My @canva colleague @anna_guerrero shared her Strawberry Watermelon Cake from @BlackStarChris today. Lovely start to the week!
Long rambling blog post about @Girl Geek Sydney and how I finally grew up and learned to embrace the sisterhood.
Shout-outs to @Tia, @Isabel, @Jody, @Sera, @Amy, @Peggy, @Daphne, @Lucy, @Donna, @Georgi, @Melanie, @Hannah, @Anna, @Poppie, and @Kelly (who prompted my new mantra of telling people how awesome they are).
I’ve been going to Girl Geek Sydney events for six years now. The first was at Google back in 2009, and I went with my friends Tia and Issy. None of us really knew what to expect. I remember feeling apprehensive because I’d recently left development to work as a business analyst, and I was intimidated to be surrounded by so many smart and talented women. Back then I didn’t have a lot of women friends. (I had some women knitting friends, but most were older and not working in tech.) I was still in my Cool Girl Feminist phase. Most other women were either dumb and boring, or Competition For My Spot. I’m not proud of it.
So I started going to Girl Geek events, and then I started speaking at them, and then I started helping to organise them, and along the way things changed. I grew up a lot. Maybe not entirely due to GGDSyd, but it was a big part of it. Nowadays I’m not ashamed to say I have girl friends, and they are amazing people: Jody and Sera and Amy and Peggy and Daphne and Lucy and Donna and Georgi and so many more. I genuinely like helping the younger generation (women and men!) starting careers in tech. I am thrilled to see my peers building cool stuff, speaking at events, and winning awards. It’s not a zero sum game anymore – we can all be successful. And I stopped caring so much whether I looked the Cool Geek Girl part (I had a terrible habit of denigrating girly-girls mostly because I was desperately envious of them), and I discovered that you can wear dresses and Taylor Swift’s red lippie and still be taken seriously in tech (by the people who actually matter).
So that’s a very long preamble to the real point of this post, which is that last Tuesday we hosted the July meetup for Girl Geeks Sydney at the Canva offices – and it was honestly one of the proudest moments of my career. I was the emcee for the night, and it was like getting to introduce two friends that you just know are going to get along terrifically. The attendees seemed rapt to be there, and my fellow Canva women all crushed it with their phenomenal talks. Even my male colleagues were telling me the next day how inspired they were.
I’m just going to end with an excerpt from a chat conversation I had with Jody a month ago, prompted by our wonderful friend Kelly:
So that’s my new mantra – saying nice things to people. To all the girl geeks I’ve met over the past six years: you are all awesome and smart and talented in different ways, and I think you’re super inspiring. I wouldn’t be where I am now without your examples. And to my colleagues at Canva: I feel lucky every day to get to work with you. Thanks for putting on a great night for all my friends. 🙂
AWShine Hack is an upcoming hackathon put on by AWS through their “Amazon Women Shine” and “AWS Startup Community” groups. It’s going to be held on September 5-6 in Sydney (and September 19-20 in Melbourne). While the hackathon is open to all, priority will be giving to women entrepreneurs and developers. Pretty cool! I’m participating as a Business Mentor for the Sydney event and I’ll be handing out some Canva swag on the day. You should register now!
A happy belated FIFTEENTH(!) blog-birthday to Matt at Scrubbles! His blog is one that I’ve read, well, pretty much ever day for a decade and a half now. I’ve got Mama Cat on my bookshelf and several LitKids prints on my wall. After years of only knowing him through his blog, it was great to finally meet Matt (and Christopher!) when we drove through Phoenix in April of last year.
You may not know, but Matt actually created the web-goddess logo for me (a barter deal for a custom knitted scarf). His anniversary reminded me that my own milestone must be coming up soon. The oldest post at this site is actually from September 7, 2000, but it was originally from a separate blog that I started for alumnae of my college dorm. The first personal blog post I wrote was on January 7, 2001, which was hosted at web-goddess.co.uk since I was still living in London then. (Wow. Some Internet marketroid has got the domain now. At least it isn’t porn, I guess.) And hey, my first first mention of Scrubbles was on January 31, 2001…
We’ve only ever had IKEA couches. Originally it was because we were still essentially students, unable to afford anything better. Then it was because we got cats who – despite every effort to dissuade them – love to shred furniture. I’ve had people tell me with straight faces that they spent thousands of dollars on their sofas, and I just shake my head and think Whaaaaat?!
A few years ago we got a two-seater Karlstad in Isunda Gray, which was fine except it wasn’t quite long enough for yours truly to sleep on. One day the Snook told me a colleague was selling a three-seater version in the same colour. We ended up buying it, intending on selling the old one… but somehow it just stayed. We arranged them like a pseudo-sectional, though we rarely sat on the small one. I was never quite happy with them though. This year I discovered two things: 1) it’s pretty easy to hack a Karlstad to look like a mid-century sofa; and 2) I really, really love my sister’s sofa with chaise. So I talked the Snook into selling the three-seater and getting a chaise unit for the two-seater, along with custom legs and a new cover.
I bought my custom tapered legs from Uncle Bob’s Workshop. (Note: We decided to only get 7 legs rather than 8. When you add the chaise unit to Karlstad, theoretically you end up with two legs RIGHT NEXT to each other in one corner, and we decided that was stupid. We reckoned rightly that you didn’t need the extra one on the chaise.) They arrived and they were beautiful. Then I ordered a range of fabric samples from Comfort Works, and we decided that the Herringbone Bark was our preferred choice. However, rather than rush to IKEA to buy a new chaise unit, I decided to wait and see if they went on sale (or someone was selling one on Gumtree). After all, we weren’t in any rush.
Then last weekend I asked the Snook to list the old three-seater on Gumtree. He went to the IKEA site to look up the current asking price. “Dude,” he said, in that tone that means Something Is Up. “It’s not on the site. I think it’s been discontinued.” WHAT?! Yes, the Karlstad has been discontinued entirely. D’OH! Suddenly the whole plan was at risk. I started messaging everyone selling a Karlstad + chaise on Gumtree, but they were all taken. Things looked dicey.
THEN! The Snook discovered someone selling a Karlstad + chaise who’d messed up and not put it in the Home & Garden category. I messaged her and to my delight it was still available. Coincidentally, someone messaged me at the same time wanting to buy both of our old couches. So it was going to work out! The only hitch was that we had to collect the new couch on Wednesday, but the old couches weren’t being picked up until Sunday. So we had several days with three sofas in our living room.
Anyway, here’s the end result.
New Karlstad with chaise, Parker coffee table, and Fler rocking chair
The new couch came with a reasonably decent dark grey cover, but I still think we’ll replace with the lighter grey one from Comfort Works. (The dark grey is covered in Amy cat’s hair already.) In front of it is our recently acquired vintage Parker coffee table, and that’s my Fler rocking chair on the side. And you can’t see it in that photo, but we swapped out those horrible legs for the beautiful tapered ones. So now at last things are starting to take shape! Just need to order the new cover and study up on how to tuft cushions…
Tapered mid-century legs from Uncle Bob’s workshop
