Why this website

TLDR: umm i had another identity crisis yay

Topics: Medication, bureaucracy, jobseeking, unemployment, LLMs (a bit).

in like April 2026. i realised i was plural. i’m writing this after about a month of introspection. it’s been a strange month for me.

i’ve been trying to get a job since my graduation from University of Sussex in Sept 2025. (i have a BSc in Computer Science…) it’s been a rough patch.

we put in a lot of work to get our final year project developed! most of the issue was in writing the report. we hadn’t been tasked to write at large about one thing before…

really, we had no idea what we were doing! writing and programming are not really even similar skills… especially to a mark scheme. plus, we were dealing with unmedicated ADHD! (still waiting on that…)

all that to say that we were going through adhd-autism burnout. it took us a few months to be able to touch a text editor after graduating.

my breaking point was applying for a passport in April. here’s the rough timeline of events.

  1. I have an appointment with the ADHD clinic about medications.
    1. They tell me that I need to verify my identity.
    2. I figure out that I need a driving license or a passport for this.
  2. I choose to renew my (provisional) driving license.
    1. Obtain form, check required proof of identity.
    2. See that I actually need an in-date passport, realise I don’t have one.
  3. I choose to renew my passport.
    1. Realise that I am transgender and need to change my name and sex-marker.
    2. Realise that I need a paper form for this (which costs more…)
    3. Realise that I can’t get help with the paper form from the Post Office, because they only provide this service for online forms.
    4. Gather required documents:
      1. Deed poll (Only have one of these, which was my mistake)
      2. Letter from my doctor saying that my change of name is likely to be permament (Blatant transgender discrimination)
      3. Proof of change of name (Bank statement, Letter from university)
      4. Countersignatory for my photo (I was like 10 when I last got my passport, I am now a transgender woman, I look too different from my previous photo)
        1. This required finding someone who had known me for over two years, and had a job. Then I had to physically go to their house and ask them to sign my passport photo. Very annoying and inconvenient.
    5. Help
    6. I had to do this all on my own. It took me a week alone just to get the letter from university…
    7. I then had to spend:
      1. £107 for the passport application
      2. I had to send off my only deed poll (important document!) so…
      3. £10×2 for special delivery each way
        1. (turns out I didn’t even pay for this the correct way, so they didn’t even send it back with special delivery)
      4. Another £8.50, because I had unknowingly sent off the passport form days before a fee increase.
      5. Another £10 to send off a proof document, after they requested a second one (letter from uni).
  4. Send off form, wait four weeks for a reply.
  5. Three weeks into this wait, I was told by my clinic that they could verify my identity through alternative means. Thanks. I sent off the documents, but I was sure that my new passport would arrive before they managed to process it.
  6. Recieve passport, get a little bit of joy seeing [REDACTED FULL NAME] and SEX: F on a passport.

um. sorry. i’m still waiting for the clinic to get back to me on medication.

so we had a bit of a mental break after that! and then josie realised that she was in a plural system.

i think it’s been quite hard for us. we are not in a great financial situation, and have been somewhat failing to jobseek for about 10 months. this new discovery really put our behaviours in a new perspective. it’s been quite helpful. we can do chores now. we were basically unable to take care of ourselves for a while…

we did this ‘bootcamp’ a bit ago. the local councils will give companies money to run ‘Skills Bootcamps’ for unemployed people. it was focused on web dev, and the first few weeks were basic html/css/js in a group setting, which was nice. the later weeks became ‘specialize in frontend or backend’. we picked frontend, because we were definitely more skilled in backend and wanted a new experience. this is how we started using react. suffice to say, we don’t like react. (can you tell by this website??) but it was a nice experience to do something new in group project settings for 12 weeks.

i bring this up because they had a lot of careers guidance in the 12 weeks. they had this ex-recruiter in SWE. his thing is basically: optimize your linkedin for a recruiter. optimize everything else for recruiters. this ended up affecting our website. so, we made a more professional sort of looking website on j0.lol. we thought in this redesign that we would start to like the website more? the design was more cohesive and it was more pleasing to the eye. but it started becoming the opposite. we started hating the website more.

it’s almost to the point where i feel a bit ashamed showing it to other programmers that i consider friends. i’m commonly in programming circles that are… non-business oriented. programming for fun type people. and i feel that the website does not represent that part of us at all. it started to represent the sort of general malaise that was coming over us over the course of the bootcamp. the spectre of large language models.

i was. i used it a bit on the course. i had a free trial of claude. it seems good at spitting out react.

i hate llms. it made us feel sad and it made us feel disconnected from our work and our craft and our entire field of work. the more i think about working in this industry, the more i think about llms.

i don’t know. i have pretty bad Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria. i live in fear of saying something that will make someone hate me. you cannot say anything about llms without alienating someone. so i sort of live in two minds about it:

  1. I hate this thing and using it makes me want to cry
  2. I will never say anything bad about it to someone’s face because that is too scary

this is sort of amplified in the ‘getting a job’ zone. like, if i say something wrong i could get discriminated on for a job. i could alienate my coworkers. i could fail at networking. it just makes it very hard to have a ‘public face’ that employers can see, and also be fiercely against llms.

so the contract is:

  • I have to put on a face on my “personal website” for recruiters, White Guy from JavaScript networking meetup, etc.
  • I need somewhere where I can actually put my opinions and express myself.

i figure that this is a better place to do that. being “openly plural” is a bonus too. i don’t really want to disclose that to an employer, to be honest.

sorry for the sort of heavy topics, i guess! i’m hoping that once we get a more stable employment situation this stuff won’t be so scary to think about anymore.

until then, this website is for us to get a bit less corporate, a bit more openly plural, a bit more us. i guess!