This is my first self portrait in five years, and my first time picking up a pencil since 2010. Based on your own aptitude at sketching, this may either sound like an excuse or bragging, so let’s interpret it as both. I’m surprised that I could do even this after such an extensive hiatus, but, ugh, there are so many areas where I need to be more thoughtful, there’s so much more work to be done.

I took a lot of drawing and painting classes in high school and had time to do an art minor in college (though I focused on sculpture), so for about ten years I did a lot of self portraits as exercises and assignments. Many of them had gimmicky constraints. But with half a dozen self portraits every year, you memorize the proportions of your face and you end up with this Official Version that isn’t truly representative. This is a luxury. You trust that you look the same as you have always looked and you just know where your features sit and the shape of the shadows cast by them. In the past five years, all the horrible fucking shit that my mother, an esthetician, had warned me would happen to my face and body have started happening. Now I don’t know how I look anymore, and I don’t trust that what I’m seeing in the mirror is the most current version. It was like I was sketching a stranger, and in a way I was kind of investigating what the hell time has done to me over the last five years without the melodrama of like unwrapping a big-ass bandage off your face.

I’ve told myself so many times before that I was going to commit to drawing and painting more, to attend figure drawing sessions, to carry a sketchpad, to buy an easel and a few tubes of paint and a couple of brushes, to observe more, but I’m not sure how this all fits back into my life. I am not an artist. Shortly before I moved to Portland I was working on a project where I shredded all my old sketchpads, turned them into pulp, and then made paper out of them and bound them into new sketchbooks. My mother kicked me out very early on in the paper-making process, and I was living on my dad’s sofa out of a bag and wasn’t able to work on it. Then The Great Move interrupted everything, so rather than carry all that paper across the country, I had everything shredded. I don’t regret having everything destroyed because even though it’s personal, it’s only paper.

A dozen self portraits throughout the ages!

Man oh man. I used to feel so sure of myself because I had like a WEBSITE that I updated with stories and things that I made, and I felt like I enjoyed writing. The primary reason I started even keeping a personal website really was because of the blogs of writers I admired, like Todd Levin and Leslie Harpold and Lance Arthur. It was so easy to write in high school because writing felt like an escape, but now it feels like an extension of myself and I feel like so embarrassed of everything all the time. Moments ago I told myself I am going to force myself to write even if it’s bad or inaccurate or pointless because at least it will be an exercise and maybe I will get comfortable with it again and regain all that I’ve lost in my 20’s. So today I am going to write about pizza.

I started making pizza in early 2012, mainly to emulate my two favorite pizzas in Portland: the margherita with truffle oil from Apizza Scholls and the salami pizza with provolone picante and honey from Oven & Shaker. (My third favorite pizza, the Cherry Jones from Paulie Gee’s in New York, is too baroque for my grocery habits, so I haven’t attempted it). I very quickly learned to mix my own dough because store-bought dough has this plastic taste even if it’s from Whole Foods. For the sauce, I divined this recipe using fresh campari tomatoes, oven-roasted garlic, salt, sugar, and a dried herb mix my dad brought me back from Italy. The pizzas were okay (really I was just amazed to have made pizza), but I’ve gotten more serious about it, making pizza every Sunday. As upgrades, I bought a baking stone and a pizza peel, which I screwed a screw eye into and installed an intimidating hook in my kitchen for. These improvements have helped the crust be less gummy. Sometimes I’ll substitutes half the bread flour with whole wheat flour in my crusts for calorie reasons, which is a sacrifice, as the crust doesn’t bake as authentically. I would never do this if I baked pizza for guests.

I’ve also abandoned my sauce recipe. The sauce at Apizza Scholls is very unique. It’s tangy and sharp, and at first I thought it must be the garlic or the tomatoes. I did some research, and unbelievably, I found a source that interviewed several pizzaiolos about their sauces, including not only the Spanglers of Apizza Scholls, but Paulie Gee of Paulie Gee’s as well. There are two fascinating aspects of the Scholls pizza construction: they layer the cheese on top of the crust and then add the sauce, so that the cheese adheres to the crust. I’ve found that with this method, it prevents the cheese from being pulled off like a molten sleeve when you take your first bite. Also surprisingly, they top their sauce with grana padano or pecorino romano before the pie goes into the oven, which is where the sauce gets its tanginess from. Incredible. I now adhere to the Scholl’s recipe. I top my margheritas with fresh basil from my balcony, and truffle oil that I brought back from Italy. It was seriously like zero euros.

