About a month ago, I saw and retweeted this thread (ThreadReader link to the full thread) about femininity in the workplace.

Interesting thread.

Manages to express in words something I’ve been struggling to understand about myself recently, w.r.t. (my lack of) femininity in the workplace.

(And it’s made even more complicated when you’re enby) https://t.co/ttDScd3zgf

— Lucy Davinhart (@LucyDavinhart) 19 February 2018

Why yes the largest section in the tech business article I'm writing right now is Fashion Tips

— Stephanie Hurlburt 🔜 GDC (@sehurlburt) 19 February 2018

And it got me thinking about how, for the most part, I still present to the world about the same as I did before I transitioned. i.e. jeans, nerdy tshirt, usually a hoodie, and no make-up at all. My hair is much longer than it used to be, and I have rather obvious boobs now, but for the most part… yeah. Not much has changed.

I tell myself that this is just my aesthetic, and not to worry about it. And because I also consider myself to be non-binary¹, I kinda just lumped it in with that.

But then, a couple of weeks ago, I was in London with a friend of mine, and we happened across a Belgian shop which, among many other things, had a large selection of nail polish. It reminded me that I’ve wanted to paint my nails basically forever, but never really got around to doing it. So I bought some. Specifically, I bought some in what was the closest approximation I could find to LucyPurple

And now I’ve found nail polish in #LucyPurple with the help of my local nail polish consultant, @MaartjeME pic.twitter.com/eXZcmXp6os

— Lucy Davinhart (@LucyDavinhart) 3 March 2018

But then… they just sat in the bag, unopened.

I told myself that I just hadn’t got around to it yet, or that I didn’t have time, or that I needed extra tools ². But these were just excuses I told myself.

This was looking like it was going to be a repeat of an idea I came up with after FOSDEM. In that case, every day of the long-weekend, I was almost exclusively in the company of awesome queer folk. So I let myself wear ever so slightly more feminine clothing (including an awesome trans-gopher shirt on the Saturday).

After I got back home³, I came up with the idea of a “Femme Friday”, whereby I’d let myself wear some of my more feminine clothes to work. The furthest that ever went was wearing a long plaid shirt on top of what I normally wore to work.

And then, a few days ago I saw and retweeted this:

Cis women, if you ever see a trans woman in her 30s, 40s etc. wearing something that looks too juvenile for her, leave her alone about it. She literally never got to be the age you were when you wore it. Let her have this, please.

— Faith Naff 🏳️‍🌈🌹🦋 (@FaithNaff) 12 March 2018

And I think that’s when it clicked in my head what was actually going on here, and it’s something which should not have been a surprise to me:

I’m self-conscious.

As much as I like to tell myself that I don’t care what other people think of me, it occurred to me that I’m still scared to do much in public that’s actively feminine.

On the far extreme of this, I have several skirts, which I desperately want to wear outside, or to work, but I’m too scared to actually leave the house in.

But that’s silly!

I’ve been self-conscious about a great many things before, and I’ve got over it!

I used to be terrified of using female toilets in public, but now it’s no big deal.

I used to be terrified of talking to my team’s client at my previous job, but that became no big deal fairly quick.

I used to be terrified of public speaking (I still am, to an extent), and then I did a talk in front of about 200 people at FOSDEM, and it went okay, so now I’m considering doing more of that kind of thing.

My point is… I do a thing which scares me, and then it’s fine.

So perhaps I should do more things that scare me?

So, long story short, I painted my nails last night.

It wasn’t perfect (I wasn’t expecting it to be), but it looks okay. And importantly, I’ve come in to work and it’s no big deal.

I found myself hiding my nails on the tram in to work this morning (initially), and hiding them at work (initially). But now… it’s no big deal.

So I should just do more stuff like this which scares me.

It’ll be fine, and I’ll feel much better for doing it⁴.

#LucyPurple update pic.twitter.com/BIjDN5GHhf

— Lucy Davinhart (@LucyDavinhart) 15 March 2018

I need to figure something out.

This post was written entirely on my iPad and iPhone, with a bunch of different apps, in my attempt to figure out how best to write posts when away from my laptop.

