.
+
+I go to Barcelona with the small cxpartners dev team to attend the [Velocity] conference.

src/timeline/2015-02-coop-at-home.md

@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
+---
+title: coop@home
+date: 2015-02-01
+---
+
+A new project is on the horizon: cxpartners form a multidisciplinary team to work with coop@home, one of Switzerland's largest online grocery retailers. Once again, I got deeply involved in the user-centred design process and loved every minute. It was really difficult work, and _many_ post-its were sacrificed, but we solved a lot of problems, and the coop@home website is still, nine years later, in my unbiased opinion, better than most UK supermarkets'. All websites are, of course, more or less Theseus' ~~ships~~ websites, but it's neat that what we designed and built worked so well that their fundamentals are still there nine years later at the time of writing.
+
+[The cxpartners case study](https://www.cxpartners.co.uk/our-work/coop-supermarket/) has some more details.

src/timeline/2015-07-public-speaking.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: Public speaking
+date: 2015-02-01
+---
+
+I dip my toe into public speaking for the first time and deliver two talks:
+
+### Post-preprocessing: When using Sass _isn't_ the best solution
+A talk at the [SassXSW meetup in Bath](https://web.archive.org/web/20151225034355/https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sassxsw-meet-up-bath-tickets-17260042251) about how Sass is great, but some of its features have a high risk of auto-foot-shooting, and where caution should be exercised when using them.
+
+### Gulping your Broccoli
+A talk at the remote conference [CSS Summit](https://web.archive.org/web/20150702084011/http://environmentsforhumans.com/2015/css-summit/) comparing the state of different build tools at the time (it was very clever, you see, because back in the day, "Gulp" and "Broccoli" were two well-known build tools) and how to implement various common features in each of them, including BrowserSync, responsive image generation, reducing compilation time with Broccoli, CSS injection, and critical path CSS generation.

src/timeline/2015-10-imeche.md

@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+---
+title: Institute of Mechanical Engineering
+date: 2015-10-01
+---
+
+At cxpartners we get involved with the [Institute of Mechanical Engineering](https://imeche.org) to redesign their website using a pattern-library-led approach. We spread the good word of breaking down silos, bringing devs and designers together earlier, and save ourselves a bunch of time down the road by combining forces sooner. A fun example of some of the forward-thinking stuff we were up to is [detailed in this blog post by James Chudley](https://www.cxpartners.co.uk/our-thinking/how-to-run-a-user-centred-photoshoot/) about content photography suitable to all breakpoints of our responsive redesign.

src/timeline/2016-02-bristol-web-perf.md

@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
+---
+title: Bristol Web Performance
+date: 2016-02-01
+---
+
+I start a Bristol meetup with the eminent [Stu Charlton](https://twitter.com/stuccharlton) and [Drew McLellan](https://allinthehead.com/about), all about web performance, imaginatively named Bristol Web Performance. 
+
+Over time, we realise that this town (Bristol) isn't big enough for a monthly meetup about web performance, but we still manage to host nine excellent meetups, featuring excellent speakers such as [Yoav Weiss](https://blog.yoav.ws/), [Bruce Lawson](https://brucelawson.co.uk/), [Ruth John](https://ruthjohn.com/), [Andy Davies](https://andydavies.me/), [Rachel Andrew](https://rachelandrew.co.uk/), [Matt Jukes](https://www.jukes.ie/), and many others. I really loved the community-building aspect of it, got to [practice my copywriting](https://twitter.com/kasiazien/status/785804310739230720/photo/1), and was not lying when I said I'd [make people cocktails](https://twitter.com/Rumyra/status/789160239299956736/photo/1) on request ([such as a White Lady](https://twitter.com/Rumyra/status/789162564462665729), one of my [personal favourites](https://www.diffordsguide.com/cocktails/recipe/2091/white-lady)). We also had [bubble teas](https://twitter.com/jegtnes/status/700038774185730048) courtesy of [Nichole](https://nichole.is/), and vegan catering before it was cool.

