3-Day Web-Building Hackathon
Leading up to the 2025 Winter Solstice, I reflected upon the various personal projects that I allowed to accumulate in my life and realized that I had no more excuses left for putting them off. Among them were a couple of websites I kept putting off building even though I had gained sufficient chops years ago to build them from scratch.
As the weekend drew closer, my anticipation grew. I was excited to turn my focus inward, to my home, to my self. I wanted to grant full license to the creative energies I had put on hold for years.
As it turned out, Friday the 19th was my first day off from work as well as my last workday of the year at one of the nonprofit employers I work with. On the Thursday just before, on the 18th, I was on the clock attending a professional development event that centered women of color working in nonprofits.
Engaging with the nonprofit community and discussing the concepts with these amazing women in the room, I realized I put myself last in everything. Although I intellectually "got" why I needed to put myself first, it wasn't until I began participating in this series of professional development opportunities with this particular cohort of women that I viscerally realized just how putting myself first really felt like.
So while I was still in the midst of building my self-care threshold thermometer, I looked at the websites I built with no-code and low-code content management systems over a decade ago and revisited how I could freshen them up and modernize them given today's AI coding assistance and my current technical capabilities.
I equipped myself with snacks and layers (hey, it gets pretty chilly in the San Francisco Bay Area, plus my room is in the north, which in the Northern Hemisphere is the coldest room in the house). I bundled up in my blankets and stayed in bed. Yes, I only got up for bio breaks. That was all.
What resulted in three days' worth of literally being bedbound most of the time?
- On Saturday the 20th, the first website for an author went live.
- After that, I began to work on my own author site and finally got it live just now!!!
What a way to celebrate the solstice!!! Winter is such a special time to be at home, to rest and to be dormant. The weather corroborated by raining all three days I hacked. What better way to spend the time than to make time to imagine something fresh and birth it into being?
Sure, I indulged in a virtual healing session I rarely got to take part in to "deepen love and connection" over the holidays. Then when the opportunity came up to join a solstice gathering at a local urban farm store, I chose to stay home and continue working on my site to get it live.
While the first site I worked on is private and stealth for another author, I can at least share my own site. Now I finally won't have to feel like -- aren't you a developer? Why doesn't your website reflect that? Well, no more of the internal critic having a field day. Feel free to check out my site: https://arts.gloriang.com :)
Psst! If the site isn't live yet in your browser and/or in your area of the world, no fret. According to my domain name service provider, it only takes about a half hour to populate to all the browsers all around the world.... 🌍