ArtLung: Study Hall Reflections ~ 25 Apr 2025

Pre-Preamble

I share some personal history at the start. Skip down to the Front End Study Hall if you’d prefer to skip intro.

Preamble

Every Job

A long time ago my family was living in the Philippines. We didn’t have money. We had roommates. Other medical students like my Dad.

One was Dave. Dave M.

Dave M. was not Dave S., he came later. Dave S. had a copy of the science fiction book The Grain Kings with a cover by Chris Foss. A colorful machine the size of a building harvested wheat. I still love the work of Chris Foss.

Dave M. would say “I have done every job.”

“Every job?” I asked?

“Every job.”

“Carpenter?” … “Babysitter?” … “Fireman?”

He answered with a confident “yes” each time. Each with an explanation about how he had done all the parts that that job consisted of or in most cases actually did it. He had been a volunteer firefighter. He had planted corn.

And I already knew he had been a nurse and a physician assistant, that was my father’s path. In some number of years he would be a doctor.

It is neat to know a lot of different things.

48 years later

I can look back from 2025 and see how Dave M. was a refugee.

US medical schools would not accept a person pushing 40 into medical school. They wouldn’t accept someone pushing 30 either.

It is hard to be dislocated from home.

Dave M.’s two teenage kids were always grumpy and mean.

His wife was never happy.

When she was funny it didn’t seem funny.

His teen daughter didn’t want to share an upstairs bedroom with a 7 year-old kid. Not even if he made sure his legos stayed on his side of the narrow room.

I thought it was all an adventure.

To a kid, everything is more or less normal.

Teenagers and wives know better. And they left soon enough.

We who stayed for the adventure studied. We were immersed in books.

We all studied.

Dad wore a pair of plastic gray protective earmuffs to keep out sound and focus.

Sometimes the earmuffs came off. Sometimes he needed someone to quiz him.

I learned what an “aorta” was. I doublechecked his recitation of its branches. “Right common carotid,” “right subclavian,” “brachiocephalic,” “left subclavian” and on down until the “common celiac.”

I could see what was terrific about this situation. Today I am in awe of the kind of liferaft these people made for their lives. It was an act of bravery to seek an education overseas.

I hope I’ll never discount or dismiss or underestimate what it means to be an immigrant or an expat or international student.

Thanks for reading this part.

It’s part of me that I’m sure informs my desire to create spaces where people learn from and teach each other. It is part of the Genesis story of Front End Study Hall.

Front End Study Hall

I have been attending IndieWeb events since 2019. In person. On Zoom. Good stuff. Like user’s group meetings (LAMG!) or mailing lists (evolt!) or usenet or BarCamp or maker spaces. People getting together to get better at stuff! People sharing what they’ve made.

Sewing circles or surfboard swaps or hot rods gathered in a parking lot or a good ink & drink. People gather!

And most already have websites. But there seemed to be an opening for more meat-and-potatoes questions

Newbies were intimidated by HTML and CSS. They’d ask questions during IndieWeb events and I could see a need for something focused on CSS and HTML and how they worked. There’s lots of places to get answers, but some learning works best with human beings talking and trying things together in realtime. Pair programming and mob programming at a few jobs taught me the value of that.

I got the phrase “front end study hall” into my head.

I made a banner for it to have a look of “rough draft / in progress.”

I mulled it for a few months. How would it run? How would it work? Would I be okay with it if nobody showed up? What would I need? Useful was the key word that I kept in mind. “The web is so awesome these days, and has so many moving parts, it would be good to approach it like a study group”

And then I made a meetup.

I have run events before. It’s work. And it’s a gut punch to create an event that nobody shows up to.

I decided to be okay about it even if it wasn’t popular.

As of today Front End Study Hall has this definition:

Front End Study Hall (sometimes abbreviated as FrESH) is an HTML and CSS focused IndieWeb popup meeting focused on markup, styling, design, layout, and accessibility in a loose format where participants come to learn and teach.

And so we’ve pondered questions and experimented with code together. Sometimes just 2 of us, sometimes more than a dozen. Authors and experts. Newbies. Coders of every stripe. Artists. Photographers. At least one grade-schooler. Each one different. Each event a dynamic conversation.

We have built and pondered.

Questions Pondered at FrESH

Why do I have to click something to get music to play in a web page?

Why does the <blockquote> have a default margin of 40px?

Why do we call it a pixel if it’s not a pixel?

Why did Flash get popular?

Why did Flash go away?

Why would I use Flex vs Grid?

How do I pronounce TeX? LaTeX?

Why might I use MathML?

How did the -moz- and -webkit- prefixes come to be?

What does it mean that it take 30 months for web tech get wide adoption?

My Reflections On All This

I really have worked on every kind of website.

Web browsers have gotten so good

Firefox has the nicest Dev Tools to work with.

I don’t do frontend work on Windows or Linux these days. It’s a blindspot.

I don’t think as much about accessibility as I would like to.

Having a person implement an idea you suggested and make something lovely or beautiful or merely useful is immensely gratifying.

I love stumbling on a hidden trove of knowledge of another person.

I love seeing a spark of curiosity!

Today is linked to yesterday.

I am not the standards and validation zealot I was in 2001 and that’s really good.

If your page is doing what you want it to, that’s already a win!

Working deployed code has a strong argument for itself regardless of how rag tag it is.

It is brave when people share their work. That alone deserves respect.

It’s hard to take criticism.

It’s a skill to be able to deliver respectful criticism.

There are few things more satisfying than understanding and defeating a bug.

Debugging is hard.

Some problems do not have satisfying solutions.

There is a reason for every default thing in a web browser and each is worth exploring.

I regret that some of the etherpad notes we’ve kept don’t include more of what we did.

I’m glad the notes are getting better.

I am so thankful to everyone who has come. Even if they just lurk.

People will volunteer to help.

I’ve never been bored and always learn something new at FrESH.

If you want to see an event start, go for it!

What’s the worst that could happen?

We Keep Notes

Lastly, my Zoom Backgrounds

I create a Zoom background before each FrESH. To spark discussion. To help frame things. Here are instances of them. No links, but here are my thoughts.