DEV Community: Niko 👩🏾‍💻

Clarity Dashboard - blending analog productivity methods with nature-inspired design

Niko 👩🏾‍💻 — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 06:30:03 +0000

This is a submission for Frontend Challenge: Office Edition sponsored by Axero, Holistic Webdev: Office Space

What I Built

I built Clarity Dashboard, a playful yet calming space for creatives, neurodivergent brains, and anyone who thrives with analog-style productivity. Think of it as your digital planning board, filled with "Post-it" sections dedicated to Peace, Productivity, Priorities, and Plants. My goal was a minimal design that boosts focus without overstimulation, offering a serene balance amidst the workday's hustle.

Design Philosophy & Inspiration

For Clarity Dashboard's core functionality, I pulled inspiration from Kanban principles. Looking ahead, I'd love to add more structured formats for users who prefer analog planning styles, like those found in Hobonichi Techo daily planners.

The "Holistic Webdev" prompt immediately made me think of nature's intricate beauty, especially plants. I've often wondered why so many of my tech friends are so into houseplants, and I realized it's probably because they offer the joy of seeing tangible results, the calm of consistent care, and a small way to engage with the natural world's beautiful chaos. I figured this connection would resonate with many in our tech community.

The dashboard's color palette comes directly from Caladium plants, also known as Angel Wings, which set the overall aesthetic. In future updates, I plan to let users easily switch between themes or even have them rotate weekly. These will also be plant-inspired, with ideas like Monstera, Alocasia Frydek, Easter Cactus, African Violet, and Aglaonema Aurora Siam on the list to start!

Clarity as an infant wireframe, they grow up so fast 🥹.

Demo and Code

Clarity all grownup.

Clarity Demo
Code

Journey

My journey with Clarity Dashboard kicked off just two days before the deadline. I've been focusing on progress over perfection, and this challenge felt like a fun opportunity to see what I could build in about 10-15 hours. I dove into researching intranet dashboards, checking out some of Axero's impressive examples, then picked the features I wanted and jumped straight into creating Figma wireframes. Once I settled on the colors and the Angel Wings plant as the theme, I just started experimenting.

Saturday was dedicated to research, brainstorming, thinking about animations, and wireframe design. Then, Sunday evening, it was time to bring my design to life. After getting my HTML structure set up, I decided to "eat my frogs first" and really tackle the CSS. It was definitely more ambitious than I'd usually attempt, but for the sake of learning and stretching my skills, I went for it! I had one super important rule for myself: no matter what, all coding would stop at midnight. I knew I'd need time to clean up my code, write this submission, and deploy – and I really didn't want to stay up until 3 AM or get so hyper-focused on perfection that I missed the deadline completely.

So, while I didn't finish all the JavaScript functionality for Clarity, I submitted it anyway. I'm genuinely proud of how much I grew in design and CSS, and it was genuinely fun watching both the project and myself bloom over those two days.

My plan is to keep working on Clarity Dashboard throughout the summer. I'm excited to bring all those brainstormed features to life and share my progress, small wins, and lessons learned along the way.

How Our Obsession With the Future is Destroying the Web w/ Maciej Ceglowski

Niko 👩🏾‍💻 — Sat, 09 Sep 2017 04:58:29 +0000

Maciej contrasts web developers to our game developer siblings, that often have 5 years between consoles. He cites this, as why you can track massive improvements throughout the years as they familiarize themselves with and master the current technology set. Maciej argues, that today web designers and developers aren't given any time to get used to the current set of devices and capabilities, before we’re already being sent to work on the next set, so what is passed off as web technology improvement is just bloat.

Maciej's slide (shown in this article's cover image), shows the old technology stack the internet is built on as an example of how things fossilize in technology when they are useful.

The talk's concluding questions and statements rocked me:

So why should the web be an exception?
Why does the web have to change completely?
Why can’t we build on top of it, like we built on top of email? Find better ways to improve it's design and management, but acknowledge that the idea is still solid and sound.

Let’s Discuss

What are we personally building the web for (to connect the world, eat the world, or end the world)? Also what would the internet look like/how would we change our development practices, if we treated it as a medium that was meant to last?

Code Reviews That Don’t Suck w/ Vaidehi Joshi

Niko 👩🏾‍💻 — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 20:12:06 +0000

Great talk that I thought would benefit the DEV community.

