I can’t decide whether this is a good thing or not.

But, if you wait until you’re an expert (which you’ll never feel like you really are), one of several things will happen: One, everything you’ve learned will seem mundane and not worth writing about. Two, you’ll be so bored of the topic that writing a book on the subject will be the last thing you’d ever want to do. Three, your interests will have led you to new, entirely different subjects. Or four, your interests will have led you to a new perspective from which it’s no longer possible to write about the things you learned.

I’m proud of the book I wrote, and the card deck I self-published. Others have found them quite useful. But, had I waited until I felt competent about the subject (psychology and design), these things would never have been created; my ideas would have never taken a form that could be shared with others. These things would have been another casualty in the lineup of ideas I’ll never work on.

It’s human to create and learn. Doing isn’t a commitment, it’s just a step that keeps your ideas in motion and your options open. What are you working on? What are you learning? What are you creating?

This is, I’ve realized, kind of the inverse of what I do most of the day: sitting mostly immobile, staring at glowing glass panes of various shapes and sizes, my mind racing up and down and through Photoshop, CSS issues, todo items, and inboxes, running without moving until the evening, when rest comes.

Walking while thinking; mind racing while sitting. I need a middle ground: more walks without phones, more focus in front of my computer.

In April 2009, the marketing manager noticed that there was a lot of traffic to the site from Singapore, Malaysia, India and South Korea. By June, they had more visitors from India than any other Asian nation. In January 2010, Ignighter made the decision to re-launch itself as an Indian dating site. It gains the same number of Indian users a week as it gained in America in its first year. (Read more about Ignighter.)

If Ignighter had only been coded with single-vendor prefixes and browser-sniffed to work only on iPhones, it probably wouldn’t have been able to grow like this, as that’s a highly aspirational product in India where it costs many times a professional’s monthly salary. But it was a website, capable of being looked at on the feature phones that are so widespread in Asia.

Obviously, there’s no guarantee that you’ll have similar success if your website works across browsers and across devices. But if your website doesn’t, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you won’t be able to develop a market in the fast-growing economies of India and China, where 40% of the world lives.

And, if you are the first woman anything, and I’m told I’m the first woman in football, then that’s something to take heart from–because you have opened a door. The trick is to hold that door open as wide as possible, for as long as possible, to allow other women to march through it.

I couldn’t claim to be the first woman in anything, but I know a thing or two about working in male dominated industries, and this idea of “holding open the door” really appeals to me. When we talk about wanting to get more women into tech, that’s exactly what us women who are already here need to do, we need to hold open the door. We need to show that this is a fantastic industry to be involved in, we need to support those who are taking their first steps and we need to be visible so that other women and girls know that they are not alone. That they won’t find themselves without female friendship. That they won’t have to fight battles just to be accepted.

It is important that we point out as inappropriate the examples of sexism that we do see. However we should also take care to reassure those who might want to walk through the door that these examples are actually few and far between. Yes, sexism has been directed at me, but not often. I don’t believe that being a woman has disadvantaged me in my work or career. We need to get a balance between showing that sexism is not welcome here and demonstrating that in general we work in a welcoming and friendly industry. We need to show those looking through the door that most people here are only interested in what you can do, share and contribute, and that there are great opportunities and a whole lot of fun to be had.

Flash died, I heard. The only thing is, suboptimal interaction design wasn’t some kind of child of Flash. It was the offspring of designers; the decisions some of us make. Some of those offspring are still very much alive. The only difference now is that instead of those decisions being encapsulated in Flash, they’re being coded into HTML, CSS, and JS by wily front-end developers at the mercy of their agency overlords for their daily bread: Animations that just…won’t…stop. Un-mutable music (hello Geocities, again). Sliding, jumping, bouncing, parallax-ing, hiccuping, flatulent decorations and controls. Force-fed, on-message advertising, masquerading as interaction, with accessibility something that might be mindfully included if the developer has time. Stop it! Please!

Let me pick up on one more bug in the system: The white-labelling of freelancers and subcontractors by agencies. That insidious situation where, under the dubious restrictive practice of perma-NDAs, some companies hoover up the credit for every aspect of a piece of work, and do not allow the freelancer to talk about what they’ve done. Stop it! Give credit. Let folks own the right to talk about their work as long as everyone else gets a mention, with a link, and a note to say exactly who did what at the start of the case study.

Let’s create an ecosystem of credit where it’s OK that ad-hoc teams come together around a project. In fact it’s something to be proud of! That’s the reality after all. That’s the truth. It’s OK to say so-and-so did this bit, but we did that. It worked out fine. No reputations were harmed in the making of this website, app, or service by an ad-hoc team. In fact, they were all the better for it. If companies like the ones I’m scolding dare to give a little credit, I’d bet they’d find it comes back with interest. Go on agencies, I double dare you with extra whitespace.

“How do you decompress from work?”

“I don’t.”

Reading through Twitter, blog posts and various other Internet correspondence, I’ve noticed a common theme. Call it what you prefer: “venting”, “complaining”, and/or “reality”, but a lot of us seem to be tired, overworked, and/or stressed out.

At the same time, wellness seems to be a theme gaining popularity. This is probably not a coincidence. We are encouraged to balance our work and our personal life as to not get burned out on either. We see articles about how sitting is killing us and contemplate purchasing monitors that can tell us we have bad posture.

But how exactly do we do that? It’s been nice to see some solutions to these issues, such as dimming our screen every hour, reminding us to get up and walk around. Or booking a private villa in Spain for when your team needs to work overtime. Not so shabby ideas. I hope to see these more of these coming.