This year I changed jobs, went to some great conferences, gave two talks, and wrote a bunch on this site. I’ve also continued to move away from hands-on coding and into more support and (more recently) agile coaching-ish things.
New job
This year I continued my mission to go Full Hippy and (left Xero and) joined the Ministry of Social Development as a Digital Accessibility Specialist. The MSD mission is deeply aligned with how I want to be in the world, and the kind of work I want to keep doing. Working in government has been a real system shock after working in the commercial world for my whole career!
Conferences
This year was great for conferences, including some in-person ones! I went to JAFAC, went to Code Camp Wellington, watched GA Conf, and went to NZ Tech Rally 2023.
I also gave two talks, both in April:
- Dungeons and Dragons and Accessibility at Code Camp Wellington;
- The ups and downs of working in Accessibility (using tennis as a metaphor) with my colleague Maria at the Auckland Digital Accessibility and Inclusive Design Meetup.
Writing
I ended up writing just over 30 posts on this site in 2023. My favourites were:
- Accessibility Audit Guide: writing good words. I like writing guidance docs.
- A human does a thing. I’ve used this framing in several presentations to illustrate the “it’s a spectrum” nature of accessiblity work.
- What I got up to at Xero. It was good to look back and see what I’d accomplished.
- How I do support. I wrote this up for the excellent human taking over my job.
And I enjoyed writing about what’s important to me around the work, not just in the work.
- The values that drive my work. I try to align my actions with my values, and writing up the values and publishing them is one way I try and clarify them.
- How I do my best work (Finishing, Impact, Type, with bonus Bright, Open, Active). A little about values, but also about work style and fulfilment.
- Human-centered colleague Manifesto. A tongue-in-cheek remix of the Agile Manifesto, looking at how to be a good human around other humans at work.