One final word about pizza: When I am making pizza, referring to an episode where I made pizza, or referring to the pizza itself, I call myself Mama Chloe, and I call the pizza Mama Chloe’s Pizza. This isn’t just a moniker, it’s an identity. Mama Chloe has different priorities than I do. So if you want to come over for Sunday Night Pizza Club, you will get to meet her.

“Pizzources”

• Pizza crust recipe
• Pizza sauce Exploration

Let me preface this as usual by reminding everyone that I am really not comfortable writing or talking about the web.

Last year I shared a side project I had been working on, Sound of Summer, which I built on top of some metadata I’d been storing for songs in iTunes. It was very fulfilling! I built it using Ruby on Rails and deployed it to Heroku because some of the APIs I was using required a server side component and I was just sick of PHP. But because of an API upgrade, I was able to take it off of Rails and make it completely client-side. This was very liberating somehow.

I converted the sqlite database to XML to JSON and refactored my Javascript (well, jQuery) to parse and display the JSON, in addition to rewriting everything using a module pattern. Purists might feel that this is a step backwards in terms of its place on the web, because it doesn’t function without JavaScript. Maybe I’ll build a fallback one day. But here’s something for the purists: I replaced as much jQuery as I felt comfortable doing with native Javascript. This doesn’t amount to much because I feel my time would be more wisely spent applying this to a new project I have in the works, so judge not.

Historically, the benefit of jQuery was that it made targeting a variety of browsers easy. But, and not to be naive because there is still fragmentation, modern browsers are not as fussy to target with native Javascript. This is coupled with jQuery 2.0 dropping support for older versions of Internet Explorer (but like, unless I am misreading the landscape, I thought the point of jQuery was to make it easier to support browsers nobody likes). As attitudes toward the web stress performance, I fear that jQuery might fall out of favor for native methods, and knowing Javascript inside the jQuery paradigm will become one of those antiquated skills like chimney sweeping or knowing Flash.

With this revision, I’ve also integrated Grunt more deeply into my workflow. Grunt, it is my favorite tool of 2013, especially when I misspell it. It’s better than syntax highlighting. When I built Ovrture, I used it for grunticon and as a build tool to minify my js and css, but this time I also used it as a watch tool to handle Compass, JSHint and HTML validation with live reloading. I’m really insecure about my Javascript even though I shouldn’t be, and I’m glad to be using JSHint because it hardly ever tells me I’m doing anything wrong. Now I can write perfect everything.

Essentially I did this because I want to put my work up on GitHub. My Ruby isn’t very strong because I’m not a Ruby developer, and when Sound of Summer was on Rails, I felt ashamed for that to be a representation of my ability when it had been cobbled together using Rails, and carefully considered on the front-end to the best of my ability at the time. This is like my first public thing on GitHub and it’s a huge deal because I just feel so ashamed of everything all the time. This is why I’m so vague and flippant when I write about making internet and why I am unable to answer the question “What are you working on?”. It’s so easy for me to say “I’m not working on anything interesting and I’m so bad at everything I’m doing” and steer the conversation toward the subject of perpetual nervousness.

I used to think this was a Chloe Problem but apparently it’s also a Woman Problem, which I discovered over the spring when the Ada Initiative was offering free private GitHub repos to women. Apparently a lot of women are intimidated to make their work public for fear of humiliation. This sucks, but it was comforting to know that there are other women who feel so shitty about themselves for imagined reasons. I don’t know how to fix this in myself or in the community of female developers, but Sound of Summer is now on GitHub for your perusal.

These are Important

• Weaning Yourself off of jQuery
• I Know jQuery, Now What? by Remy Sharp
• Browser Diet
• A Baseline for Front-End Developers by Rebecca Murphey