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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

I’m Stephanie Stimac, a product manager and designer from Seattle, WA but I currently live in a small town in England. My background is in visual and web design, and I graduated at a weird time in terms of web tech. A good portion of my final year of university was spent learning about how to build websites in Flash and when I graduated, Flash quickly became obsolete, but I had a bit of HTML and CSS knowledge which helped me advance through my career. I was doing purely design work for the first part of my career before I joined the Microsoft Edge Web Platform team, where I started doing a handful of other things that were product management and developer relations adjacent. I’ve spec’d out features, analyzed data and user flows, created content for social media, performed user research to identify developer paint points, given conference talks, the list goes on.

I left Microsoft for a startup that moved me to Berlin but that was unfortunately short lived due to the company folding rather quickly after hiring 100+ people. Now I live in England with my husband and work for Igalia, a technology consultancy, and I’m back in the Web Platform space. It’s sort of like my role at Microsoft but less product and more project focused.

In between all this, I wrote a book that was published in 2023 called Design for Developers. It’s an evergreen guide to the basics of visual and UX design for web developers.

I’m a collector of hobbies but my focus lately has been reading, baking, photography, printmaking and creating content. I’m a mountain biker and love to hike as well as paddle board. I’ve also gotten into birding in the last year or so. There are so many different kinds, it’s incredible.

What's the story behind your blog?

Depends on which blog you’re talking about! I’ve been blogging since about 2003 when I had a LiveJournal in high school. That evolved into a blogging and sharing about college life on Wordpress around 2008/2009 and went through a few iterations before I landed on the name The Hermes Homestead. I no longer blog there but am in the process of starting that sort of lifestyle blogging again and am building a new site with Astro and Netlify.

As for my more technical and design focused blog, I started that in 2019 about 3 years into my career at Microsoft. I wanted a space to talk about CSS, design and web browser things. This is my most visited blog, and it is attached to my personal website and portfolio though I called it “The Web Witch’s Blog” for a long time – now there’s just a cauldron with a code mark. It’s been through a few redesigns. It was very basic in terms of styling for the longest time. I’ve slowly made incremental improvements to things over the years, but this year I did a larger redesign to try and capture a bit of my witchy vibe and wanted to include more visuals, some subtle animations and view transitions.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

There are a few different types of ways I post. I was doing monthly updates just covering things I had learned, big life events, what media I consumed in a month, books I read. I haven’t done this in a few months as I’m currently pregnant and was feeling burned out on everything. I’m sure I’ll pick those up again soon. I’ll also post about major career or life events.

Other posts are inspired by things I’ve experienced, for example I’m in the process of writing about the worst onboarding experience I have ever had with a credit card and the brand’s website and app. Nothing quite inspires me like a poor user experience, and I hope in sharing those experiences other people will be inspired to make sure whatever user experience they’re designing isn’t terrible. I’m also not afraid to share my terrible experiences working in tech, whether that’s about encountering conference line ups that are all men or finding out my book was scraped by Meta’s AI.

I also write about new CSS features that web developers can use but I have to want to write about these, so they usually need to have some sort of design focus or benefit.

Those are sort of the three main categories I center posts around at the moment, but generally if it fits into general life and career, I’ll write about it.

When it comes to writing the actual post, I usually just write straight in VS Code in a markdown file. I try to proofread in VS Code but I need a new spelling and grammar extension as I end up missing a few mistakes that I’ll correct as soon as I see them. Recently, I’ve started copying text over to Microsoft Word just for a quick visual to catch any misspellings. Then I hit publish. I rarely have someone else look over a post unless I am writing about something I’m little unsure about or if I’m talking about the company I work for. I don’t want to misrepresent them.

Overall, my process is kind of like writing for a diary. I don’t really overthink what I’m writing about and just post it. That being said, I often come up with many ideas for things to write about, but it really depends on the type of mental space I’m in whether those get finished or not. I have a pile of started but unfinished drafts.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

For writing, I usually have to be at home or in a quiet space with some music. Sometimes I can write when I’m out at the coffee shop, but it is very dependent on the coffee shop and how busy it is.

Physical spaces 100% influence my creativity and just overall mood and wellbeing. I like to be in a space that inspires me, surrounded by things that inspire me. I have a hard time focusing if there’s a mess or I’m in a space that doesn’t speak to me. I like to be surrounded by an environment that has a vibe or a point of view.

