this website

Creating this website

Since I remember myself I felt the need to create like an ich.

• The painted rocks we would let out into a gallery as kids.
• The pen and pencil self-portraits in between homework from school.
• The theater group that pulled me away from University.
• The drama school and professional stage...

And then, like we all remember as in a haze, the covid pandemic. No more shows, no more work. And after that, my first pregnancy. I had to find another way! I applied for a public technical school and got into the computer developing studies. During the first lessons everything sounded... well, Greek indeed, because that's were I leave. I did not understand a word. But every word I did not understand, I looked up. Day by day I become fascinated with this new world that was presented to me. After a long day and after my kid would go to sleep, I would stay up studying and practicing.

Two years past, and I took the final exams pregnant with my second one. And with perfect marks! I was proud even thought I knew we could have learnt much more if the whole class was up to it. I would rather have worse grades because I would have struggled a bit more to achieve more knowledge.

A few months after school my second child was born. Life was hectic with two children, two cats, a few plants and everything else I had to take care of. The laptop remaind on my desk collecting dust and a few post it notes of ideas to work on when I would find the time.

And after some months, I would find one or half an hour at night to code and design something. A game for my kids, a page for my sister, an invitation for my birthday and now a website for my work.This time, the project was going to be for me. And that made it harder to start than any of the others.

I wanted it to look like me although I didn't know what I that would be. Loud and nostalgic, like the Y2K pages we grew up with, full of colour and character? Or quiet and serious, like the editorial pages I kept catching myself admiring?

I started the way I started as a kid with pen and paper. I sketched the whole homepage by hand, boxes and arrows, a little theater button icon drawn in pen for the acting page, a bug for Bee Me. It never felt strange to draw a website like I used to draw everything else. Whatever ends up on the screen, it started the same way everything of mine has started: with a pencil, no plan and figuring it out like by line.

I sat in front of my screen and i begun with the content: the html part, the files organization, the collecting and naming of photos and other files. But the look and the feel, the style and the css work was always on my mind. I went back and forth for days, until I understood I didn't have to pick one. I could be both. Mostly quiet and simple, with playful colour choices, the way I am mostly calm and quite, until something I love pulls a bright reaction out of me.

Then came the part that would have terrified me before technical school, turning the drawing into code. Divs, grids, media queries, a photo section that rearranges itself depending on whether you're on a laptop or lying in bed scrolling on your phone. Small pieces, evenings at a time, the same rhythm I learned making a memory game or a simple calculator application: an hour here, half an hour there, after the kids were asleep, sometimes next to them, with the laptop warm on my knees, keyboard clicking and calm baby breaths.

As I write these lines, the website is still not finished. There's a contact form that doesn't send anything yet, an acting page waiting for details of productions, a Bee Me page waiting for the game to be uploaded and accessable. This page about this site to be more than just a monologue. And this website to be more than some files on saved on my computer.