Localghost

Hi, I'm Sophie.

I’m a web-focussed product engineer at incident.io, building software to help companies manage, resolve and learn from incidents.

Prior to this I was a senior web engineer and Web Discipline lead at Monzo.

I care about web accessibility, keeping the web fun, and lowering the barrier to entry for people learning web development.

By day I build web things, but by night I make music with SHE Choir London. Very occasionally I do coding for fun, like the emojinator.

Find me on Twitter or send me an email: sophie@localghost.dev.

Recent posts

  • Burnout, a cautionary tale (and a plea to take a break)

    It turns out that burnout doesn’t ‘just happen to other people’. I’ve been running on fumes for months, and it culminated in me crying in a coffee shop in front of my extremely kind and patient manager.

  • Start at the beginning: the importance of learning the basics

    If you’re an early-career developer, Twitter is overflowing with people tweeting great tips – and some absolute rubbish – about how to improve your skills and become better at your job. I’ve spoken to more than a few people who’ve asked me, “how should I start?”. And I tell everyone the same thing: learn the basics. However you learn best – book, video, interactive tutorial – you need to learn HTML and CSS before you can call yourself a web developer.

  • The right tag for the job: why you should use semantic HTML

    Whether you write plain old HTML, HTML templating or JSX, are you using the right HTML tags? A guide to semantic HTML: what it is, why it’s so important, and how to use it

About this site

As well as being somewhere I occasionally write things, this site is a throwback to the time when web design was a bit more maximalist than it is now, and websites were collections of weird little code snippets you picked up on your internet travels. Though hopefully it’s a little more accessible and performant than sites were back then.

(I stopped short of adding a trailing custom cursor.)

You’re welcome to steal any code from this site, just promise me you’ll have a go at making it your own and not just copy it straight up.

Like many other people in the early 00s, I learnt to build websites by clicking View Source, copying bits I liked, then changing them slightly. It’s a bit more complicated than it used to be, but I still strongly believe in learning from others and passing it on.

If you encounter any accessibility/usability issues while on the site, please do let me know and I’ll fix them ASAP.

Credits