Stubbornella - Nicole Sullivan

A little over a year ago Ajaxian published a piece on my CSS techniques. Fortuitously, this forced me to start talking to people about my ideas, to create an open source project, and to speak at conferences. I’m shy, so I might not have taken the leap on my own.

For the first time, people followed me on twitter that I hadn’t met before. My blog posts got actual, interesting comments — along with some trolls, of course. Immediately, I stopped posting anything non-techie. I shouldn’t bother people with the delight I felt at eating corn flakes for breakfast, right? The truth is, I was terrified. I’m a lurker. I rarely even comment on blogs. For about a month, I stopped tweeting. Then, slowly, I became less shy and more spontaneous. A year has passed, and I’ve learned a lot about not taking things personally, how to deal with trolls, and how to be myself and be on the internets.