Main Argument

“I love code reviews in theory. In practice, they are only as good as the group that's responsible for conducting them in the right manner.”

This quote, eloquently sums up how many of us feel about code reviews.The major thing I took away from this talk, is that to have better code reviews we need to proactively build a healthier developer culture/behaviors around them.

According to Vaidehi the largest factors that contribute to better code reviews are social. Reviewing everyone pushes for a culture that values vulnerability. It's important for other developers to see that even senior developers can make mistakes and that it's ok. She advises us to develop empathy by also highlighting what was done well. Also, code reviews don't have to be rooted in negatives, but instead in shared ownership and responsibility of what we’re building together. And finally, that we need to initiate more conversations about code reviews, whether you feel your team code review process isn't where it needs to be or about what's working (if you're proud of it).

Let’s Discuss

How do you currently practice code reviews? What does this version do well or what could it do better?

When Code Duplication is the Right Answer w/ Sandi Metz

Niko 👩🏾‍💻 — Thu, 31 Aug 2017 17:23:56 +0000

This talk blew my mind and I thought it would benefit the DEV community.

Main Argument

Sandi equates trying to fix a problem by increasing the complexity of the wrong abstraction, with chasing a beach ball on the outgoing tide. She urges us to prefer duplication over abstraction in our code. DRY isn’t bad and duplication isn’t good. But, if your choice is between duplication and the wrong abstraction, the right choice is duplication.

Let’s Discuss

Sandi offers this quote, “Make the change easy, this might be hard, then make the easy change”, as guidance. She advises us not to get lost trying to get to the future with our code, but instead to aim for code that can adapt for the future when it arrives (with the idea of making small objects that have single responsibility at it’s core). What are your thoughts about this?

Why It's Easy to Ignore the Lack of Diversity in Tech w/ Rebekah Michael

Niko 👩🏾‍💻 — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 18:33:48 +0000

Found this great talk and wanted to share it with the DEV community.

Main Argument

When individuals feel different, they feel forced to "fake it"/appear to be someone else in order to work in technology environments. Rebekah feels that it's crucial to an industry founded on problem solving, that we seek out those that have experience with different problems than our own and who can bring to light solutions that would otherwise not be considered. But, for that to be possible they need safe spaces where they can stop “faking it”.

Let’s Discuss

How can we build work communities where no one is "faking it"? Where it's safe to talk about your challenges, to fail, and to have a different background/perspective from the others at your company?

Why Introducing Information Equality to Your Code Matters with Safia Abdalla

Niko 👩🏾‍💻 — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 18:53:10 +0000

Let's listen to this talk as a community and engage in a constructive conversation from the POV of our industry and experiences. Feel free to share meaningful take-aways, raise questions (that folks in the DEV community might be able to help clarify), or state areas where we may disagree with the speaker's POV in the comments.

About Our Speaker

Safia Abdalla is a passionate open source software and data science for social good advocate. She co-organizes the Py-Data Chicago meetup, has given numerous insightful talks, and is active on twitter @captainsafia engaging the community in conversations worth having about our industry.

I was first introduced to Safia from her CodeNewbie podcast episode which piqued my interest in open source.

Talk Summary:

This talk explores how those who spread knowledge and ideas, before we were data scientists, engineers, or researchers; we were storytellers. That though the latest excitement in our field revolves around databases, frameworks, and technology. At the core of all these technologies is the desire to communicate and return to our roots. And that it’s imperative that we stop building things for each other and start building things for the people.

The notion that the general public isn’t interested in learning about the details of cutting edge research or work that we do, is challenged as a mere distortion that has been manufactured to keep people ignorant. Raising the question, is there any use in creating knowledge that doesn't reach the people that need it most? Until we can get our work into the hands of not just our colleagues, but everyone including: teachers, suburban moms, children, and business professionals, have we made true impact? Until that goal is achieved can open science or open source ever be truly open at all? Safia shares with us that focusing our energies and high IQ’s towards this goal of information/education equality, will be the greatest challenge of our generation and will begin a New Knowledge Renaissance.

With notebooks being a long standing symbol of the preservation of meaningful thoughts and knowledge; She poses that the innovation of interactive notebooks will play a key role in this renaissance, allowing through it’s computationally backed narrative, easier sharing of ideas to all.