Prose.io - Free

Prose.io seems good. This was one of the first things I found when I Googled for Jekyll editors, so I think it is designed specifically for Jekyll sites. I have been writing this post in that site so far, and it works okay, but not particilarly well.

The most annoying part is that it does not take advantage of iOS’s autocorrect¹, e.g. spelling, uppercasing first letters, double-tap space for full stop.

Plus it’s a web app, so I need Internet access to use it².

But it does integrate directly with GitHub, so I save posts and drafts easily.

So while this does kinda work, it’s not great, and I can see myself getting frustrated with it quite easily.

So. Let’s find other options.

Octopage - £0.99

Octopage on App Store

This app actually works quite well. It has offline editing, preview, and a Markdown syntax guide.

There are a few bugs though, the most annoying of which is that it occasionally scrolls up when I preview the post then go back to edit mode.

It also only has drafts local to the app. No way (yet) of using the drafts directory in the repo. I’ve asked the dev to add that functionality, so we’ll see what happens.

That’s not a deal breaker, but it does mean that any post I don’t complete in this app can’t be picked up on my laptop.

Which means that, while I can write my thoughts on the app using the app itself, I need to update my page draft with a different app, so back to Prose.io for now.

Source for iOS - Free?

Source on App Store

The app is actually free, but being able to push back to GitHub is an in-app purchase. Sort of.

This one took a while to get started. It wasn’t able to set up my SSH key to GitHub, so I had to add that manually. Once that was in place, it all went swimmingly.

This one is a full fledged git client, so it lets me edit any file in the repo. And it also has offline editing, which is nice.

No preview functionality, but that’s fine; that’s not what the app is for.

It does have a few keyboard issues though. It has its own keyboard, which can be used in other apps. It looks like it is supposed to have quick access to special characters, but I can’t see how that is supposed to work. You can disable the custom keyboard, but even then there is none of iOS’s autocorrection, which makes it frustrating to use.

I would like to love this app, but I would need more keyboard behaviour settings before I am happy with it.

I have listed it as free with a question mark because it says that pushing to a remote repo is part of the £4.99 in app purchase, but it looks like that works fine in the free version. I suspect the answer is that pushing to other remote repos is the premium feature. Or it could be a bug, because when I try to push without committing at the same time, it prompts me to pay for then in app purchase.

Git2Go - Free

Git2Go on App Store

Another full git client. Without looking at it too much, it doesn’t appear to have all the git functionality of Source, but I don’t need it to.

This one just has the iOS default keyboard, and again the autocorrect functionality is nowhere to be seen. But I can send feedback from directly within the app, so I’ve sent the suggestion to the dev.

This app is definitely free though, if you don’t need private repos or GitHub Enterprise, so that’s a bonus.

It took me a while to figure out, but you can move files, which means you can publish posts. Which is nice. Looking back on Source, it can’t do that.

It also lets me view diffs before committing, whereas Source would only let me see which files have changed, but not the diff.

I don’t anticipate needing to post many images, but that is possible in this app, where it isn’t in Source.

So… what will I use?

There are a few more apps I could try, but at this point, as long as Git2Go’s devs allow you to toggle autocorrection, I can definitely see myself using it.

This was really the only problem with Jekyll that I needed to figure out before being satisfied that it was a good blogging platform for me (as opposed to Wordpress, for example).

Well, after about 6 years¹ I’m back to… what is this exactly? Blogging? Journaling? Rambling? No idea. I’m not even 100% what I’m going to put on here.

So, if I don’t even know yet what this is for, what am I doing starting it?

Firstly, I’ve had some major surgery last week², so I’m off work recovering for the best part of two months, which means I’m gonna be bored out of my mind! This… whatever this becomes… gives me something to do besides binge watching YouTube and Netflix³.

But also, I’ve got a bunch of projects up in the air, some of which I’m actively working on, some more casually, and some which haven’t had the dust blown off them in years.

While I have started tracking tasks related to these in JIRA⁴, this will give me somewhere to write about stuff I’ve done and how I solved certain problems.

So even though there’s no guarantee what I’m gonna post here, or how often, or even if it’ll stick around for more than one or two posts, watch this space!