Sally Lait - blog

Render Conference is a two day, single track conference held in the beautiful city of Oxford, which is billed as a “conference for front-end developers” but actually manages to pack in so much more.

At the end of 2015 I’d been really struggling: the stress of living on a building site for a year and my sleep/sanity waning; desperately trying to move house to get away but the chain collapsing numerous times; brain tumours and subsequent travel uncerta…

This post is the second in a series where I’ve been answering questions originally posed as part of a feature in net Magazine.

For the November issue of net Magazine I was invited to contribute to the Exchange section, where each month four selected experts answer readers’ questions.

Earlier this year I was in London, discussing Pokémon Go with a colleague.

15 years ago, my personal school and Sixth Form experience of being taught anything related to computers (or ‘ICT’ as it was at the time) was at best a mixed experience.

Over the past year and a bit, if you follow me anywhere online you’ll probably have seen some references to the torturous time I’ve been having trying to move house.

Throughout 2015 I did quite a few talks on data, or more specifically the concept of open data.

I didn’t end up doing this last year, but it feels like 2015 has been an important year for me both personally and professionally and I’d like to document some of my learnings for my future reference.

In one of those ‘blog about it so I don’t forget later’ moments, today I happened to discover something that shouldn’t have surprised me, but which could be pretty useful in the right circumstances – the ability to introduce live Google translations into a

This is an altered-for-the-written-word version of a talk that I gave in several forms in 2015, including at Fronteers (Amsterdam), From the Front (Bologna), and Web In the Woods (UK).

Walking off stage, my body was processing the usual adrenaline rush and come down combo, I was sweating profusely, and my throat was sore from all of the previous days’ practice and the final delivery.

This is an altered-for-the-written-word version of a talk that I gave at Shropgeek (R)evolution in September 2015.

“I know that this is going to sound incredibly stupid, but I didn’t realise that it would be so… woody.”

I spend a lot of time around screens, with my hands often either on a keyboard, a touch-screen, or a game pad.

When I bought my current home I had been employed for many consecutive years, brought home a decent regular wage, and had the luxury of applying jointly with my boyfriend who was in a similar situation.

Last weekend brought with it the second full gig for Colchester’s branch of Good For Nothing, which was an event that I had been looking forward to ever since the last one.

It’s apparently Web Hunting Season again, as there has recently been a new flurry of ‘web vs apps’ viewpoints emerging; tweets sparking more tweets, blogs sparking more blogs.

In March this year I started a new transformation project working in the utilities sector for a rather large and well-known company.

I’ve been speaking at events for four years now, with these spanning small, free, community events in the UK, to large corporate curated events in the USA.

At the end of February I attended Seb Lee-Delisle’s latest workshop, all about the “Internet of Things”, or as Seb likes to put it: “Stuff that talks to the Interwebs” (ST4I).

I got my subscription copy of net Magazine in the post today, and during my usual initial flick through was pleased to see a miniature version of my own face looking back at me.

Last Friday I attended Generate conference in London, where I had the pleasure of being introduced to a lovely guy – Benjamin Hollway.

Last week heralded my final speaking gig of the year, at From the Front, which took place in the beautiful city of Bologna in Italy.

Last week was a busy one.

One of the things I’m very keen on is being open about the realities of freelancing.

I’m reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson at the moment, and came across this passage that I particularly liked.

The other week, my friend Paul Swain happened to mention that he was finally getting round to transferring some of his old blog posts over to his current site.

For anyone who has perhaps been at some kind of hipster wilderness retreat for the last couple of months, you may not have noticed that the 20th FIFA World Cup was held in Brazil recently.

Last week I finally finished the game Watch Dogs, at least to the point where the main story was done.

After a thoroughly brilliant long weekend of conference fun, I was finally back on a train this morning, racing via inevitable delays and route alterations back to the land of Essex.

I’ve recently done something that I’ve been considering for a while, which is to write and publish an ebook.

As part of my fast-approaching presentation at Responsive Day Out 2 I’m (spoilers!)

I’ve been working from home a lot recently, and the primary reason (outside of my extreme train grumpiness) is that since the start of the year I’ve been trying to coordinate being here so that I can bring home some kittens.

Whilst skimming through my Twitter feed a while ago, I dropped out of the stream quickly to read a post that had been tweeted by Kotaku, the well-known gaming blog.

More news!

Yes folks, it’s that time again.

Earlier this year I promised myself that I’d at least try to work with certain people that I was really interested in and was passionate about, either because of the subject matter or the nature of the work that they were doing.

At the start of this year I was over in New York.

I’ve been considering forming a limited company to operate under for quite a while now, and this weekend I finally went and did it.

A friend and ex-colleague of mine, Paul Swain, recently wrote a quick little post called “You’re pissing in my pond now“, which was around his thoughts on the matter of the IT departments and legacy systems that frequently hamper him during his work as He…

Anyone who has hit a brick wall with their vocabulary and resorted to summoning a thesaurus, has probably experienced that picking an apparently synonymous word can actually result in a totally different message.

A couple of weeks ago I was very excited to find out that Marvel had released an API, exposing some of their data.

Quite possibly my favourite thing about freelancing is the ability to control my own ability to take time off.

Coming to the end of my full-time job at the end of 2012 was a sad but exciting time.

When starting out with your own business, getting the accounting side of things right can be a big headache.

Many years ago, one of my (now) friends had just started working at the same company as me.

I’ve recently started thinking about a new talk I’m going to be doing later this year, and since it’s quite a short one I’ve got lots of ideas but need to settle on the strongest themes.

Earlier tonight, one of my fellow Colchestarians tweeted the following: Recommendations for splendid vinyl LPs please. — Oli (@oli) January 3, 2014 To which I replied “Splendid as in music, or as in artwork/vinyl itself as a beautiful entity?”.

I felt very lucky to have had a thought published on the wonderful Pastry Box Project earlier this year, so when I was sat thinking about a particular subject on my way to work a while ago, I tapped out some thoughts and wondered if the folks behind it wo…