Concepts I’d like to discuss.

1) nteract
One of Safia’s Open-Source projects is a desktop based interactive computing environment/interactive notebook editor. In the Jupyter ecosystem it uses React, Rxjs, and Redux (Web tools packaged for the desktop using Electron). Noteboooks use ipython format so you can share them with colleagues and outputs displays with live updates. Are you interested in checking it out? Any thoughts on combining cutting edge web technologies and the stable and well tested desktop world?

2) Perception politics regarding programming and coding tools.
Do you agree that these exist? Any ideas of ways we can make our products more accessible and less intimidating to the broader community?

3) The Crisis of Ignorance.
Safia posed that no matter how much data is acquired or research produced the information still isn’t accessible to everyone. Her argument that "historically when misinformation reaches problematic heights, it triggers the beginning of innovation/renaissance; that we’re overdue for" was really thought provoking. Any possibility that aids the way we communicate with each other as people, gives me hope. She believes due to federal funding, education pushes, and changes in accessibility of informations that in the future professionals like teachers knowing how to program may become the norm. What are your thoughts on this?

Final thoughts:

Safia encouraged us to envision a world with truly open science and open source would look like. That we as technologists and storytellers are responsible for making the dissipation of knowledge from creators to consumers easy and delightful. I'm all for allowing the truth she shared, that software is a conversation between the community of people creating it and community using it, should inspire us to do great work.

Hope you'll join in the conversation with me in the comments here or on Twitter

How to Level up as a Developer w/ Scott Hanselman

Niko 👩🏾‍💻 — Thu, 24 Aug 2017 17:35:41 +0000

About Our Speaker

Scott Hanselman has been programing since the 80's. He blogs, has multiple podcasts, is an evangelist for Microsoft, a health hacker, a master of the Twitter-verse and speaks around the world. I met him at the 2017 Codeland conference. We chatted forever about biohacking diabetes, African American hair care, social justice, languages, and the difference between selling out vs scaling yourself.

He is very much who I want to be when I grow up as technologist: funny, candid, dynamic, incredibly talented, wears all the cool hats, and is just a joy to be around. After meeting him, my friend Chanice and I both secretly adopted him as our code dad and started absorbing his blogs posts, talks, and podcasts as inspiration and instruction in how to scale ourselves as developers. This talk has changed how I think about development and is definitely worth a listen or 3.

Talk Summary:

In this talk Scott explores the cycle of fear and distraction that keeps us from our potential. That the fear of appearing to be a "phony" by not being good enough, pushing production ready code fast enough, smart enough, up-to-date on all happenings, and masters of everything weight that we put upon ourselves causes us to divide our focus and energy (both of which are limited). We tend to try to combat those fears, by hoping we can catch up after hours, but hope is not a strategy. To scale ourselves as developers we need to be able to differentiate between effectiveness (doing right things) vs efficiency (doing things right). The example is given that the first is choosing the right direction to run and the second is running in that direction as fast as you can.

What I Learned:

Becoming a more productive developer starts with choosing how you are not spending your time, since the less things you do the more you can do of them. That it's sabotaging your productivity to check email in the morning or on weekends ( responding will trigger a response) and you shouldn't put energy into things you don't want more of, because through those actions you teach people how to treat you. Incoming information or requests need to be triaged (sorted by priority) based on the three fold nature of work(work you planned to do, work that appears unexpectedly during your day, and work that defines who you are as a developer) then time-boxed, addressed, then you move on.

That optimizing yourself in the end comes down to embracing flow and only allowing yourself to be wrapped up in the pursuits most meaningful to you (important but not urgent) first. Interruptions that cause a context shift are costly in terms of your time and energy. And fascinatingly, that important info/tasks will find their way to you many times while you do this and sometimes dropping the ball is the right answer.

Concepts expressed that stood out the most to me:

1) That there are only so many keystrokes in our hands, so we shouldn't waste them.
Whenever we are engaged privately for our professional opinion or guidance in written form that would take more than a paragraph that, we should instead document it in a way that can be readily shared with more than just one person and send them a link to the wiki, blogpost, or article. It's been said that you should write, engage on social media, and give talks about the things you want to be paid to do. I think this is an amazing optimization of our time and energy, encourages us to write on those areas mentioned above, can be referenced many times, and helps build our brand as being knowledgeable on that subject as well as invites learning opportunities from the community if it's an area where we are confused.