I work from home so most of my work happens there. My husband and I have been in the process of slowly upgrading our home to be a space we enjoy being in. It’s been a slow process over the last two years, and we’re still making changes but it’s getting there and there are spots in our home I’m starting to love. But it’s also important to change up the scenery occasionally, so we’ll go out and work from coffee shops some mornings, otherwise I get stir crazy.

I also use a combination of digital and analog tools to keep track of things. I have a bullet journal I fill out every week with my calendar and personal to-do list, and I have what I consider a digital bullet journal for all my work stuff in Notion that’s formatted nicely. I do have a digital bullet journal for personal stuff I’m also starting to use again, which is helpful when I have a lot of long-term plans in the works.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

For the technical blog, it’s hosted on Netlify and I’m using 11ty. The domain used to be registered with GoDaddy but I’ve been migrating all my domains over to Namecheap because I find some of GoDaddy’s practices predatory or less than user friendly.

The old lifestyle blog is on Wordpress and is still hosted on GoDaddy, and I’m probably going to end up paying someone to migrate it all to Namecheap for me because my migration attempts have been headache inducing. I want to keep the blog up even if it’s not active, but I’m tired of paying an exorbitant amount just for an SSL certificate compared to other providers. I think it’s criminal GoDaddy charges you the amount they do for SSL when you get an SSL certificate for free.

The new lifestyle blog will be hosted on Netlify (like most of my websites), with a Namecheap domain, and I’m building it with Astro.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

For the technical blog, no I wouldn’t change anything. It’s tied to my name and career. I’m happy with Netlify and 11ty.

For the lifestyle blog, I wouldn’t use Wordpress again. It has its benefits but for the functionality I want and need, I think it’s overkill for what I personally am trying to achieve. I like having more control over the layout and design and I’m happy to be building the new one with Astro. As for the name, I only wish I had chosen something that was a bit more open instead of something that was so aligned to a specific period of my life (The Hermes Homestead). It doesn’t fit where I’m at anymore, but I feel like the new name is more open and maybe starting with a fresh slate isn’t so bad.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

If I combine everything, I think it’s about $350 a year for all my blogs including URLs and hosting but I expect that to be reduced significantly once I move everything away from GoDaddy. (For reference, I just got an email from them telling me that my SSL for one of the URLs I’m letting expire won’t renew and they want £90 a year just for the SSL certificate.)

On the technical blog, I do generate a little bit of revenue but not a lot. I sometimes include affiliate links, and I do run ads on the homepage, but it is one spot in the sidebar. I don’t want an intrusive experience with ads because there’s nothing I hate more than landing on a page that is so covered in ads you can’t navigate through the page (looking at all you food blogs.) I was recently on a food blogger’s page and went to the print recipe page to try and read the instructions more easily and they had even put ads on the print page. I don’t want to replicate that experience, so I try to keep things as minimal as possible.

I really don’t mind if people are trying to monetise their content unless it’s so overwhelming full of ads that I can’t view the content. At the end of the day, I don’t know what a person’s situation is, and we live in a rather precarious and unstable time for many people when it comes to employment. Monetising could help someone reach a goal more quickly or give them a little more freedom or room to breathe in their budget.

I’ve been given product in exchange for writing a review and I don’t mind that kind of partnership. I think affiliate links are a great way to monetise without being intrusive. I use Carbon Ads for my technical blog and don’t mind their style because it’s very minimal.

In terms of supporting other bloggers, I’ll click an affiliate link or engage with their content but I’m not currently paying anyone via Patreon or a subscription, though I have in the past.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

I love Henry Desroches’ content over on henry.codes and stillness.digital.

Olu Niyi-Awosusi also has a lovely blog over at olu.online and I love reading their work.

Maggie Appleton’s Garden is also full of incredible writing.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

If you’re a developer trying to level up your skills outside of code, my book Design for Developers, is available on Amazon and Manning.

My colleagues host an interesting podcast that covers a range of technology topics called Igalia Chats.

On the more casual side of things, I’ve been vlogging and trying to improve my video editing abilities over on YouTube. Typically sharing my life in England and more style focused content over there.

And a final shoutout to my husband, who is constantly building absolutely wild things with CSS. He’s working on getting his blog up but for now he’s got a few links on his website.

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