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Fenders is a personal site by me, Mandy Michael. It's just a simple a collection of frontend notes, type experiments, and other web things. I just wanted somewhere to share my thoughts, ideas and experiments.

I would call myself a frontend developer, I love CSS, typography, and text effects. Alongside Fenders, I historically have made a few small sites for exploring those ideas in different ways so I've pulled those into this site as well. I haven't added to them in a while, but I hope to get back to them at some point.

Fenders brings some of those threads together. It is home for new notes and posts, while also linking out to projects, experiments, and older writing from those other sites.

Why "Fenders"?

Well, it started as a meetup group for front-end web developers in Perth, Western Australia.

I started it a very long time ago because I wanted a place to talk about CSS, the web, and all the cool and interesting things people were making. Things were different back then, and it was a way for us to get together and share ideas. It ran for nearly a decade, bringing together people from the local front-end community to share ideas, give talks, ask questions, and generally be excited about the web in the same room.

The name came from a tiny piece of workplace shorthand. At the company I worked for at the time, the cost code for front-end work was FEND. When I set up the group on Meetup, I needed something to call the attendees, so I called them Fenders. It stuck. People ran with it, and the name became part of the group's identity.

I stopped running the meetup a little while after the global pandemic, for a mix of reasons, but the community never disappeared entirely. There is still a Slack group, mostly made up of the old crew. We do not talk about front-end as much as we used to, but the connection is still there, and I like that.

I decided to bring the name back for this blog because I wanted something with a bit of history. This site is not the meetup, but it carries some of the same spirit: curiosity about the web, an affection for CSS, typography, experiments, and the small details that made front-end development interesting to me. So it just kind of felt right?

I saw it as a continuation and a little archive to remember what Fenders was and meant to me.

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