src/timeline/2016-05-full-time-freelance.md

@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
+---
+title: Full-time freelance
+date: 2016-05-01
+---
+
+It seems like a large proportion of freelancers don't get into it by choice, but are forced into it by circumstances and accidentally enjoy it.
+
+Anyways, redundancies hit cxpartners and I find myself unemployed and went through a number of damp job interview squibs, and an exciting freelance opportunity lands in my lap not too much later. Fate, eh?

src/timeline/2016-06-nationwide.md

@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
+---
+title: Nationwide
+date: 2016-06-01
+---
+
+For my first grown-up, full-time contracting gig, I join Nationwide as part of an external team to help them set up an in-house design studio, deliberately at arms' length from the main business to help them deliver excellent and innovative customer experiences quicker and cheaper.
+
+This was a design- and UX-heavy setup, and I was one of two developers. I led development on a rapid prototype built in React, *Healthcheck*, to be used on an iPad in Nationwide branches as part of a conversation between customers and staff about customers' finances, which was well received by both customers and branch staff.

src/timeline/2016-07-hybridconf.md

@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
+---
+title: Speaking at Hybrid
+date: 2016-07-01
+---
+
+Two of my great friends, Zach and Laura, were putting on the third edition of their conference, HybridConf, in Berlin. My lightning talk proposal about the science behind habits, _Habitually Speaking_, was accepted, and I was scheduled as the first lightning talk of the day; but because of technical issues with the projector, I volunteered to go first to distract as my talk didn't _need_ the slides. Fortunately, the tech team fixed the projector halfway through it!
+
+And that's the story of how I accidentally keynoted a conference with a lightning talk.

src/timeline/2016-09-nudge.md

@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+---
+title: Nudge Digital
+date: 2016-07-01
+---
+
+For my second contracting engagement, I join the friendly people at [Nudge Digital](https://web.archive.org/web/20170728034747/http://www.nudgedigital.co.uk/) (who have since been acquired) - building and maintaining WordPress and Drupal sites for several of their clients. I befriend senior dev [Ben Organ](https://twitter.com/benorgan) and we bond over how we want to move to Canada following The 2016 Vote That Shall Not Be Named™, and how much of a good boy his cat Stannis is.

src/timeline/2017-01-phpsw-talk.md

@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+---
+title: Talk at PHPSW
+date: 2017-01-01
+---
+
+I deliver a slightly extended version of my HybridConf talk at the PHP SW meetup in Bristol. It was even recorded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzeOaazMlLU

src/timeline/2017-03-zdocs.md

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+---
+title: Zurich ZDocs
+date: 2017-03-01
+---
+
+I join cxpartners to help out on a project they were doing for the insurance company Zurich.
+
+Through user research, they discovered Zurich salespeople relied a lot on printed literature to sell their products, which was cumbersome, frequently went out of date, and each document often had several unrelated sections, getting in the way of the conversation between customer and salesperson. 
+
+I joined a small interdisciplinary team with designers, researchers, and another developer to prototype possible solutions and in a short, focused alpha phase, we released an alpha version of a custom digital document creation tool in three weeks, tested and validated this with users, got great feedback, and expanded upon this to create a fully-featured beta version that was known as ZDocs, a React-based web application designed to primarily run on iPads as a progressive web app.

src/timeline/2018-02-vancouver.md

@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+---
+title: Moving to Vancouver
+date: 2018-03-01
+---
+
+I move to my favourite city on earth, Vancouver, BC, on a year's working holiday visa; I consider taking up a job locally but opt to stay freelance and carry on working with UK-based clients during my time there, including Lovehoney.

src/timeline/2018-08-cxpartners.md

@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+---
+title: cxpartners website redesign
+date: 2018-09-01
+---
+
+I work remotely with [cxpartners](https://cxpartners.co.uk) to help them with their main website redesign and redevelopment. We moved off WordPress and onto a statically rendered site powered by a headless CMS, which did great things for the site's performance.