New challenges

This month is my last at Wigo4IT, and I’m excited to start new projects at Mozilla and the Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Leaving Wigo4IT

For years, I’ve wanted to work on front-end code for the public sector, inspired by the awesome user-centered design work that the Government Digital Service (GDS) have done in the UK. While I lived there, I wasn’t in London, the closest I got to the GDS was working for Nomensa and sitting near a team that did a GDS project.

Back in the Netherlands, I was quite excited when Informaat, a user experience agency, approached me and asked me for a project they did for local government. Long story short: I spent a bit of last year and a large part of this year contracting for them at Wigo4IT. Wigo4IT is a cooperation of the four largest Dutch municipalities, who work together on software related to social welfare.

I worked on a portal where people can apply for income support. The role of our front-end team was to build a responsive component library that can be used to create WCAG 2.0 compliant pages. The project was full of challenges related to web forms, front-end pattern libraries and theming. It was also a lot of fun to advocate for accessibility as part of the project, and my first time to have the JAWS screen reader software available to test on. I learned a lot about differences between the public and private sector, on many levels.

New challenges

Mozilla

As of next month, I will join Mozilla for a couple of months as a freelance front-end developer. I will be working for the Participation Systems team, the team that has as its goal to make it easier and more effective to contribute to Mozilla projects for all. I am incredibly excited (and slightly scared) about getting the chance to work with some brilliant minds.

Government

I have also recently started to work on two projects for the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations together with Atticus: one to apply a redesign to a set of government data related websites, and another one related to accessibility guidelines conformance statements. I love this, because this is the Ministry where a lot of the official Dutch accessibility information and guidelines are published.

CSS Workshops

Lastly, this year I will also be giving my first workshop (organised by Fronteers). Two times, in fact. It’s going to be about modern CSS Layout, including flexbox and CSS Grid Layout. I hope I’ll convince the attendees that those who haven’t yet can now safely abandon Bootstrap for layout, and that we can have lots of fun exploring and using new layout-related properties and thinking.