2) There were many mentions of great methods, some of which I've tried before but many I would have never dared to consider before.
I've heard of, and tried, the Pomodoro technique but never attempted tracking my internal and external distractions during the focus periods. I've been trying it this way for the past 2 days and it has made such a difference.

I also have never thought of declaring email bankruptcy before. Moving all the emails that are older than a week into a different folder called "Not My Inbox" (because your inbox should be a place only for recent communications/info you've yet to process) in order to free yourself from the psychological drain of an endless "to be processed" environment.

3) Getting things done using the "Rule of Three" to create personal sprints for yourself.

Scott advised that looking at a disheartening long list of potential things to do is paralyzing to growth. Instead we should create our own sprint for ourselves to level up. Picking only three things to get done today and try to get them done, they build into three larger things to accomplish that week, which build into three overall goals for the month, then year. He invites us to envision what it would take for us to not feel guilty or like a phony for a day, week, month, or year? And use that vision to set goals that we then break into actionable chunks. Try figuring out your vision on Monday of what a great week would look like and then reflect on Friday on how it went as well as areas for improvement.

I've used a three goals a day system to focus my efforts previously ( focusing on 2 that were urgent and one that was important to the bigger picture), but never anything like this.

Final thoughts:

I am so pumped to use the nuggets of wisdom shared in this talk by proactively putting more of these practices into my daily habits immediately. I hope you enjoyed the talk and were able to take something away from it as well!

Tech Talks: Slow Growth & Yvon Chouinard

Niko 👩🏾‍💻 — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 14:38:42 +0000

This podcast stimulated many thoughts that I wanted to discuss with the DEV community. Let's listen to it and engage in a constructive conversation from the POV of our industry and experiences.

Feel free to share meaningful take-aways, raise questions (that folks in community might be able to help clarify), or state areas where we may disagree with the speakers POV.

To kick things off These are 3 things that stood out to me:

1) 7:35 His Ideas on slow and meaningful growth, i.e."sometimes you grow strong, other times you grow fat". What do you think about this, does it apply to our industry as well?

2) 7:24 Creating the product you wish you could buy and demand coming organically from others in the community wanting them also. He makes a statement similar to "we were our own first customer, if you wait for customers to tell you exactly what they want you are too late". There is something to be said for being/having a domain expert on your team to refine your efforts. But I'm a big fan of market research/user testing to identify what users actually value over what I would guess they do so am unsure if I agree with this, but think it's worth consideration.

3) 18:14 Progressive Work Environment that was way ahead of it's time.
It blew my mind that 40 years ago in the 70s Patagonia was offering their employees maternal and paternal leave, a child friendly office and daycare on-site, and flexible work schedules. Benefits that are frequently offered in software engineering (with the exceptions of child care considerations), but to this day still are often not offered in other fields, even other fields of tech like IT.

If you have suggestions of other interesting recordings of talks or podcasts with some application to tech and that would be interesting to try this with feel free to run with this theme and make a post or leave it as a suggestion in the comments.

What's your absolute favorite snack food while coding and why does it hit the spot?

Niko 👩🏾‍💻 — Mon, 14 Aug 2017 13:49:03 +0000

Mine is anything that has a satisfying crunch that I can bury in authentic hummus or guacamole. I live for one-handed access to savory, salty, possibly tangy, and rich flavors :D!

When and how do you make time to learn?

Niko 👩🏾‍💻 — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 20:06:05 +0000

During the past 2 months of my new role, I’ve been learning to program in a new language and a drastically different way of approaching coding solutions just to function. One of my favorite aspects of this field is the built-in life-long learning, but like other #beginners I still often find it extremely challenging to find time to devote to continued learning, whether for work or personal projects/interests.

So that got me wondering how you all approach finding time to learn new programming languages, frameworks/methodologies, disciplines (UX, UI, Design, Product), or other skills. The DEV community always has a wealth of insight and I bet many of us would benefit from what's shared.

Hey, I'm Niko 🍉🍰 👩🏾‍💻

Niko 👩🏾‍💻 — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 17:32:08 +0000