Community.

One of the most significant things that inspired me as a web developer was the sense of community. Through conferences, meet-ups and just being online a lot, I found a tribe of like-minded people who were all similarly passionate about web standards and making fun, creative work. This community spurred me on to make better work, to think and discuss more, to write about what I learned and even to speak at conferences where, in turn, I made new real-life friends, grew my community even further and, hopefully, helped others too.

A community is fundamentally different from a network. When you’re networking, you’re thinking of how an interaction can benefit you and your interests, business or personal. A community is a bunch of people getting excited about stuff together. A community lifts each other up, helps each other out for no other reason than that it brings joy and it’s a kind thing to do. What I loved about the web development community is that we’d share each other’s work enthusiastically, and riff off each other’s discussion points to create new, interesting work of our own. Often someone would publish a blog post dashing off their thoughts about a particular topic and then someone else would pick that up and run with it, writing a blog post of their own. The original thing would take on a new life, become an evolving conversation. Naturally some of it benefited our careers and led to new opportunities, but that was a side-effect of being really excited about something, not the sole aim.

That’s not to say this community was always harmonious all of the time — sometimes there were internal disagreements, occasionally ones that threatened to cause bigger rifts. There is the wider community as a whole which is, necessarily, a broad church, and of course you’re not going to see eye-to-eye with everyone. But then you have your “local” community — I don’t mean geographically, but the people you talk to most often, whose work and ideas you share. The ones who inspire you the most, who keep you going.

I’ve written this in the past tense, but a lot of this stuff still happens, the community is still there. I just don’t feel as strongly a part of it anymore. For me, it started roughly when Twitter died and the wider community fractured around different social networks. My friends were no longer all in one place. But mainly I’m burnt out on the current state of tech — the rapid enshittification, the layoffs, the AI rammed down everyone’s throats telling you that your craft, the thing you invested time and love and a huge part of yourself in, is now worthless. There are a lot of people who can still keep going and are still making creative things online, and I respect and envy them. But personally, the only way I can keep from spiralling is to opt out. To close my laptop at the end of the working day and no longer think about coding. I don’t want to spend my free time writing polished articles, making demos or preparing talks to be gobbled up by some LLM. I want to create messy things with my hands and my brain.

But I do miss the community. Now that I no longer go to conferences and write articles I have less and less to contribute to the conversation. But I still care a lot about the people doing good work in this community. Without being an active part of it though, it’s harder to stay in touch with people.

After this burnout I’m finding new ways to be creative again. One of those is by writing. I’m enjoying freeing myself of the shackles of having to write about a particular topic, instead writing whatever’s on my mind, in whatever style I choose. I wake up every day excited to write, knowing I have no obligation to write for anyone. But I haven’t found my writing tribe yet. My good friend and artist Jessica Bartlett inspired me to join her on this writing challenge, writing something every day in the month of May, and doing it together has been great for motivation. I get new ideas from reading her writing and a boost of creative energy whenever we talk about it, knowing we are both pushing ourselves to try something new, to be vulnerable. We are, so far, a community of two. But I would love to meet and follow fellow writers (especially amateur ones!), to be able to discuss our work and encourage each other. Of course, the online community for non-technical topics is not as active as the one for web development. Or perhaps I just haven’t found it yet.

For now I’m remembering that a community is not just the people you meet online, or the people who share the exact same interests as you. Communities grow organically, and sometimes bring disparate people together around a shared purpose, fleetingly or for the long haul. Communities look out for one another, and are greater than the individuals who make them.