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#heading-1

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#heading-2

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.